Today’s image is linked to yesterday’s. However, this time we’re looking up Lago di Garda towards the Monte Baldo group. I suspect that the cairn was assembled just that morning as it was balance far too precariously to survive any wind.

It’s very difficult to stay in the office when the forecast is excellent

So yesterday, I took a holiday and headed down to Lake Garda to a great vantage point above the lake on Cima Comer (just above Gargnano).

This photo was taken just 10 minutes up the path from the village of Sasso on our way to Cima Comer. Unfortunately, once we got to the top the view of the Apennines wasn’t quite as good, hence this post from lower down its flanks.

We couldn’t resist bagging our local ‘confluence point’. Today’s image visually documents our trip last Saturday to 46N 11E. Our GPS track (thick red line), latitude and longitude lines (thin red line) and the confluence point were all automatically overlaid by Marmota

(Also see our previous post about confluence points)

This morning we stumbled upon an astonishing website related to geo-objects, namely ‘The Degree Confluence Project‘. We quickly noticed that we had such a ‘confluence point’ close to Trento and had already captured it in one of our previous posts Anyway, I’ve re-generated this post with the new source of geo-data. In the next few weeks we will visit the 46N-11E point and add our own entry to their website. Please, if any of you have any geo-referenced images containing other confluence points then send them to us for posting!

Interesting project!

It’s a bit humid here in Trentino at the moment, but nevertheless I managed to snap this pretty shot of the Tre Cime del Monte Bondone from the top of Palon. The Tre Cime can also be seen from past posts here, here and here

p.s. If you are interesting in seeing our Marmota photo explorer too, then visit our EagleEye page…

Today’s post is more of a news bulletin about Marmota. It’s taken from this article.

Here is the text:

——————————————-

The “Marmota mobile AR” prototype developed by FBK researchers, allows you to frame a landscape with your mobile phone and overlay information such as mountain-names/distance/altitudes into reality.

Simply point your mobile towards the landscape that you are looking at, and a few moments later you will see all the information you desire, such as the profiles of the mountains and the names of peaks/refuges, together with their distances away and  altitudes. A dream for those who find themselves in a more or less unknown location and want to know everything about the scene around them.

The “Marmota mobile AR” prototype developed by Claudio Andreatta, Michele Zanin and Paul Chippendale, researchers at the “Technologies of Vision” Unit (TeV) in the Information Technology Centre of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in Trento, is already up and running and being field-tested at the Trento research centre for further improvements.

“The system”, explains Michele Zanin “integrates technologies and findings from different disciplines, spanning cartography to computer graphics, and sophisticated machine vision algorithms. Each pixel of the image is associated with information such as altitude, latitude, longitude and distance from the observer”. This works using a minimal amount of memory and the user’s location (obtained via internal GPS) is sent via the Internet to a central “Marmota” server – currently hosted at FBK – where the data is processed. When the user’s information is ready, it is packed (usually 50-120 Kb) and sent to the user who then receives a high resolution, 360 degree augmented overlay layer. In accordance to priority rules, the augmented layer will specify tailored information, such as county names and altitudes.

“One of the innovative aspects of the system,” continues Zanin “is that the rendering provided to the user shows aspects that are only ‘actually’ visible from the observation point, and excludes hidden ones that would create confusion. The system also offers the user information on points far from the eye, up to 500 km away, and functions throughout the world between 60° latitude North to 60° South. The system can also draw vectorial data of any kind into the scene such as roads, hiking paths, rivers or lakes, taking into consideration the actual visibility from the user’s view point”. AR applications are amongst the most downloaded by owners of new generation mobile phones. This Android-based prototype  represents the mobile version of the  “Marmota” technology, a project under development by the TeV research unit since 2007, aimed at correlating geo-referenced landscape photos with synthetic three-dimensional models. “User Testing” says Zanin “will follow in the immediate future and will involve volunteers from outside FBK and will hopefully identify critical points in the system, thus helping us to transform the current ‘prototype’ into an application that can be enjoyed by the general public”.

For further information:
- Website of the TeV Research Unit in FBK headed by Stefano Messelodi: http://tev.fbk.eu/
- Websites of the “Marmota” project: http://tev.fbk.eu/marmota , http://tev.fbk.eu/marmota/blog
- See the  spotlight of the “Marmota”project, by Marzia Lucianer (Communication Unit FBK): http://www.fbk.eu/it/node/682
- Press room: http://www.fbk.eu/press

Val d’Ambiez acts like a magnet to the Marmota team. Last week Michele took this lovely shot from the other side of the Valley, looking down onto Rifugio Cacciatore. For other posts about the valley have a look here and here.

After 1400m meters of height gain, our colleague Gloria Zen was rewarded with this magnificent view from the top of Cima d’Asta (which is notoriously capped with cloud). She said that “it was worth the effort”, and this photo certainly proves it.

We spotted this great picture of the recent (July 11th, 2010) Total Solar Eclipse on APOD and immediately decided to apply Marmota to it. The author is Janne Pyykkö and he kindly gave us permission to publish the results.

Unfortunately, only a few of the peak names are available on GeoNames in this region of the Andes, so we decided to label missing ones with their lat/lon/alt data.

Thank you Janne for sharing your magnificent shot!

Today’s wonderful image was taken by rosa.farina very close to our previous blog post. I really love the clarity of the Brenta peaks in the reflection.

Thanks for sharing it with us Rosa

Although the skies weren’t as limpid as they were on Monday, today’s image gives you a tempting glimpse of what the Dolomites have to offer

Another nice picture from Gabriella Montagner, this time from the rocks of Monte Paterno (2746m), looking towards the Tre Cime di Lavaredo.

Note: given the natural large dark border of the image, we had to manually fix the label positioning provided by Marmota.

Another image from Corsica; this time taken from the little village of Ota . Above the village sits a huge boulder perched on the top of a peak, you get the sense that you wouldn’t like to be there in an earthquake.

After his ‘Heimgarten view‘ contribution last year, Philipp Weigell sent us another interesting picture. He told us that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, should be present in this view.

We told Marmota to extract LHC and SPS shapes from OpenStreetMap and to overlay them onto the image: this is the result. The green circle is the LHC, while the smaller red one is the SPS. They are in fact present in the photo! Thank you Philipp for your contribution.

This image is released under a cc-by license.

Another sunny weekend and another gorgeous snapshot of Trentino. This time in the Brenta dolomite group, looking towards the 2 alpine refuges high up in the valley, Cacciatore and Agostini. Look at this old post to see it from the other side of the valley: Val d’Ambiez.

Inspired by the “Vicino o lontano?” post written by Prof. Sentimento Cuorcontento in his blog, we decided to let Marmota label this aerial photo featuring ESO‘s Very Large Telescope on top of Cerro Paranal (2664m), Chile, and Llullaillaco Volcano (6730m), 192km away, on the Chile/Argentina border.

The exact position of the shot was not available, so we had to guess. After some try and error, we obtained lat=-24.624966° lon=-70.435863° alt=3020m (about 1000m above ground).

The original source is the ESA website, where all photos are released with a CC license (details here). The photographer is probably G.Hüdepohl.

It’s not always easy to understand which island you are looking at, especially in the evening mist. You may have a clue, but when you’re not 100% sure, ask Marmota. In the above image, you can see the steep mountains of Capraia.

Today’s image was taken last Sunday from the top of Venet (2512m), situated in the Austrian Alps near Imst. There is a great cablecar, leaving from Imst, that takes you to Krahberg (2208m) (labelled in the lower right of the photo), just an hour and a half walk away.

A new entry in our 300+ km series: an incredible view of the highest point in Africa, Kilimanjaro (5895m), from the second highest, Mount Kenya (5199m).

This picture was taken by ccferg who released it on Flickr under a CC license. We release this elaborated version under the same license.

Today’s post drags us back to the Alps. Reschensee (Italian: Lago di Resia) or Lake Reschen is an artificial lake located in the western portion of the Italian province of Bolzano-Bozen, near the Reschen Pass, 2 km South of the the Austrian border.

During a recent travel to Uganda, I visited the Queen Elizabeth National Park, in the South West of the country. This picture was taken from the middle of the savanna, looking approximately North (325-340 degrees), where some huge mountains were visible.

After my return, I ran Marmota on this picture, discovering that I captured a view of the Rwenzori massif, the Mountains of the Moon (or Lunae montes). The highest point of the massif, Mount Stanley (5109m), is hidden by closer (and lower) peaks. Mount Gessi (4715m), 51km away, is the highest feature visible in the picture.

Despite the high altitude reached by these mountains, no glacier or ice cover is visible here.

Below, you can find a synthetic rendering of the scene, in order to better appreciate the complex altimetric structures that go from the base of the massif (about 950m) to the tops (4000m and more).

Synthetic rendering, color proportional to distance (blue is close, red is far away).

The Marmota team have been enjoying the mountains, so over the next few days we’ll be bringing you images from our travels. Today, an image from central Corsica, taken next to the man-made lake of Calacuccia

This morning I searched for the keyword ‘mountain‘ using Flickr’s search engine, limiting the search to Creative Commons media, and sorting the results by ‘interestingness’. Today’s picture appears on the very first page.

The author is Christian Meichtry and the picture is available here. The license is CC by-nc-sa2.0.

Mountain names and country flags are automatically derived from GeoNames. If you find any errors, please fix them directly in GeoNames and then write a comment here: we would then regenerate the image with the corrected data.

Although it’s the 1st June, there is still quite a bit of snow around the high altitude mountain refuges. At least Rifugio Agostini is no longer under 4m of snow!

What nicer place to have an afternoon chat than on the banks of Lake Windermere in Ambleside.

I took this photo last weekend, after I’d done a wonderful via ferrata in a canyon, Rio Sallagoni, below Drena castle. A great visual reward.

Today’s photo was taken by our colleague Gloria Zen whilst wandering through the tranquil Lagorai region, not far from Trento. It’s a really beautiful place to explore and you never find many tourists.

We’re always happy to post your images on our Blog. Yesterday, a friend of Marmota, Nigel Martin, sent us an image from his recent holidays in Italy. It was taken from the Monte Baldo range above Lake Garda and is looking due North.

Thanks for sharing this with us Nigel

Here’s another photo from my trip to the English Lake District. It was taken close to the historic village of Cartmel looking towards ‘The Lakes’.

I recently discovered the collection of historical photos published by Cornell University Library on Flickr, and decided to apply Marmota on some of them. This is the first result.

It is an albumen print of Nice, France, taken in the period 1865-1895, and is available here. The geotag position provided on Flickr is not perfect: our current estimate is somewhere near (lat,lon,alt)=(43.696861111, 7.3000861111, 212m).

Even though we have posted many images of the Brenta, when the sky is as clear as it was this morning, I could not resist sharing it with you.

Enjoy………….

The English Lake District in Spring is a wonderful place to visit, proving that it’s not at the weekend! I took this lovely photo by the side of Lake Windermere looking towards the Langdales and the Central Lakes.

Following this old post, we continue today our “View from the window” series.

Our friend Mario Sandri lives in the beautiful village of Revò and this is the incredible view he can enjoy every evening from his window. Great!

Another picture from Gabriella Montagner, this time from the top of Monte Vioz (3645m). She told us that the picture was taken on Sunday, September 6th, 2009, early in the morning. From the position of the Moon, we can tell that the exact time was 6:50am.

This gorgeous picture of the Brenta group emerging from an ocean of clouds was taken by our friend Gabriella Montagner. She was on the top of Cima Presanella (3558m) at the time, looking towards the ESE. The profiles of the highest peaks of the Brenta group were the only visible things.

On a perfect day, a tiny bit of the Northern Croatian mountains would be visible in-between Cima dei Armi (2951m) and Torre di Brenta (3013m), about 290km away.

Grazie Gabriella!

This view from the top of Monte Tofino (2151m) was taken by our colleague and blog reader Marco Bozzano, using his cell phone camera.

Thanks to the sign on the top, there was no need to generate a Marmota label for Monte Tofino!

Thanks Marco for sharing your photo.

As soon as Spring returns I cannot help thinking about past trips into the Dolomites. Here’s a good friend of mine taking a panarama break on a trip a few years ago in Val di Fassa next to Catinaccio.

Spring has arrived here in Trentino and what better way to explore than on the bike. I took this photo from the ‘Greenway della ex-ferrovia Ora-Predazzo’ looking south down the Adige valley

Before the snow melts and the Spring colours arrive, we wanted to show you a last glimpse of Winter. Brrrrrr..

Many years ago, our colleague Bruno Caprile found an interesting collection of old drawings of panoramic views. These drawings look a lot like the synthetic mountain profiles generated by the Marmota technology, so Bruno decided to share with us his precious collection.

You can see a sample of Bruno’s maps in today’s post: a portion of a wide panoramic view from Monte Leco (1072m), not far away from Genova, Italy. We generated the same view with Marmota; you can download our modern rendering here (4660×706, 122K).

The main difference is that Isola d’Elba and Isola Capraia should be visible, at least theoretically. It would be nice to obtain a real photo taken from Monte Leco and compare it with our synthetic results.

Thank you Bruno for sharing this view from the past!

The fastest and easiest way to travel to World is through the experiences of others and the photos they share with us all. But, if you are unfamiliar with a place, how do you know what you are looking at? This is where ‘Marmota’ can help you.

I came across this great image taken in Hawaii yesterday and it had the comments “Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa from Haleakala”, but which was which and how far away were they? 2 minutes later I had my answer, see for yourselves…..

Thanks for sharing this image with us Jerry

Nepal is a stunning and remote part of the World where many peak remane un-named and un-touched by human hand. In this image only one peak has a name and it’s not easy to ensure that this is correct. Thanks for sharing this with us Laurent Bois-Mariage.

Today’s photo has been shared by our friend Aleksandar Gospić. It’s a lovely warming shot of the sea and the colourful houses in the village of Vinjerac in Croatia. Thanks for sharing this with us Aleksander

After a lovely winter’s walk on ‘ciaspole‘, our colleague Gloria Zen reached the top of Dosso di Costalta (1955m) (also featured in Thurday’s post), where she took this picturesque shot.

In the past, we featured other photos from Gloria on this blog: they are available here.

I’ve passed through Glenetive many times on my Scottish Highland trips, but I’ve never seen the mountains look as dramatic as this (it’s usually raining heavily and full of ravenous midges!). Thanks for sharing this photo with us Arthur.

Closer to home today. This image was taken by supermariano81 not far away from FBK on Costalta and shows us how lovely it is to be on the tops in Winter. Thanks supermariano81

Back to the Alps. This time JendaX has shared with us an amazing view of the Alps from the Czech Republic. Thanks JandaX

I thought that it was about time we tested Mamota in the US, so I browsed around Panoramio and found this great image from Larry Workman QIN taken on Nevada Highway 305. Unfortunately, there are only a couple of labelled peaks in the image. Thanks for sharing it with us Larry

You have to be pretty fortunate to see Lake Garda from a distance, as the mist rolls in from the Po valley ‘Pianura Padana’ all too often. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my lucky day

Back to the snow again, as it is still Winter after all…….

I think we all need a break from the snow! Here’s an image I took a few Springs ago, just to remind us that the green will return. Enjoy…..

This Winter has been a bit grotty and we’ve not seen our lovely mountains much. On Saturday, thankfully, the weather was good and so I headed up to the Monte Bondone range, above Trento, with the snow shoes and camera and took some lovely shots. Enjoy……..

Happy New Year!

The first post of 2010 is full of festive colour and was taken by our friend Aleksandar Gospić. It’s another amazing shot of Italy from the other side of the Adriatic. Thanks for sharing this with us Aleksander

It was August, 2008. Our friend Kumitey sent us some photos (published here) and presented Marmota to his colleague Fabrizio Lorenzini. Fabrizio is a photographer that likes to experiment with panoramic 360 degrees pictures but, at the time, our system was not able to deal with this kind of images. We recently added the support for panoramic photos in spherical projection, so Fabrizio submitted this 360 degrees photo taken from near the top of Monte Cadria (2254m).

The number of visible features is overwhelming and the correct way to visualize them depends heavily on resolution and physical size of the final media (computer screen? small print? huge panoramic print?). So instead of choosing a particular target resolution and rendering all the labels on it, we just sent Fabrizio this txt file containing the full list of labels (image coordinates are relative to size 8699×1024). Fabrizio took the file, imported it with a script into Photoshop, and then he manually fixed the labels. We publish here the result of his efforts: a 20591×2424 labeled panorama (7.2M). Congratulations Fabrizio! And thank you for your contribution.

Update (Dec 9th, 2009): Fabrizio printed his labeled panoramic picture in poster format (160cm wide) and sent us a seft portrait.

I quite liked one of the images from the panorama sequence published the other day, so I thought that it might be worth a seperate post.

Enjoy….

Another lovely image from our friend Aleksandar Gospić. Thanks

Dear Marmota Blog readers.

Today we are giving away a free super hi-resolution Marmota enriched poster (19000 x 3000 pixels). The photo was taken by Paul Chippendale on the 25th Nov 2009 in the grounds of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (where the Marmota project was born). Feel free to download it from here. Beware it is over 20MB ! The poster is released under CC-by-nc-sa3.0 license.

Enjoy …….

Matteo Finamore, the author of this photo, found one of our previous posts, concerning ‘mountains visible from far away’. He decided to sent us this photo featuring a flat region with far away ‘unknown’ mountains, asking us to name them. Today, we are publishing the results generated by our Marmota system.

The Monte Baldo group is perfectly visible, with its main peaks Cima Valdritta (2218m) and Punta Telegrafo (2200), about 170km away. Also Cima Presanella (3558m) is visible 226km away, although barely.

Just a reminder, don’t forget that we also share our EagleEye photo collection exploration tool with you all. It features all of our Blog images and a lot more, in an interactive browsing environment. You can find it here: http://tev.fbk.eu/marmota/eagleeye/

Have fun

Another shot from the top of Monte Stivo. I took it just a few days before the snow arrived. Next time, the snow shoes

How would you like to tend your flocks here, up at Malga Campo in the Italian Alps? Unfortunately, the access road in Winter is usually under a few meters of snow

Another lovely photo from Aleksandar Gospić. This time he’s not looking across the sea to Italy, but instead east towards Croatia. Thanks again, Aleksandar.

This morning was very cloudy, but for a few sweet minutes, just before breakfast, the Brenta was bathed in a warm Autumn glow. Enjoy…

I took today’s photo half way up the track from Malga Campo to Monte Stivo. The mist over Rovereto that morning was stunning and just the peaks above 1500m were visible. The spiky ridge in the center is the Gruppo del Carega

The third photo of Aleksander Gospić’s sequence. Just like the first photo, but with a much larger field of view.

The second photo of Aleksandar Gospić’s sequence. It was taken from the same place, on the same day, looking a bit to the right of the first photo. This time the main feature is Monte Catria (1701m), 247km away.

A photo from Loreto (Italy) we published a long time ago (July, 2008) features approximately the same peaks, and their shape is amazingly similar, even if the point of view is very different.

Last week we received this email from Aleksandar Gospić, the author of some of the best photos we have published.

In his email to us, he said: “This winter blast brought us some excellent visibility in last few day, so on Tuesday I went on Velebit expecting to see Italy and it was magnificent.”

We begin today by publishing the first of Aleksander’s magnificent photos. More will follow.

The visible details on these 260km away mountains are incredible!

Today’s picture was taken by our colleague Oswald Lanz from nearby Kasseler Hütte / Rifugio Roma alle Vedrette di Ries (2276m), looking approximately South-East towards Collalto (3436m). He used the camera integrated into his iPhone.

Thank you Oswald.

This nice photo covers a region of Italy we have never featured before on this blog: Basilicata.

It was taken from the village of Acerenza (833m), looking approximately North-West (291-314 degrees) towards Monte Vulture (1326m), an extinct volcano that is the main geological feature of the area.

Monte Crispiniano (1104m), 70km away, is not really visible in this photo, but we think that it should be possible to spot it in a perfectly clear day, or maybe just after sunset.

Today’s photo was submitted by Giuseppe Lipori, while the authors are the students of ‘Collegio del Mondo Unito dell’Adriatico‘.

Do you remember the photo from Passo Principe we published some weeks ago (here)? The point of view is not exactly the same, but this postcard from the past (1955) covers approximately the same mountain, Cima Catinaccio (2918m). You can also see the old Capanna Passo del Principe, now transformed into a rifugio.

This postcard comes from the Catina collection and the original is stored at the Biblioteca Comunale di Trento. All Catina images published on our blog are available here.

Today’s photo was taken from the village of Gaeta looking out over the bay to Formia.

Yesterday we came across a lovely source of old postcards, some of which have been geo-tagged. The archiving project Catina was undertaken by the library in Trento (Biblioteca Comunale di Trento) and is an interesting repository of vintage photos of our region. This particular image shows the village of Cavedine (featured in many of our blog posts and EagleEye entries). If you would like to see this photo ‘placed’ in 3D inside GoogleEarth then just download this Saluto.kmz file and open it with GoogleEarth.

Following on the sunset theme…. I thought that I’d share one of my recent photos from the other side of Italy. This time Lazio.

This nice photograph of Venice lagoon at sunset with far away mountains was taken by our colleague Claudio Cestari. Thank you Claudio!

The bell tower in the middle of the image is probably the fourteenth century Church of Santa Caterina, on the Mazzorbo island.

It is interesting to note that Cima Palon (2232m), 102km away and Col Santo (2112m), 106km away, are visible in another photo we published months ago, taken far away from Venice, from a village just North of Trento.

You can’t help but feel a little bit nervous looking down Via Vesuvio in Pompeii. One day Vesuvius will blow again, but let’s hope that the inhabitants have a bit more notice (or perhaps common-sense) this time.

Another photo from our colleague Gloria Zen (other pictures here). This time from Rifugio Passo Principe (2601m) looking towards Cima d’Asta (2847m), 33km away.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam; be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home [song]

Rick Pappas, one of the best local photographer, shares some of his great pictures on his flickr photostream. In the past, we already asked him the permission to label some of his images and publish them on this blog (see here).

Yesterday we found this nice image of Adige valley, featuring a strange ‘oriental looking’ house. As Rick said in the comments, ‘that is so cool’, because I (Michele) live there, that is my home.

Thank you Rick for sharing this photo!

Another picture from our colleague Gloria Zen. This time it is an array of pointy peaks spotted from Rifugio Antermoia (2497m), looking SE (from 136 to 152 degrees). The main mountain is Cima della Vezzana (3192m), the highest point of the Pale di San Martino Group.

Other Gloria’s photos are available here.

We received today’s photo from our friends at SentieriVivi, a local company that is developing a mobile gps-based system for hikers. All photos from SentieriVivi (this one and future ones) are reachable following the ‘sentierivivi’ tag. All SentieriVivi pictures  are copyrighted.

Last Sunday we planned a nice walk from Val di Bondone to Val d’Arnò, passing on the top of Monte Corona (2508m). Unfortunately, heavy rain hit us, so we looked for cover at malga Stabol Fresco (2078m), where we decided to abandon the climb.

This picture was taken just few minutes after the last drop of rain, when we were ready to go back to our car. Luckily, on the way down, we collected huge amounts of bilberries (Vaccinium myrtillus).

Philipp Weigell contacted us yesterday submitting this nice photo taken from near the top of Heimgarten (1790m), Germany.

The view is so rich of mountains that, at blog resolution, there is not enough space for drawing all the labels. For this reason, we provide also a full resolution version (4288×2848 1.7M).

This image is released under a CC-by license; thank you Philipp for sharing it!

I took this photo a few years ago from Via Ferrata Brentari above Val d’Ambiez. As there are too many peaks to label in this photo, I asked Marmota to draw only the visible buildings, such as farms and refuges. Unfortunately, you can’t quite see Rifugio Agostini,where we stayed the night, as it is just hiding behind the rocks to the right of the image.

This photo was taken from the start of a lovely walk that eventually takes you to Rifugio Val di Fumo. Although busy on a Sunday, it was easy to escape the procession of hungry walkers and find some really tranquil places. Enjoy…

How would you fancy relaxing on this bench for a while? Well, the next time you are passing by Val di Sole turn towards Pejo and then wander up the valley to Rifugio Cevedale – Larcher; it will be there waiting for you as you catch you breath. Enjoy the summer …..

Whilst visiting relatives in the far North of Scotland I took this dramatic photo of Loch Eriboll from Portnancon. Pretty typical weather for that area; very windy with blustery showers! Great local names

I saw this photo on Flickr from our friend Samuele Striatto and was impressed that he had managed to label peaks manually. Then upon closer inspection I saw that there were 2 vague mountain ranges in the distance. The perfect question to ask Marmota! As you can see (below) they are Monte Rosa and Dom which are both over 230km away. I can imagine that on a perfect day the views from Monte Baldo are stunning. Thanks for sharing this image with us Samuele.

Rifugio Rosalba is perched on cliffs below the summit of Grignetta in Lombardia. Today’s photo was taken by Justin Clements, and for a change I have shown it visualised in GoogleEarth, as the effect is particularly pleasing. You can see the same GoogleEarth screenshot with the photo made transparent below.

Alex Tate from British Antarctic Survey research center sent us this photo (taken by his colleague Dr Teal Riley) asking us to label it. It features an incredibly remote range of mountains and, apparently, all of the visible peaks are unnamed. So, we decided to manually add some custom labels with latitude/longitude pairs instead of real names. Thanks Alex and thanks Teal for sharing this amazing picture.

Since this region is outside the CGIAR-CSI SRTM coverage, we tested the recently released ASTER Global DEM (a product of METI and NASA). The result is quite good, but not perfect; the triangular rock in the middle of the image is, in fact, completely missing in the DEM, and some very pointy peaks are modeled with a smooth shape. We publish below a synthetic rendering with color proportional to altitude.

Update July 27, 2009: Alex Tate noted that the triangular rock that is missing in the DEM is probably the only named peak present in the photo. It should be, in fact, Mount Ahab (925m). We hope to re-render this scene in the future when a more precise terrain model will be available.

Synthetic rendering with color proportional to altitude

Rifugio Pedrotti is a classic mountain hut placed at the start of the Bocchette Centrali (one of my favourite via ferrata). From this point of view the ferrata disappears behind Cima Brenta Alta.

Sometimes when you are out walking you wonder “What’s the name of that peak over there?”. Well, whilst out walking on the ‘Cargador del Veder’ footpath the other day I wondered what that triangular mountain was called just behind the new wood carving. When I got home I asked Marmota to tell me. Apparently, as you can see, it is ‘Castello dei Camosci’, or ‘Castle of the Chamois‘ in English. What a great name!

It’s about time that we featured a photo of the ‘classic’ three peaks (tre cime) that tower over our heads in FBK. To enjoy this beautiful horseshoe walk, you would normally park in the Viote car park, head up to Monte Cornetto first and then traverse the ridges to Doss d’Abramo and Cime Verde, and then head down through the forest to Viote once more. Take at look at the view looking back from Cima Verde here

Today’s image was taken by our colleague Gloria Zen during a travel to Armenia few years ago. It is a spectacular view of Mount Ararat (5165m, 31km away) from Khor Virap monastery (Armenia).

I was walking on a footpath just below Fai della Paganella when this clear view of the Eastern part of Dolomiti di Brenta appeared. The tall building on the right is Hotel Miravalle.

Today’s image comes for an interest viewer, Denis De Mesmaeker, who asked us to label one of his images. It was taken close to Bellinzona in the Canton of Ticino, and gives us a lovely view of Monte Rosa in the distance Thanks for sharing it with us Denis

Today’s image was taken by Rick Pappas, an exceptional local photographer and a regular contributer to our Blog. I’ve visited Molveno several times but never have I managed to capture it like this. Great photo Rick. Thanks for sharing it with us.

I came across this amazing image of Chile on Flickr by Ole Begemann called ‘Pucón and Lago Caburgua’ and couldn’t resist asking Marmota to label it for us. To my surprise there are actually 4 volcanoes visible, and one of them lies on the Argentinian border 183km away! Ole wrote in his comments: “The peak in the background could be Llaima (3,125 m) but I’m not sure.”; he got it spot-on Thanks for sharing this image with us Ole

We just can’t stop playing with the results of the Marmota alignment process!

Registering an image with the world and the DEM data allows us to view the photo from a new perspective through the creation of a virtual camera.
In today’s photo we changed only the elevation of the original point of view but pointing roughly in the same direction.
The original hi resolution image is here (6212×2832 12Mb).

As we can see from a single shot we don’t have all the information we would need to fill the entire image so the grey pixels show you the altitude in different shades of gray.

You can find a nice video of the virtual camera moving around here (or here ).

The views weren’t bad from my early morning dog walk yesterday….

People keep asking us ‘Where did you get the idea of Marmota from?’. The answer is here…..

From our office window, we can see a couple of peaks poking through a gap in the mountains (only on a good day). We asked around and nobody could tell us what they were called. We consulted maps and Google Earth, but could not find the answer. From this curiosity, Michele and myself came up with the Marmota concept; rendering the World around us and then matching the real and artificial World using computer vision algorithms.

Once this alignment was achieved, all pixels in our photos had a latitude, longitude and altitude. Thus we finally had the tools to answer our question !!

Alas, the mystery was solved and our mountainous office view became less special

Only joking

The yellow GPS track you can see in the photo was the footpath taken by Michele last weekend to get the shot seen in a previous post and today’s image was taken from my office window just after lunch

A possible way to visualize the output of our Marmota system, is through GoogleEarth’s PhotoOverlays. From the extracted alignment parameters, it is immediate to produce the necessary kml code to embed the considered photo in the Earth’s landscape.

This screenshot presents a semi-transparent labelled photo, aligned with the syntethic world of Google Earth. You can play with it yourself: just load this kmz file into your local installation of GoogleEarth.

The author of the photo is Paul Chippendale and the white and blue building is FBK-Irst, the place where we work.

The stimulus for writing about PhotoOverlay visualization comes from today’s post of the Google Earth Blog. After describing some features of our system, they say: “I would like to see this kind of technology to automatically match Panoramio photos to where they were taken so you can view them in PhotoOverlays in GE.”.

You can find other examples of Marmota generated PhotoOverlays in our gallery, or you can download any of the following kmz files: Allalinhorn (author Luca Cristoforetti), Sunset (author Paul Chippendale),  Malghetto (author Diego Zanin), FBK (author Paul Chippendale), Adige (author Michele Zanin).