Several of us Engineering Lizards walked up to the Convention Center on Tuesday to show support for the hardworking Sales and Marketing Lizards who were manning our booth and to have a look around. The first thing I noticed was what a blue conference it was. Every booth and banner seemed to be a cool cerulean, with the single, vibrant and very red exception of Oracle’s digs.

The theme of this year’s GITA conference was “Infrastructure Solutions”, so there were a lot of “geospatial solutions” companies offering data integration software and services. I saw the word “conflation” so many times I looked it up later.

Crowlike, I’m drawn to the shiniest objects in a given environment, so I ended up spending the most time with the very amiable representatives from an Italian company called Abaco. My eye was caught by a CAD image of the Duomo in Milan spinning in 3-D on their monitor. Abaco was showing off its DbMAP® Web 3D product, a set of tools for building three-dimensional representations using existing bidimensional GIS data.

The thing that arrested my gaze was that when the perspective dropped down into a piazza and you were looking at the sides of the buildings, the facades were correct, peeling paint and all. Not like other products I’ve seen where the elevation view is blank grey or the roof of a building dribbles over its flank like a Dali clock. I asked how this was possible, and they showed me how they manually grabbed image data from oblique aerial photos and applied it to the raised buildings in the 3-D creation, skewing and stretching via what I assume to be complex algorithms (the kind we in the imaging industry bench-press every day before breakfast).

Seeing this, my first thought was, wow, that might be fine for a hilltop village like Civita di Bagnoreggio, but adding a facade to each building by hand would be untenable for Rome, let alone some sprawling city like Phoenix. It was explained to me that in the suburbs, you would apply facades randomly from a palette—only in familiar areas like the downtown or famous landmarks would you apply the actual facade. Fair enough.

Still, invoking the adage that the coolest stuff is seldom the most useful stuff, my second thought was, who would be going to so much trouble creating virtual land- or cityscapes that they would need such a tool? Tourism boards, for one, I was told, and though the sales guy listed other customers of theirs, I didn’t catch those because the bubble above my head filled up with an image of how perfect such models would be for the website of any municipality that relied on tourism for its economy.

The other coolest thing was at our own booth, where Lizards Jim and Robert showed me the HistoricAerials.com website, which uses our Express Server software to deliver aerial image datasets spanning decades and enables viewers to toggle between years at any given location.

In my hometown of Bellevue, WA, for example, I could zoom into any spot in the city the way it was in 1964, then click to the years 1968, 1980, 1990, 1998, 2000 or 2006, seeing the city develop before my eyes. And with the haunting “dissolve” feature enabled, each year gave slowly away to the inexorable erosion of time as the next year in the set gradually supplanted it. The images above show the effects of nearly half a century on one piece of earth.

I doubt the product spec ever called out “haunting” as an intended feature, but I’ll tell you this: I stayed up late that night toggling between 2006 and 1964 and watched farmhouses in the center of town giving way to Bellevue Square Mall, and Uncle Harold’s hobby shop, where I got my first bike, dissolving beneath a mayhem of skyscrapers.

Bellevue images courtesy of HistoricAerials.com. Duomo image courtesy of Abaco Group.