FOSS4G NA 2016

Tangible Landscape

Cognitively grasping the flow of water

Brendan Harmon, Anna Petrasova, Vaclav Petras, Helena Mitasova, & Ross Meentemeyer

Tangible Landscape

A tangible user interface powered by open source GIS

Tanigble interaction with GIS

With Tangible Landscape you can hold a GIS in your hands - feeling the shape of the earth, sculpting its topography, and directing the flow of water.

History

An evolution of Illuminating Clay and the Tangible Geospatial Modeling System

Piper, Ben, Carlo Ratti, and Hiroshi Ishii. 2002. “Illuminating Clay: A Tangible Interface with Potential GRASS Applications.” In Proceedings of the Open Source GIS - GRASS Users Conference 2002. Trento, Italy.

L. Tateosian, H. Mitasova, B. A. Harmon, B. Fogleman, K. Weaver, and R. S. Harmon, “TanGeoMS: tangible geospatial modeling system.,” IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 1605–12, 2010.

Image source: MIT Media Lab

How-it-works

Tangible Landscape couples a digital and a physical model through a continuous cycle of 3D scanning, geospatial modeling, and projection

Features

A collaborative environment for tangible freeform modeling, object detection, real-time geospatial analytics, 3D rendering, and immersion / VR

Intuitive scientific modeling with Tangible Landscape

Tangible Landscape is designed to enable a rapid iterative process of observation, hypothesizing, testing, and inference

Difference in water depth

The difference between the reference water depth and 1. itself, 2. mean of digitally sculpted water depth, 3. and the mean of tangibly sculpted water depth

Open source

Fork us on GitHub

Repository with experiment instructions, scripts, data, and results

Tangible Landscape plugin for GRASS GIS

GRASS GIS module for importing data from Kinect v2

Tangible Landscape repository on Open Science Framework

Further reading

Read our book and give it a try