Santa Claus May Have a New Tool to Plan His Christmas Route

Imagine a screen that shows the globe, as seen from space. With the touch of a button you can zoom in, watching continents flash by and cities slowly materialize. Move near the surface, and suddenly you’re skimming over mountains and hovering just above the ground, seeing the terrain in exquisite detail.

Is it the ultimate Christmas trip planner for a gift-giver in red? The newest video game? It may look like a game, except for one small detail: everything on the screen is real, and is being transmitted from the most up to date sources in the world.

The system is the brainchild of York University’s Vincent Tao. The NSERC-funded researcher is working on a program called See Anywhere Map Everywhere (SAME), which will enable researchers to join up different imaging systems to create one big worldwide system.

“This is really an electronic skin of the earth,” says Tao. “We can see, we can sense, we can touch.”

SAME works as a network of different satellites, Web sites, traffic cameras, mobile graphing data and a multitude of other “sensing” databases. The most remote pictures of the earth come from a NASA satellite, and as the program zooms in further, the feed switches from one source to another to provide more and more detailed images.

“I am able to pull out images at multiple resolutions from multiple remote servers, and see them all on my laptop,” Dr. Tao says.

Using the SAME technology, for example, Tao can reconstruct three-dimensional images of any nuclear facility in the world, enabling scientists to examine it from many angles. He has done so with a facility in North Korea.

“This gave international inspectors a lot of power to really look at those nuclear sites,” says Dr. Tao.

The program also has major potential for disaster management.

“We need tools of technology to provide maps in a very timely fashion. We need maps in an hour, or even in ten minutes,” he says.

For example, if an earthquake were to hit Vancouver, the system could immediately spot areas that have the most damage, and keep track of flooding and fires through sensors such as water level monitors and fire detectors.

And who knows, maybe Dr. Tao can sign up Rudolph as yet another way of keeping an eye on everything and everywhere in the world.

Contact:

Dr. Vincent Tao
Tel.: (416) 736-5221
E-mail: tao@yorku.ca