3d Fractals for real

For a while, I have been interested in 3d fractals.
Recent 3d printing technology development has allowed me to get some of these printed for real, and for relatively cheap.

Getting a file suitable to a 3d printer is a very complicated process.

Here is a picture of me at my home desk holding a SLS object of size 15 cm, printed by 3DProd for 269 euros.

On the desk is an older smaller object (the same that is on the screen), printed on a ZCorp printer.

Integrating your own gigapixel images in Google Earth

I have found that the processing necessary to integrate very large images in Google Earth 4.2 is, if not easy, possible.

All you need is create a version of your image padded to a power of two in both dimensions, then scale by 2 recursively until image fits in a 256x256 pixels tile.

Then you have to subdivide each image in single tiles.

Finally you have to create a suitable KML file.

The documentation for this feature can be found here.

I have some scripts that automate the process for a given TIFF image.

Google Maps like nagivation of images

Viewing images on the Web is not always very user friendly, mainly because Web Browsers do not allow arbitrary zooming and panning in images.

A more and more common way to solve this problem is the use of JavaScript with custom nagigation of images, using concepts such as pyramidal organization of images.

A well known implementation of this concept is Google Maps.

While not directly related to very large images, because zooming does not refine information (images are not so-called very large), an interesting work has been conducted by Siva Dirisala, on a variety of Nasa images.

By using more and more of these ideas, we should expect more and more very large images (and more generally all images) to be really in-place zoomable, a nice addition to content of Web pages.

Gigapxl images now available in Google Earth

Everybody has noticed that Google Earth 4.2 now allows sky view. But few have noticed that it also allows all Gigapxl images viewing.

All you have to do is to allow "selected content" and choose Gigapixl Photos.

Locations are dispatched all around the United States.

Vliv source code for sale

During the 3 or 4 years I have proposed Vliv as Shareware, I had exactly 4 registering customers. So I decided to make Vliv Freeware and not crippled in any way. Since then I have had 3 people interested in buying the source code (that is available at a reasonable price), so my revenues have been much more important.

It should be noted that these demands are not regular at all, and since the 3 I had at the beginning, I had no more request for source code.