Well, I am home and partly rested from my trip to Southbridge, MA and back. I have collected most of my thoughts and hopefully can put them into the proper words.

I kind of felt out of place at first, the speakers were either university types or from ESRI and all have been doing GIS type stuff for years. Then there is me, a guy that does all this in his spare time and works in a field that has nothing at all to do with GIS.

So, let’s begin the write up now. There were five presentations starting at 9am, and I got to go first and get it out of the way. There were about 25 people in attendance, most were from universities or colleges and some were from industry or research groups. There were two people from Google there as well. But I will save that for a little later. Obviously I was presenting on the use and features of World Wind. I stayed mostly in the middle and covered as much as I could and for the most part just showed how useful and open World Wind can be. I have posted my presentation and you can see it here.

One thing I found interesting is that many people actually came mainly for my presentation because while they have heard all about Google, they don’t know a whole lot about World Wind and I impressed just about everyone there with what World Wind could do and that it was not restrictive. After the presentation, several people approached me with more questions and also asking about the possibility of me coming back out to do some training sessions for their respected universities. Will have to see what the coming weeks will produce.

Next up was Jon Claris from Smith College and his presentation on “Using Google Earth in the Classroom”. Now, what is interesting is that this was NOT a presentation on how to use GE in the classroom, but on if it WAS a good tool for use in the classroom. The slides mainly asked the kinds of questions one would ask when looking at purchasing a major software package. The conclusion gained at the end of his presentation was that use GE is a nice tool and is getting “GIS to the masses” it is not really a very good classroom teaching tool.

After his presentation we had a break and the two Google people came over to talk to Jon, I am not going to name them here though, but one was a “Google Earth Community Development Specialist” and the other was from the Google Corporation. I am not sure what they talked about as I was talking to other people and they were asking some interesting questions, mainly when the 1.4 version is coming out and when they could try the Java version.

I did get a chance to talk to Jon later, and he admitted he had not looked much into World Wind, but he was much impressed by my presentation and was going to look more into World Wind.

Next was Neal Hirsig from Tufts University and his presentation was on “Placing 3D Models into Google Earth”. This was another interesting presentation and it was interesting that he shunned the use of Google Sketch-Up and uses Blender for the 3D modeling. When asked why, he basically said it was a great basic primitive drawing tool, but not a good tool for serious modeling work. GE’s support for 3D models, though they may look nice, is quite primitive still and you have to do quite a few steps to get a decent looking model to display correctly in GE.

Another complaint Neal had was the lack of a library for Non-Sketch-up models. The Google community Specialist said that the forum could be used, to which Neal’s reply that that was pointless because you can’t find anything easily in the GE Forums.

Again, after his presentation, the Google people went to talk to him. (Notice a trend yet?) Neal also had CDs of his presentations and models, I have a copy but have not looked at it yet.

After this we had a nice buffet lunch. And I talked to a few people again and got more feedback and requests for information. I had given out about half the business cards I had on my by now. But yet I had not talked to the Google people yet, in fact they seemed to be almost ignoring me. You would think one of their larger competitors to the education front, they would want to ask me a question or two.

After lunch was Robert Chavez from Tufts University and he presented on “An Experiment in Migrating Data and Applications to Google Earth”. To be honest, I did not pay a whole lot of attention to this presentation. As it was moving data from one format and service to another. But yet again, Robert was not that keen on using Google, as he said he was having a hard time getting specs on the servers as well as pricing. And again, once he was done the Google rep went and talked to him.

Now, the last presentation was the one I was waiting for it was from Matthew Davis from ESRI and he was covering the ArcGIS Explorer. I was really keen on seeing this presentation as the real power behind this virtual globe is not the imagery, but what you can do with the data inside the virtual globe similar to the ideas behind World Wind.

The real power behind GIS Explorer is the bringing in of multiple data sources seamlessly and the power of the Tasks to analyze; process and share the results with other Tasks to get the information you require. I am not sure I can really convey his presentation well enough. But what he did with just a basic demonstration was pretty amazing. Tasks can analyze data, create reports; and send the data to another Task.

That was all the presentations, and after that there was a break out session, but I could not stay for that as I had to drive down to Hartford to catch my flight back to Detroit. But I did leave behind enough business cards for the entire group if they wanted to contact me for more information. As I said before, several people were interested in having me come do some training for them and asked what it would take to get me there.

Now, as for the people from Google, I know it probably wasn’t intentional.. but it really did feel like they were trying to avoid talking to me. Which is a shame because I could have gotten some interesting questions asked.. though probably not answered.

So, maybe I’ll have a new job out of this.. a World Wind trainer / instructor. This was an interesting experience, and I got a really nice travel mug as well out of it.

When the presentations are all online, I will pass that URL along so you can check out the power points.

Another thing I just remembered about using Google Earth in the classroom is the licensing. One of the professors was saying how he tried to get a lab setup with GE Pro and wanted to get a site license. But Google doesn’t license that way, they license to an email address instead. So, now you would have to create an email address for each computer in order to get a license. He was not very happy on how that was going to work out, and he was also not happy about the support of the Google Earth “professional” products, it left a lot to be desired.