Slideshow: Mapping the oil spill
While the world’s news media report on the expanding oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, MIT Media Lab student Jeffrey Yoo Warren and his collaborators are providing their own useful coverage of the crisis.Warren, Oliver Yeh ’10 and do-it-yourself cartographer Stewart Long have been using inexpensive cameras attached to ordinary helium-filled weather balloons, or even oversized trash bags, to capture aerial photos that are then stitched together and geometrically corrected using software Warren wrote (to compensate for camera angle and distortions) to make very accurate local maps. For example, last January Warren traveled to Peru to help citizens there meet a requirement to provide accurate maps of the lands they occupied in order to obtain the title to the lands — Warren’s mapping software enabled them to create those maps.The team realized that in the Gulf oil spill, future lawsuits, as well as monitoring of environmental impacts from the...