Tag Archives: animation

Qwiki: awesome animations of Wikipedia pages

Some time ago I made a video of evolution in time of the Wikipedia page about 2005 London bombings.
Well, what you get from Qwiki, for almost every Wikipedia page, has nothing to do with it! It is awesome! Below there is the embedding of the qwiking of page about 2005 London bombings.

View 7 July 2005 London bombings and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

Qwiki gets info from a Wikipedia page and automatically reads a text summary (synchronise with the text), adding images from different sources.
It is amazing! I can imagine students in schools pondering “instead of listening this boring professor about history of Europe, I’ll check the qwiking of it” (see below).

View History of Europe

Or do you want to quickly get an idea about the recent 2011 Egyptian revolution? Nothing better than qwiking it (see below).

View 2011 Egyptian revolution and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

Well, you can compare these videos with the reports created by professional journalists of CNN or BBC and pondering how far we are from automatic generation in real-time of news reports.
Currently most videos are short (even when the corresponding pages are very long) and this totally makes sense from Qwiki perspective but I guess we are not far away from automatic generation of school lessons about geography, history or literature (and more). For example check the qwiking of the Trento, the city where I live and work.

View Trento and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

And as an early feedbacker was saying, I’m nearly in tears. This is so beautiful.

Animated Invasion over Google Map

UPDATE: This is a demo on Google Maps I put together in few hours in 2005. And this was the first time I got BoingBoinged (it was the last time too … ;) The demo was working in 2005 but now the Google Maps API changed and it does not work, so I replaced it with the flash video I recorded at that time.

Some Mozillas and some Gnus are invading Microsoft office in Redmond (the blue E).
First I saw on BoingBoing that Vestadesign created Star Wars ATATs attacking Palo Alto using Google Maps API. So I thought I could add some animations. I also ended up changing the environment (Micro$oft offices) and the invaders (Mozillas and Gnus). Free software to the rescue!
Go to the page with the Javascript code that produces the animation.
Below there is the Flash animation but you should see the real page (with the code). (If you can’t see them, check the static image.)

It should be very easy to create real playable games on Google Maps. Here are some ideas:
– playing Risk on the real world map (with the ability to zoom in/out to combat at different scales). Extend Jrisk or JavaRisk (code available on SourceForge).
– playing FreeCiv on real world maps. Modify FreeCiv source code.
– driving a car race on streets of the real world.
– much more I guess
Let me know if you create such a game.

UPDATE: after being BoingBoinged, I created a Games on Google Maps wiki page, for collecting ideas (and implementations!). Contribute to it, if you like.