Assignment 3 Proposal

Proposal: To combine social media, photogammatery and spatial information systems to determine "Photogenic Densities"




Technologies Used:  Social Media, Yahoo! Pipes, PhotoSynth+Toolkit and 3dsMax.

Social Media And GIS Mashup - Flickr, Panoramio, YouTube Densities.

Social Media and GIS Mashup - Flickr, Panoramio, YouTube Densities based on "likes", Parramatta and Blacktown.

Yahoo! Pipes Social Media Firehose.

Identification of the most photogenic facade in the search "UNSW Library"

My proposal aims to use Yahoo! Pipes to tap into the wealth of bottom-up information available in social media, visualize them using Photosynth, and overlay them onto a geographic plane or a geographic model.

The information can be used to determine desirable photogenic orientations, and/or popular spaces where people has been in. The key is not to get a overall accurate photosynth from social media, but to determine how one face/element/orientation etc is more detailed and popular than the other, thereby allowing us to see a range of densities and allowing us to make a judgement of photogenic facades and desirable/undesirable spaces.

Challenges:

1) Scale/Selection of Survey area(s) - To make a comparison, ie "UNSW" i will have to filter through more than one keyword and one set of synth, ie all the buildings and spaces in the whole UNSW Campus. First thing would be to identify general areas in the UNSW campus worth doing the query. 2 weeks will not cover every building in the entire campus. If i scale it down to an area or several areas, what justification do i have for that?

2) Variation of Detail - Finding a visual/geometric standard to determine photogenic rating. Amount of point cloud per search/ Amount of polygons per mesh?

3) Integrity and mashiness of the Yahoo! Pipe - Does the Yahoo! Pipe perform as expected? Can many different social media vendors (Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa, Photobucket etc)can be joined into one pipe, or are they all on separate file and "unmashed"