I caught up with mapping expert Joe Morrison, who shared why you need satellite imagery to build virtual worlds, how video games are way ahead of the curve on 3D tech, and why taking it slow is the right way to go when you jump into a new technology like spatial computing.
Show Notes
Joe Morrison is perhaps best known for his Substack, where he covers the world of satellite imagery and mapping with a thoughtful and fact-based — but altogether surprising — point of view. He’s the kind of commentator that once argued (convincingly) that Google Maps’ advantage was fading. And that’s not the only insight he’s offered that flew in the face of common wisdom.
When I caught up with Morrison earlier this month, he brought his critical eye to our discussion of spatial computing. Among other topics, we talked about why you need satellite imagery to build virtual worlds, how video games are way ahead of the curve on 3D tech, and why taking it slow is the right way to go when you jump into a new technology like spatial computing. After all, says Morrison, there’s no gold medal for being first.
Links:
Links:
- Google Maps' Moat is Evaporating - Joe Morrison
- Avazea - Geospatial software
- Geotrellis - Geographical data processing engine
- Mapping's Future Looks like Gaming's Past - Joe Morrison
- Snap acquires Pixel8earth
- Airbus WorldDEM
- Tandem X - Earth capture mission
Creators & Guests
What is The Spatial Reality Podcast?
We host one on one interviews exploring the businesses and individuals that are defining the applications of spatial computing. We aim to show you how spatial computing can change your business and your life—not a decade from now, not in a few years, but today.
Welcome to the Spatial Reality Podcast, your resource for authentic conversations about spatial computing technologies. I'm Sean Higgins, your host. Every few weeks I'll share a new in-depth interview with a leader in spatial computing. I'm casting my net wide trying to find experts who can help us understand how this technology is going to change and is already changing a huge variety of.
My goal is to offer hype free information about spatial computing. For these first three episodes, I pulled recordings from my most popular interviews from the last year. These recordings were made so I could publish text interviews on the website, and that means we used Google to record not ideal.
Still, I think it's worth sharing these so you can enjoy the insights that our guests have to offer. Enjoy, and keep an eye out for more podcasts coming very soon.
Today's guest, Joe Morrison, is perhaps best known for a sub stack where it covers the world of satellite and imagery and mapping with a thoughtful and fact based, but surprising point of view. He's the kind of commentator that once argued convincingly that Google Maps advantage was fading. That's not the only insight he's offered that flew in the face of common.
When I caught up with Morrison earlier this year, he brought his critical eye toward discussion of spatial computing. Among other topics, we talked about why you need satellite imagery to build virtual worlds, how video games are way ahead of the curve on 3D tech and why taking it slow is the right way to go.
When you jump into a new technology like spatial computing, after all it says Morrison, there's no gold medal for being.
Listen on and enjoy. Does the term spatial computing mean anything to you? If so, what? My limited experience with spatial computing comes mainly out of the geospatial field. I was. Working for a consultant for a long time called Xavier that builds a lot of open source software for doing large scale geospatial processing.
And the majority of that was 2D data mapping data. But some of it, like the Geo Charles project. Was two and a half D data, so elevation models, pixels with a Z axis. And so yeah, I got exposed to it a little bit that way. I think in general, I've written before about video games as a lens into what modern spatial computing looks like and how mapping tends to lag video games pretty dramatically.
So you can see what's coming. Despite looking at video games, and there's so many ways in which this plays out in the history of web mapping in particular. For instance, the folks who created Google Earth, are you familiar with their story? They were a failed video game startup, and I forgot what their interactive graphics or something like that.
They had this video game company that didn't work out and Keyhole was the stuff they salvaged from it. And you can look at Mapbox and their integration with Unity as one way in which these two fields are starting to merge together. Certainly another place where it starts to blend is Snap snaps.
Mapping team is very impressive, and a lot of that is augmented reality. So they acquired a company called Pixelate, started by Sean Gorman, which was using phone cameras to cross correlate with satellite imagery to position 3D photometric scans from the ground in the correct place on Earth so that they had a mapping context to them.
And that's infrastructure for. If they wanna do a times square event where they get everybody with their glasses on and times square and dragons fly over and the billboards all change, and they need to know spatially where that is, all those key points are, that's a geospatial problem. So I think a lot of times when people talk about spatial comput, My sense is that they're talking about arbitrary three dimensional constructed projections that are typically used in video games and virtual reality.
But to me, I think of. Geospatial computing. And it's interesting when those two things intersect like they do with the Mapbox Unity SDK or Snapchat, you can make a pretty quick and convincing case that this problem extends from that local scale all the way out to the geospatial if we're gonna have a holistic infrastructure for the sort of spatial computing technologies that we're developing these days.
Is that, Do I understand you? Yeah, absolutely. And the 3D. The world is for the most part, mapped the foundational elements of the world, and actually a lot of it's open now Facebook and Google and Apple. I know that Bing and Facebook have both released large. I think Facebook has also released large building footprint data sets.
People like Synergize have released all of the bodies of water in the world. It's the foundational features that don't move a whole lot land. That's decently well mapped for a reasonable resolution globally. The elevation data, though the terrain data is not well mapped, at least not openly. So the best elevation models for the globe tend to hover around 30 meters down to like 10 meters for each grid cell.
Um, and that's terrible if you're trying to do a local level analysis. So there are projects. The Bryon map of the world that is owned by Maxar and the world Dem that's owned by Airbus. One of those was arrived at with stereoscopic images and arbitrarily overlapping optical images where you could do photogrammetry and, and arrive at an elevation model.
That's Max R'S technique done in partnership with sob. They were the one with the algorithm, and then Airbus used this sub synthetic temperature radar mission called Tandem X, which I, I think is the most underrated mission. In the history of remote sensing, incredible feet of engineering, where they took a pair of very expensive synthetic radar satellites.
They flew them in extremely close proximity on the order of hundreds of meters apart, which is just when you're traveling 16,000 miles an hour to be a couple football fields apart and not run into each other and be tracked precisely as crazy. And then they flew them in a helix. Which meant they were literally corkscrewing around each other in the sky, which is a thing you do to avoid a collision.
So anyway, I say that because they use that to produce a one meter elevation model for the whole globe, which is crazy called World dm, but that's proprietary. It's very expensive you get access to. But that type of data, one meter and below unlocks all kinds of use cases commercially for doing things.
Predicting how deep rivers will be in order to more accurately predict the amount of water traveling through them. Cause you know their width, if you understand the elevation, you can guess that their depth. And then if you know the width and the approximate depth, you know how much volume is moving and therefore you can predict really accurately what.
Hydropower dams downstream of that are going to generate in terms of electricity. You can do all kinds of interesting analysis and you can also do much more accurate flood in modeling during storm events and all these things that have insurance and agriculture and catastrophe response. So I say that because a lot of the focus is a LIDAR on iPhones, which is wild to be honest.
That is crazy to me. I think it's super underrated, but. What I'm interested in and what I focus my career on is the global scale, right? It's how are you going to get information in a situation where you can't. Bring an iPhone or there is no internet connectivity or you're not allowed to fly a plane and fly lidar.
So I'm interested in methods that are space born because they're immune to a lot of those geopolitical boundaries, assuming nobody uses an ASAT to shoot them down. So there are also spatial computing applications at the geospatial level like you're talking about, that are worthy of attention for commercial purposes.
That's a wonderful point. I think something people probably could stand to hear more of. Yeah, and the key thing there with all of this is that it's not hype. Synthetic app radar was invented in the 50. The TX mission was conceptualized and funded in 2004. This is not new. It's not like any of this stuff is newfangled
It's just sitting there waiting to be applied. I had joked about this with someone previous. A lot of what I'm doing in a lay context often sounds futuristic. Satellite space, precise measurement of the earth space. It's very old technology. It just hasn't been applied for commercial purposes, and that's a great shame because there's a ton of value to be unlocked.
And so when I, when I. Hear about like metaverse and 3D and all that. I'm excited by it because I feel like it's not new technology, it's just the investment and marketing and education required to apply it in a more broad commercial context. And the people that are doing the best work are often not doing anything novel.
They're simply making a very expensive thing cheap. They're making a very expensive lidar. Cheap enough to put on every car. They're not inventing lidar. So that's where I tend to focus. Not like really the cutting edge, but like 20, 30, 40 years ago. Yeah. These, the physics have been proven. Now it's just a logistical question of how to make this cheap and affordable and accessible is the major factor in making these things a reality?
Just time. Is it actually getting down to working on the mundane problem? Because people are always promising we're gonna have something tomorrow. Is it just that everything is going to take more time and we need to be patient? No, it's a lot more complicated. I don't think there's any guarantee that it's going to happen, that this data, especially satellite imagery, will ever become accessible to a broad audience.
I, I think like the era of progress points in that direction, but I don't think you can take progress for granted. And I don't claim to understand the many interconnected forces that create the complex system that will result in whatever changes happen over the next decade. Because even zooming all the way out, it's a tremendous capital expenditure to, to build satellites.
Even though people always talk about launch costs are coming way down. Yeah. But like a one and a half meter lens in a clean. Didn't get any cheaper. Yeah, there's, Maxar is bragging about how each of the Legion satellites only cost a hundred million. That's like there, it's still the physics for optical at least still require really big lenses and so it's always gonna be a huge capital expenditure.
And SAR is its own totally different set of physical limitations that have to be accounted for, but the. I guess the point I'm making is that we've been in a, at a macro level, at an economic level, we've been in an exuberant bull market for a long time. That resulted in a lot of venture dollars pouring into the space sector in particular, and the earth observation niche as well.
Companies going public, things like that, raising hundreds of millions, billions of dollars in aggregate, and some people look at that and say, Very Cyn. That's all hype and over promise and under deliver and all that. To me, that's a regular technology cycle. This is no different than why we have, like I'm getting internet installed at this cabin that I'm in today.
Gigabit speed fiber cable. The companies that created that infrastructure, a lot of them didn't make it. And it was exuberance that funded it, but undeniably it created a tremendous amount of value. And I think Earth observation is going through a similar kind of phase where that window is starting to close, it feels, but the capital is there.
To build the infrastructure and really great companies could become huge infrastructure players like Verizon. I, I'm not, I'll take the hype. Sometimes it's annoying and sometimes it's frustrating. I remember when some of those sponsoring and a, the stuff that they were going on TV and saying was unbelievable.
It was lives, they were lying and wasn't clear to me that they knew that they were lying. But it was like anyone with any sort of intellectual. Would realize that they were lying and, but by the same token, they were able to raise money and that will be used towards good purposes. And probably some of them will get sued to high heaven for representations that they made and some of them will get acquired and whatever.
But the point is that the financial aspect has to be there. And then on top of that, there has to be enough people that survive and the, the forces of competition have to be such. It does get cheaper and more accessible. I don't necessarily wanna apply the lessons learned in earth observation more broadly, but looking at these technology cycles as you put them, what's your takeaway about how to look at a market that's always about to finally make it over the cusp of something?
How does one navigate this sort of thing between the hype. The complexity of the system with all these different forces at play, interacting with each other in unpredictable ways. What recourse do we have as we try to understand, maybe even simply react? Yeah. If you're an entrepreneur, for instance, thinking about starting a business in the satellite imagery space, building some sort of.
Analytical product and you're wondering about this right now, today, you're like, Is it going to get cheaper? Is the licensing going to get from there? Cause it, my whole business model depends on understanding where things are moving. Yeah. And the answer is pretty simple, which is that just simply be more conservative than you think you should.
It's a lesson I think that has played out in every technology forum ever. The first mover. That's a fake, that's not a real advantage there. There is no such thing as a first mover advantage. Facebook is not the first social media platform, uh, at Lyft is not the first ride sharing platform. They did all right for themselves.
It's not always a benefit to be first. Sometimes the first one does take the line share of the. But you, you, you can wait. Just cause somebody's doing it. It doesn't mean you can't do it versus something that you can't find a single example of anyone doing currently or having tried before. My perhaps cynical view, but my experience d dictates that's not, that's because it's not a good idea.
Most really great ideas. Someone's tried them. They may have failed. The timing may have been wrong and you may have better timing, but if no one's even trying. and you don't understand that market really deeply. It's not where you come from. It's a terrible idea. Like I can tell you right now, it's a bad idea.
If it's your problem that you're struggling with and no one's ever tried it, you've got a shot. But even then, instead of starting that business, try to find somebody to build it for you or try to find somebody who's doing it and hire em. And if they're terrible, then you're like, Okay, maybe I'll quit and start my own things.
Business to business. It's very simple. They either have a really dire need that you're solving for them that they'll pay you for today, or it's not actually a dire need, and so you shouldn't be wasting your time on it and you just wait for somebody to do a decent job and then you do a great job and you them.
So it seems like everybody puts a so much, so much emphasis on innovation, but in a business setting, maybe just following the market and watching it is a much more prudent. Thoughtful way to approach these problems, if I understand you correctly. Yeah. And the bigger the technical challenge, the better it is to have that extra information.
Cause there is no, there's no gold medal for being first. There's no customers do not care if you were the first to do something. They care what's in it for me. And so I think that's a pattern that can be applied across lots of verticals. It's ego. I used to. I wanna invent stuff. I wanna be the first one to ever do.
But there's actually tons and tons of invention in the nuance of putting together the business model and the nuance of how you design your product and how you manufacture it. Each one of those pieces has a million decisions where there's innovation like that goes into it. And rather than thinking of yourself as you know, World changing genius.
It's much easier to think of yourself as just competing against other regular people and trying to do a little bit of a better job than them. That adds up over time, over a million decisions to a much better customer experience. And yeah, I learned that lesson. Like in college, I started a backpack company and I designed my own backpack.
I hired a fashion designer who did purses to help. Design the world's shittiest backpack. It was like a burlap bag with a toiletry kit sewn to the front of it. It was the ugliest thing. I literally, I got in my car after they handed me the prototype and I held back tears. This is the worst thing I have ever created in my, I spent like half of all my money on this stupid prototype.
What found up happening is I just found a guy. Made backpacks and he had a catalog of backpacks and one of the designs was awesome. He made a couple small tweaks to it. We put different color schemes, different materials on it, my logo, and he just contract manufactured it for me. That cost $250 for my sample bags versus $2,500 for the custom one.
So it's like that was the moment when I realized I don't have to, I don't, you don't have to be the first one to ever release. Thing that's just all ego. And the other side of that is like this myth that you don't wanna be too late or you'll miss the boat. It's often a lot later than you would expect if you're paying really close attention to a sector, cuz you understand it really well.
You're living way farther in the future than you realize. You just have to catch the wave that's happening in the present. And that's actually. Probably a couple years later than you expected.
Thanks for listening to today's podcast. Check the episode notes for links to the books, reports, articles, and other media we discussed. Today. You can find more episodes of spatial reality in your usual podcast spots. Leave us a review if you enjoyed today's interview. And so, you know, I'm always looking for more.
To talk to. So hit me up on LinkedIn if there's anybody you'd love to hear from. See you next episode.