The Tourist Project

Acknowledgements

George Newbury, Greg Michael, Kelly Vanderbrink, David Clark, Joe Harrison and John Wilder for being an awesome team.

Press Coverage

MIT Technology Review
National Defense Magazine
O'Reilly Radar
MITRE Digest

“Terrain must be studied carefully and understood well by all commanders.”

- Sun Tzu
The Tourist Project was initiated by the U.S. Army Rapid Equipping Force (REF) to collect Geospatial Intelligence Video (GIV) coverage of urban combat areas.

Geospatial Intelligence Video (GIV) is a full motion, high-resolution, interactive spherical video technology, akin to Google Street View. The camera system utilizes eleven video streams arranged according to geodesic geometry to capture an almost complete spherical image. Our system integrates GPS information and other metadata to produce a highly detailed, georeferenced and interactive application that can stream spherical video on request.

What I did

Along with George Newbury, we designed and coded an application, based on the ESRI Flex framework that can distribute Tourist data over a web browser. I developed the capability to view individual frames of video, in a Papervision-based 360° viewer, by querying a spatial database and displaying only the points within a user’s area of interest. This is an extremely effective approach for bandwidth limited forward operating bases (FOBs). The results of the query are then displayed on a base map. A user can then click a point, loading the corresponding video frame in the 360° viewer. Points can also be exported to a custom offline viewer or to Google Earth for inclusion in presentations.

In addition to George’s work, I personally developed a robust zoom tool, allowing users to input any system of coordinates and immediately be navigated to the correct location. When the tool is active, it overlays Lat/Lon and MGRS grid lines on top of the map. Currently the application accepts all major coordinate formats (MGRS, UTM, Lat/Lon, USGRS in DMS, DD using any delimiter) and is a heavily used feature in the application.

Other work included a logo, an internal website (CAC Required), a custom preloader, skins for the application, a written plan for server renovation, a 31 page illustrated manual Tourist for Dummies and a third widget built in collaboration with ESRI.