Thursday, February 14, 2008

Virtual Reality on the Owyhee? Almost.


Today, Valentine's Day, was a red-letter day for mapping on the Owyhee. NBMG recently obtained some very cool software and hardware for mapping in 3-D. With the help of digital photgrammetry and several other things I only vaguely understand, it is possible to build orthorectified and georectified stereo-models in the digital domain, map on them, and then export the lines (with z-values no less) into ArcGIS. Today, my colleague Nick put me through the preliminary ropes with some Owyhee images, and I am sold. Extremely cool, and not nearly as complicated as a PG-2 plotter to set up.


I plan on fine-tuning the Owyhee map with this device before the river trip. Note, if I have time, I can also extract a very accurate longitudinal profile for the river (or any feature for that matter). Stay tuned. I can even cut cross-sections if necessary...extremely freakin' cool.

1 comment:

  1. Great!!!
    Was that really an offer to cut cross-sections? Where do I place my order? In all seriousness though, I also have software to cut cross-sections from DEMs, but I imagine you have much better terrain resolution using the digital photos. I was hoping to build a very simple 1D model for Artillery before our river trip in order to get a rough estimate of peak Q from a landslide-breach flood. Perhaps you could provide me cross-section(s) of the landslide dam, and I could cut the remaining cross-sections from the DEM? I'll be pestering you in the coming weeks about this.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.