Posted May 13, 200619 yr Pigboy and I have been working on a new website for a while now - CincinnatiRoads.com. Our idea was to document the whole city by driving around, taking video of each street, and then posting it in an interactive map. So far we've covered the Central Business District and most of the vehicular bridges, but we plan to hit OTR next, the West End, Mt. Adams, etc., just radiating out. The site was really designed with you folks in mind. We figured a) it's the kind of site it would be cool to browse - and Andy's map is an amazing experience to browse - I'm still astonished every time I see it! and b) it would be an excellent resource for hunting for that building you remember, or explaining to someone a particular site's location - you can direct-link just to the movie, and then tell someone "it's the building on the left at 1:15." So if you have any comments, suggestions, ideas, anything, just let us know. We hope you dig the site as much as we've dug putting it together! http://www.CincinnatiRoads.com
May 13, 200619 yr People, please go here. It is well worth your time. (Grasscat has not been paid for this endorsement.)
May 13, 200619 yr (Grasscat has not been paid for this endorsement.) Not yet... check's still in the mail. :wink:
May 14, 200619 yr This is exactly what we need. Great site. Cincinnati-transit.net and CincinnatiRoads.com are just awesome.
May 14, 200619 yr Excellent idea and site...I am really amazed by the whole thing...the maps, the videos, the car icon travelling down the street...I can't imagine the time invovled...thanks guys....Awesomeness!!!
May 14, 200619 yr WOW i hope you have enough bandwidth for all the traffic you will get from people checking out the site.
May 14, 200619 yr If any of you are re-visiting this thread... Can I ask how well the thing seemed to perform for you? That is, when zooming and moving around the map, how smoothly did it seem to move? (And how good is your computer?) It's something I've been trying to improve over the past couple of weeks and am always curious how it performs on other computers.
May 14, 200619 yr Ditto the praise! As far as performance, everything operates great/smoothly for me.
May 14, 200619 yr I love this site guys. So many reference points to work with in mapping out downtown. Bravo!
May 14, 200619 yr I'll go announce this on the road sites I frequent. I can think of two people I know (both of whom have been featured here by me at time or another), who would be jealous of your idea. BTW, when are you going to post links to Monte and my sites? :wave:
May 15, 200619 yr ^ Know any cartographers down there at LSU who might have comments or suggestions on the map, even if they're not geek enough to be interested in the subject? :wink: Assuming RiverViewer doesn't mind, I can add those links...
May 15, 200619 yr ^ Know any cartographers down there at LSU who might have comments or suggestions on the map, even if they're not geek enough to be interested in the subject? :wink: Assuming RiverViewer doesn't mind, I can add those links... Might be awhile till I can track some down. Classes ended @ LSU back on Saturday. But we have 2 ex-ohioans as professors here who I can mention your work to.
May 16, 200619 yr Great job, that was VERY cool! You guys need to come up to Cleveland and do the same thing here! Since I am too lazy and technically challenged.....I will supply the place to stay and the beer/booze! :) I would love to see that done here in C-town!
May 16, 200619 yr FWIW, I've received a couple of complaints about your site requiring Flash 8 to view. :|
May 16, 200619 yr That was a balancing act...these videos are pretty large as they are - some are as large as 30-35 megs. But we were getting some really, really crappy quality. Like, there would be these floating boxes of gray-ish color, probably 15x15 pixels, floating right in the center of the road. Couldn't read any road signs, and the Roebling bridge movies were simply unwatcheable - big blue boxes where the cables should be. We tried different compression methods - me saving movie files large, saving them small, moving titles out of my files and into the .swf's, different Flash compression, etc. And in the end, Flash 8 gave such superior results in the final flash files that the decision was really pretty simple. For about the same file sizes, we had a tremendous upgrade in quality. Andy was really concerned about requiring Flash 8, but in the end, it was a pretty necessary decision: use Flash 7 and show unwatchable and unusable garbage, or Flash 8 and get good results...
May 16, 200619 yr Andy was really concerned about requiring Flash 8, but in the end, it was a pretty necessary decision: use Flash 7 and show unwatchable and unusable garbage, or Flash 8 and get good results... Thanks, I'll pass the word along.
May 16, 200619 yr ^Think it would assuage annoyance if we added that explanation to the "Sorry, you need to get Flash 8" message? We should probably explain that...
May 16, 200619 yr Wonderful! This is one of the most impressive and useful things I've found on the internet. Outstanding job! :clap:
May 16, 200619 yr You guys have it a home run here, I love it! The entire layout is very well thought out and can be appreciated by those familar to Cincinnati's streets as well as people that are unacquainted with the Cincinnati area. I especially love the moving car on the map that orientates the viewer to the location of the car in the video. Very original and very well done. Please copyright or confirm this idea as yours; I could see online sites such as Mapquest being very interested in applying an idea such as yours to their product.
May 16, 200619 yr Kudos to you guys for your excellent work. I was doubly impressed that everything ran smoothly with my 5 year old dog iBook. Good stuff.
May 16, 200619 yr FWIW, I've received a couple of complaints about your site requiring Flash 8 to view. :| RiverViewer of course summed it up already... it's not something I had wanted to require, but the thing just works a lot better with it. Also, some of the measures I've taken which really improve the general performance of the map (i.e. panning and zooming) are only possible with version 8. Things were really pretty choppy before. BTW, Magyar, I've tracked down a couple places where you've posted about this site (by looking at referring links for visits)... thanks for helping to spread the word! Oh, and thanks to everyone else for your compliments! And please, if you have criticisms or suggestions, we'd like to hear those too!
May 17, 200619 yr I finally have seen it Ethan (after all this time). WAHOO! Great great GREAT site!!! "You don't just walk into a bar and mix it up by calling a girl fat" - buildingcincinnati speaking about new forumers
May 17, 200619 yr Gentlemen, that is a superb site! I used it to follow my preferred (same as the old/proposed!) routing of the subway/surface rail line into downtown - Central to Walnut, emerging to surface operation south of Court Street and keeping the line on the east side of Walnut. Just my two cents, for a change... :wink: "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
May 17, 200619 yr ^Thank you! And if you ever wanted those segments strung together for a presentation or proposal or anything, that's easy enough to do...actually, I'd probably just drive it special...
May 17, 200619 yr ^ Thanks for the offer! That would actually be neat for a subway tour visual, since that was old proposed routing anyway. Although the subway would become a surface/elevated line where Walnut goes down the hill south of 8th (but you probably already know that -- more for the benefit of other readers). "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
May 17, 200619 yr ^To be honest, I never really followed the details of the subway plans. They're very neat, I plan to tour them someday, and I vote for any public transit issues that come along, but my real interest in Cincinnati is that it's so heart-breakingly beautiful - I'm probably not going to get excited about the subway unless we started actually making progress towards it... But, I should mention that Andy made a super-kick-ass map of the Cincinnati subways for a contest or project or something, and he's yet to share it with us...time to put the pressure on him! And I should take a subway-route movie and have Andy plug it into the map, with appropriate titles to indicate points of interest, like where it reaches the surface and such...
May 19, 200619 yr Your website is sweet. Not a super-serious suggestion, but perhaps you could add a choice of Cincinnati-themed music selections to enhance our viewing pleasure?
May 19, 200619 yr We thought about the audio tracks - an early run of the videos included me announcing the road crossings like I was a bus driver..."Fifth at Walnut", that kind of thing. But that was a) a pain in the butt, b) increased the file size dramatically, and c) sounded so trashy. I just have a little computer mic, I've got finches chirping in the background, so there'd be silence, then "[hissssss][chirp^3]Fifth at Walnut[/hisssss][/chirp]" Just sounded stupid. We also talked about putting together our own CincinnatiRoads.com theme, but good lord, would that get annoying. Now different songs for different roads, or looping background Cincinnnati stuff? Yeah, I'd rather let folks interested in music go to a music site, or leave their own stuff on in the background, than impose my choices on them...but you're right, we definitely discussed our audio options, and in the end went without. Well, except for the Roebling Suspension Bridge videos - I rolled down the window and left the sound on for all of those, since it's so distinctive. Know any out-of-towners? Send them here: http://www.cincinnatiroads.com/DirectLink.php?RoadFileName=RoeblingSuspensionBridge_KYtoOH20060402.swf ...the sound of the hum is like Graeter's and goetta - pure Cincinnati!
May 20, 200619 yr Finally had a chance to look at. One word; Awesome. What a great record of Cincinnati.
July 8, 200618 yr We have some new videos up now- ten of them on nine streets in Mt. Adams. RiverViewer recorded them a few weeks ago and I finally got my arse in gear and got them up there. So have a gander, and as always any feedback is welcome! www.cincinnatiroads.com
July 9, 200618 yr Wonderful work! "You don't just walk into a bar and mix it up by calling a girl fat" - buildingcincinnati speaking about new forumers
July 9, 200618 yr so who wants to place bets as to how long it takes till google buy you guys out and makes you supper rich, then you can donate money to a cincinnati subway system.
July 10, 200618 yr Well, except for the Roebling Suspension Bridge videos - I rolled down the window and left the sound on for all of those, since it's so distinctive. Know any out-of-towners? Send them here: http://www.cincinnatiroads.com/DirectLink.php?RoadFileName=RoeblingSuspensionBridge_KYtoOH20060402.swf You have to get the sound clip of Dustin Hoffman saying "97X, The Future of Rock N Roll" while driving over the Roebling. :D
July 10, 200618 yr so who wants to place bets as to how long it takes till google buy you guys out and makes you supper rich, then you can donate money to a cincinnati subway system. Personally, my sights are set far, far lower...I can't speak for Andy, I know my interest is just for the UrbanOhio crowd - documenting the city, being a 21st century version of the postcards I spend hours with on http://www.CincinnatiMemory.org, making a reference tool...but yeah, with Andy's amazing mapping skilz, who knows? If he wants to go nuts with it, I'm always happy to become either super rich, or even just supper rich! You have to get the sound clip of Dustin Hoffman saying "97X, The Future of Rock N Roll" while driving over the Roebling. :D ...that would be pretty funny...
October 26, 200618 yr Congratulations to Andy, who won the NACIS Interactive Map context this year with CincinnatiRoads.com! Plus he gives props to UrbanOhio.com! http://www.geography.wisc.edu/News/stories-department.htm Geography grad student Andy Woodruff wins national NACIS Interactive Map prize Second-year geography grad student Andy Woodruff has won the Interactive Map section of the student web mapping contest of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). The interactive map integrates actual video footage with a searchable map that simulates driving through Cincinnati, Ohio urban streets. The map, "Cincinnati Roads," can be viewed online at: http://www.cincinnatiroads.com/ . The award was announced during the 25th annual NACIS meeting held here in Madison, WI on October 18-21. The award brings a $500 prize and significant recognition in the cartographic community. A really useful idea In a personal email, NACIS award director and ESRI senior cartographer Charlie Frye said, "What struck me first was that his idea is useful. Imagine if Hertz or Google picked this idea up—travelers could test drive their routes before arriving in a new city. I would love to have that service. I travel six to ten times a year, usually to two new cities every year, and typically I arrive after the sun has set, making navigation really difficult." According to Frye, the 3 judges base their decision as 15% on concept, 30% on cartography, 25% on technology, 15% on web design, and 15% on reliability—all aspects of delivering solid web-based content. The weighting focuses on the two areas that would require the most of student's mapmaking and technical abilities. Robust and fun Frye also indicated he was impressed with "how robust the application is. [Woodruff] has several things a user can do at any time. His map could handle the abuse even the flakiest of users might dish out... Some of that's due to the technology (Flash)," he wrote, "but Andy also deserves some credit for figuring it out and exploiting it. Not everybody does that or to the level he did." Not content with following the video's pace? "You could 'speed' by hitting the fast-forward button," said Frye. Urban Ohio.com Woodruff said he got the idea for this map from a friend, Ethan Hahn, who he met in March through the UrbanOhio.com website, an online community that mainly uses photography to showcase what he calls the "urban morphology" of Ohio. "Hahn was interested in doing a website for his Cincinnati videos," said Woodruff, "and—because I was in Harrower's Geography 575 class at the time—it made sense to do it as an interactive map instead." Hahn shot the videos and Woodruff incorporated them into Flash. The Cincinnati Roads map honed his cartographic and advanced Flash programming skills, said Woodruff, but preparing and coordinating the videos was fairly time-consuming. Woodruff also said that he's been able to leverage many of the techniques he learned and components he built for the Cincinnati map for use in other interactive map work. Recently, Woodruff was on the team that began the groundwork for the interactive campus map. His master's thesis, supervised by Prof. Mark Harrower, will examine the utility of aerial photos versus traditional line maps in online mapping environments. Interactive maps are maturing, diffusing "The NACIS Student Web Mapping Contest has been something of a bellwether for web maps in general," wrote NACIS' award director Frye, "and this year it was very clear that the state of that art has matured with highly-integrated elements that are appropriately balanced against one another." Frye wrote that all of this year's entries—not just the winners—had these qualities, indicating that interactive maps are maturing along with the diffusion of design skills to make them. Wrote Frye, "This permits better targeting and presentation of information and knowledge—and I think that helps make our world a better place."
October 27, 200618 yr Ooooh...PigBoy getting press, CincinnatiRoads.com getting press, Riverviewer getting press, and UrbanOhio getting press!!! "You don't just walk into a bar and mix it up by calling a girl fat" - buildingcincinnati speaking about new forumers
October 27, 200618 yr I'll be waiting for the all-inclusive interview on the AAG website, Andy. :-D :laugh: Congrats on the recongnition. (how much did working with someone outside of acadamia, on that project (Cincyroads) help or hurt you in the "eyes" of the judges?)
October 29, 200618 yr Thanks folks! Now we just need to get on RiverViewer's case to go record some more videos. :bang2: (how much did working with someone outside of acadamia, on that project (Cincyroads) help or hurt you in the "eyes" of the judges?) Probably didn't matter much. For one thing, NACIS is not as much of an academic group as some others; it's quite a mix of academics and professionals.
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