Viewing posts tagged digital elevation models

As part of Kartoza's outreach programme, I recently helped the geography department at St Johns College in Johannesburg set up a Tangible Landscape, which to my knowledge is the first in Africa and possibly the first in a secondary school (most are at universities). I've been fascinated by these ever since I saw videos of them in action.  So, when Samantha Jones and the rest of the St Johns geography department (Bridget Fleming-HOD, Brandon Louw and Keith Arlow), expressed a wish to have one in the department, Sam's husband, Matt, went ahead and built a frame. That was all the motivation I needed. Peter Henning, the IT Manager at St Johns, gathered an old i5 PC with 4GB RAM (running Ubuntu Linux) and some old monitors and a projector and ordered a Microsoft XBox Kinect. While Peter and Matt set up the infrastructure I set up up the software, mainly consisting of the Open Source GRASS GIS and the module that takes the point clouds coming in from the Kinect and converts them to raster digital elevation models (DEMs).