On June 11 it was a warm afternoon when we all boarded taxis in front of the WMO lobby and promptly got stuck in a huge traffic jam in the center city.
After nearly 45 minutes during which some groups abandoned their taxis and walked along the shore of Lake Geneva to La Tour de Molard, everyone arrived safely at the meeting point.
At the Tour de Molard we were joined by several others who had come from other parts of the city. We reorganized into teams and the 8 tablets (6 TegraNote 7 + 2 Google Nexus 7) connected to the Huawei mobile Internet access point provided by Scott Simmons (Laramie Range and CACI).
We then skipped the planned first demonstration and rushed up the stairs and pedestrian streets to the Hotel de Ville.
We needed to reach the Hotel de Ville as soon as possible in order to conduct the demonstration of Inglobe Technology 3D Tracker on the interior staircase before the doors to the courtyard were to close to the public at 7 PM.
After a brief introduction to the project prepared for us to experience horses in the interior staircase, everyone was able to see the project on the iPad which did not need to be Internet connected. Unfortunately, this project (unlike all the others) is not available on the Showcase tablets but everyone had a quick look. If you missed the demonstration, you can see the screenshots here.
We then walked through the tables of the guests dinning peacefully at the Hotel des Armures on our way to the balcony overlooking the place in front of the Cathedrale St. Pierre. Here we were undisturbed, cool and our target was brightly lit. In the shadow of the building, it was dark so that we could see the tablet screens clearly.
Under these conditions, we conducted the demonstrations of six showcase projects:
– the smartMap Geneva project and Geneva 3D SDI using the 3D models of the buidlings as well as other data sets
– the CitiesAR Geneva project which shows the 3D models of Geneva attached to the map of the showcase event
– the i-SCOPE project using the 3D buildings in CityGML
– the DiscovAR game using Points of Interest in the city center and
– the visualization of Geneva city mobile antennas using Swiss OpenData sets in the Chrome browser.
In addition and despite some difficulty with connectivity, we tested the 3D AR visualization capabilities of Augment (available on both Android and iOS) using the 3D model of the cathedral (it is the only model which is labelled "cathedrale").
Our next stop was the terrace overlooking the Parc des Bastions.
At this location the sun's angle was low and the light directly on us so we backed into the shade of trees where we were shown the demonstration of Envitia's MapLink project using city building models, water supply, and tree data sets with GeoPackage and GeoContext files to control the data layers in view.
We concluded with a toast with fine Swiss wines to the success of the developers and projects in the Parc des Bastions.
Although some people had already taken leave of the event, we captured a group photo of the participants in front of the Reformation Wall.
Thank you to all the sponsors for their support, the developers for their projects and the participants for the enthusiasm for the event.