‘Kiwi' Spatial Data Visualisation Software

Users will be able to interactively fly through and explore the Wellington region's topography, zooming into the harbour using Emma's flight paths and diving into the harbour's floor with gradient colour to illustrate depth and identify any harbour hazards. Also showing at the conference will be a three-minute movie that will showcase the Wellington dataset collected for the conference.

The interactive display and movie have been specially commissioned by the Shallow Survey Conference. Organised by Land Information New Zealand, NIWA and GNS Science, the Shallow Survey Conference draws together 200 international hydrographic and marine charting experts and other scientists to discuss cutting edge advancements in shallow survey techniques. More than 80% of delegates are from 20 different countries, and from as far afield as Canada, Norway and Finland, China and the Czech Republic.

Emma says that designing this interactive display map for the conference has been technically challenging, and also hugely enjoyable. There's a great deal of data from a variety of sources that she had to carefully fit into the software. "I've taken the common dataset produced for Shallow Survey, digital elevation model data, along with orthophotos in different projections, and stitched them together into a single data set."