Amsterdam is the first 3D European city at Google Earth

Posted on 1 Jun 2007. under Useless Rants. No Comments.

Amsterdam is now the first European City in 3D at Google Earth. So finally Amsterdam gets a 3D city in the virtual realm of the Google globe. I am sure more will follow. Hopefully some Eastern European cities too! Wait, they have to map them first…

Readability in Websites

Posted on 3 Apr 2007. under Graphics, Useless Rants. 1 Comment.

Ato readability study performed by Alyson L. Hill from Department of Psychology of Stephen F. Austin [State University], black on white background, present in most websites todaty, is not the best solution. You can actually get this conclusion by simply looking at paper’s webpage — it uses exactly the color combination, which he found to be the most favorable. While the study itself is quite dated (1997) I don’t suppose people has changed a lot since then so most if not all of results must still be valid. Here are some interesting ones:

- Green on yellow is the best color scheme in the most conditions except for italicized Arial, for which it’s the worst
- Times New Roman on average is much better than Arial
- The combination, which gives the fastest response time is (surprise) italicized green Times New Roman on yellow background

- Black on gray is much faster than black on white

This text is the readability winner

I did find white background not appealing, nor readable. Geat importance in readability plays letter and line spacing. At the time I designed this blog theme, fall 2006, both colors and spacing seemed optimal to me. I tried to find the best compromised between readability and appealing look.

The Real Digital House

Posted on 30 Mar 2007. under Architecture, BIM & CAD. No Comments.

Google

Want the house of your dreams? Soon, it may be possible to design it on your computer, then have it delivered to you in customized, Lego-like pieces.

That’s the idea behind a collaboration between Bell Travers Willson Architects and Facit, showcased at the 1:1 Making the Digital House exhibition at The Architecture Foundation in London.

Using 3D modeling programs, an entire home or building can be designed on a computer. All the dimensions and screw-hole placements for the building materials are then relayed to a Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine that cuts out the customized components needed. Essentially, you print out your dream home–in lumber–and have all the parts sent to you!

Human Eye “megapixel” Resolution

Posted on 19 Mar 2007. under Useless Rants. 2 Comments.

eye

The average human retina has five million cone receptors on it. Since the cones are responsible for color vision, you might suppose that this equates to a five megapixel equivalent for the human eye. There are also a hundred million rods that detect monochrome contrast, which plays an important role in the sharpness of the image you see. And even this 105MP is an underestimate because the eye is not a still camera.

Also, the two eyes that humans have continuously flick around to cover a much larger area than your field of view and the composite image is assembled in the brain - not unlike stitching together a panoramic photo. In good light, you can distinguish two fine lines if they are seperate by at least 0.6 arc-minutes (0.01.Degrees). This gives an equivalent pixel size of 0.3 arc-minutes. If you take a conservative 120 degrees as your horizontal field of view and 60 degrees in the vertical plane, this translates to 576 megapixels of available image data. Curiously - as a counterpoint to this - most people cannot distinguish the difference in quality between a 300dpi and a 150dpi photo when printed at 6×4″, when viewed at normal viewing distances.

Although the human eye and brain when combined can resolve massive amounts of data, for imaging purposes, 150dpi output is more than enough to provide adequate data for us to accept the result as photographic quality. Interesting, women have more cones and men have more rods, therefore the ladies see colours brighter than gents but can’t see as well when it gets dark.

The Power of Google

Posted on 1 Mar 2007. under Useless Rants. No Comments.

Google

I just checked my website traffic at http://www.arhisstudios.com/ and noticed that my traffic increased significantly over the past week. While I usually get 1500-2000 page views per day, traffic for the past week increased on average, threefold. What generatated this? Over 80% of my past week referrals came from Google searches, and the most searched term was Nikon D3, followed by D3h and D3x.

Well, this has an easy explanation: I posted a few months ago an article on the future hi-end Nikon SLR: D3x and D3h. That was picked by Google at that time. Searches on this terms seem to have intensified over the past days, as PMA 2007 is near and people speculate that this new Nikon cameras will be released. Since there are few website that talk about this cameras as of today, my arhisstudios.com has top listings. Better placement than dedicated photography equipment websites that will review Nikon D3h or D3x when eventualy announced.

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Amsterdam is the first 3D European city at Google Earth

Readability in Websites

The Real Digital House

Human Eye “megapixel” Resolution

The Power of Google

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