Alex Schreyer's Blog, Projects, Books, and More
As announced today, Google has sold their widely popular 3D modeling application, SketchUp, to Trimble, a company that focuses on GPS- and heavy-construction hardware and software (for example, the steel and concrete BIM software Tekla belongs to Trimble). This is a very interesting and at least on the surface quite appropriate move. After all, SketchUp […] Read more..
I finally got around to writing something about an exciting project that I completed last year at UMass (and which I presented at the Google Geo User Summit 2011 in the meantime). This is the crowdsourcing website application where students, faculty, alumni, employees and visitors to UMass can submit their favorite places on our campus. […] Read more..
A university of 27,000 students and several thousand more faculty and employees is a very complex environment whose spaces and places are experienced differently by different audiences.
This project sought to request feedback from students, faculty, employees and visitors to UMass about their favorite places on campus. This was done by providing a website that allowed to crowdsource feedback by letting users place a pin at their favorite locations and submit a comment.
BCT Students in my BCT 420 and ECO 697SB classes just finished modeling 30+ buildings at Amherst College in 3D. Once approved by Google, those will appear in the official “3D Buildings” layer in Google Earth. Follow the link below to watch a video or download the KMZ file for Google Earth: http://blogs.umass.edu/bct420-schreyer/student-work/amherst-college-in-3d
If you are using SketchUp, then it’s time for you to soon browse over to Google’s website and download the latest version (v.8 M2). Although this release is not a new version but rather a maintenance release (hence the “M2”), there are a few new features and a bunch of bugfixes. So what’s new and […] Read more..
I recently had a need for a PHP script that queries a MySQL database for location-based point data (a LatLong coordinate and some descriptive information) and then creates a KML-file from that data on the fly. A file like this can then easily be loaded into Google Maps, Google Earth and other geospatial applications. In […] Read more..
When I went to the 2011 Google Geo User Summit United States in Mountain View, CA this July, I had the chance to present two projects that I have worked on in the recent past here at the University of Massachusetts. “Building a 3D World” The first presentation was on our campus modeling project in […] Read more..