Goggle Maps Street View, which was first addressed by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Goggle, in Seoul Digital Forum on 30 May 2007, has been creating countless images by users who eagerly crave for attention from the world.
In some sites are already deciding ranking for the finest view. One of the top-ranked views features ET holding a beam sword that the heroes of Star Wars use. The background of the shot is Diamond Hill Road, NJ, represented in ET-StreetView#egosio.com as the peculiar place-discernment identification and easily searched at egosio.com.
However, Dr. Lee Sang Gee of Korea Ocean Research & Development Institute(KORDI) told ZDNet Korea that there was something unconvincing. According to him, it reiterates similar patterns as going down to the South along with the same road, properly maintaining the angle of revolution.
The following view shows that ET, contrary to the above view, is now holding the beam in his right hand.
As going further down to the South along with the road, ET and beam sword are repeatedly found in several places.
Does ET appear only in New Jersey? The answer is no. The evidence is found everywhere. The following view shows that ET with the beam sword travels to Miami Beach, Florida.(ePosition: ET-Florida#egosio.com )
Although ET does not appear in Denver, the beam sword is now bifurcated, like a sword fight, there.(ePosition: denver-light-2a#egosio.com )
Based on the evidence that shows the same patterns reiterated everywhere, Dr. Lee concludes that ET and the beam sword may be faults that could be generated in the process of image editing.
Goggle Street View consists of a series of 3-D pictures, which are possible to revolve around according to location and sight-direction, by using several pictures. Those pictures are produced by 11 cameras, installed to a car in order to take pictures of the whole direction of 360¢ª as the car moves forward.
In the case that the sun is located in between two adjacent cameras in the process of picturing, however, the beam sword could appear unless junctures are perfectly treated in the process of image editing.
ET could appear as well if two adjacent cameras simultaneously capture slender lights passing through rifts of branches or structures that block the sun. The fact that ET mainly appears in between branches or lawn supports this hypothesis.
Dr. Lee, who specializes in image treatment and location-based service, suggests that "those phenomena do not happen in the cases that the sun is blocked by building or structures ant that camera does not directly focus on the sun". "Those faults," he continues, "could be solved by excellent software for image treatment in the process of image editing, but wouldn¡¯t be technically solved in the images that Goggle Street View provides."
To back up those explanations, it is useful to examine the following three adjacent locations on I-678 to JFK international airport. (ePosition : i678et#egosio.com )
Among the above images, the middle one does not show ET and the beam sword because a traffic sign covers the sun, preventing sunlight from infiltrating into camera. Meanwhile, the beam sword appears in the first and third images in which the shadows of things are located in the exact opposite with the beam sword.
One can easily find locations in which ET and the beam sword appear by registering ePosition, peculiar place-discernment ID. ePosition provides services to register and search, based on Google Map, by using Google Open API through the site, www.egosio.com, operated by GG21.
ePosition does new location-based service of UCC to which customers register their locations of interest by themselves, using Goggle Maps. Netizens can use the service by registering various interesting places in the form of ePosition and searching and sharing those IDs.
ePosition service has a similar form with email and is possible to register in different servers. It uses # in the place of @, guarantees exchangeability among different servers, and supports both English and native languages.
In addition, GG21 presented an application for the new standard of regulation to Korean Agency for Technology and Standards in order to drive forward the international standardization of ePosition technology in the filed of Ubiquitous GIS.
(Original headline: ET with Star Wars beam sword ranked on the top of Goggle Maps Street View, but could be everywhere )
