GoPro: Falling Tide, Monmouth Beach, Lyme Regis

Some more of my Underwater GoPro Adventures

Lyme Regis Fossil Festival 2013: Ammonites Video

Recorded by John Cummings as part of the Wikimedian-in-Residence programme at the Natural History Museum (May 2013) featuring Paddy Howe of the Lyme Regis Museum.

Experimenting underwater with a GoPro

Having moved the book writing endeavour to Lyme Regis for a couple of weeks to spend some time with Rikey from Alice's Teddy Bear Shop and Paddy from The Fossil Workshop it seemed a good time to put the new toy, a GoPro Hero 3+ Black Edition to the test underwater.

Here are a couple of videos of rock pool life with thanks to Leon (Rikey and Paddy's so) for assistant cameraman duties.

Rounding off the sea-life theme I visited the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre to meet Phil, a friend who  used to work at the Natural History Museum to record some footage of a cuttlefish the centre had raised from eggs.

The scraping noise and final tipping of the camera were caused by an Edible Crab investigating, and then burrowing under the camera as you can see below.

Living ammonites: recreating a Jurassic sea

Last year Paddy from Lyme Regis Museum (well worth a visit) took over the window of Alice's Bear Shop (well worth a visit) for Lyme Regis Fossil Festival. Paddy also runs the Fossil Workshop below the bear shop (you guessed it - well worth a visit).

Seeing this re-ignited a much talked about idea among the Buckland Club of doing something to recreate a Jurassic Sea. The opportunity provided itself with Adrian, Maggie and Helena from the NHM bringing the underwater rover REX to this year's Fossil Festival (along with a replica ammonite and belemnite).

Maggie and I preparing the replicas for the sea

After attaching the creatures to some large weights Adrian ventured out to return them to the sea.

After waiting for the next day's morning high tide we launched REX and went to see if we could find the 'living' animals.

REX the remotely operated vehicle

Launching REX off of the Cobb at Lyme Regis

REX finds the 'living' ammonite. Now that's a Nature paper, surely?

Lyme Regis Fossil Festival: The Preparations

Several people (TetZoo, NHM) have already blogged about the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival and how great it is. Instead of doing it again here are some things that had been occurring before and during but out of the public eye, mainly relating to the work of the official friends of the Fossil Festival: The Buckland Club.

WiFi
For the second year running the Festival has had WiFi internet available in the marquee and around the Marine Theatre and the Cobb Centre. Last year we were fortunate to have Pao and Victor from the Quick Mesh Project in Barcelona to help. This time it was just me and Sam Bennet. The first full day of our holiday was spent wiring up the nodes to test them in the office of the Lyme Regis Development Trust, the second was spent with the ever helpful Chris (who had also taken a day off work) around the town - installing the nodes on buildings and inside the marquee and running ethernet cables through some troublesome runs. By lunchtime on day 2 everything was good to go.

Satellite Link
Eddie and Tony (media technicians at the NHM) setup a satellite link on the Cobb to beam back live video to the Nature Live events in the Attenborough Studio. This involved very quickly setting up some kit and a far greater amount of time hunting for the satellite with the satellite dish.

In this process there was a rather unfortunate exchange between Eddie and a seagull:

The Town Prepares
The event is celebrated by many places throughout the town. When in Lyme Regis we are all the adopted family of Rikey and Paddy. Rikey runs the famous Alice's Bear Shop, Paddy runs the infamous Fossil Workshop in its basement. For the festival weekend Paddy was allowed to have the window display.

Long lost potential relatives
The Festival is also a great time to meet friends old and new. After four years of nagging Richard Edmunds (Jurrasic Coast team / my Jurassic Dad) and I finally posed for a photograph together.

Accomodation
The Buckland Club contingent this year was a relatively small 14 requiring three properties in Lyme Regis organised by the legendary Jackie Skipper (plus the occassional sofa-surfer from Charmouth). The numbers were swollen on the Saturday and Sunday nights as we threw first a party then a BBQ for ourselves and a rather large number of people from the NHM and others associated with the Festival. We had our favourite party house named (at least by us) Cauli and Flowers after the fruit and vegetable shop that used to be below. No two rooms of the house are on the same level - making it resemble an Escher artwork.

The Cyclists
As if turning up to spend your holiday teaching people wasn't enough dedication Aoife and Sally decided to cycle to Lyme Regis from London (still time for a charitable donation here). There's more about their trip on Twitter at #london2lyme.

Using Maprika for Geology

In the last post I shared a video of Jeremy Young using the iPad (plus iPhone and Android) app Maprika on the Jurassic Coast as part of the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival.

Maprika is an app originally intended to allow you to find you friends on ski slopes, by taking an image of a ski map and allowing you to georeference it in-app by adding the same points on your map and on Google Maps. The app provides an easy to use interface that can switch between these views while you georeference the map.

By using this technology to georeference the old W. D. Lang maps of the Lyme Regis we were able to study the effects of coastal erosion on the limestone ledges of Monmouth Beach (including the world famous ammonite pavement). As the video in the previous post showed the change has been considerable - both in terms of the amount of cliff that has eroded and the erosion of the limestone pavement.

The photo below (thanks to Aodhan Butler) shows Sam and I standing on a line of stones that we placed along the cliff edge of the Lang maps - showing the extent of the cliff erosion.

Digitising Old Geological Maps with Maprika

Jeremy Young talks to Marc De'ath about using Maprika with the W. D. Lang geological maps of Lyme Regis as part of the Collaborative Curiosity Digitial Live Science Experiment.

Augmented reality for Geology part 2

A while ago a wrote about augmented reality for geology. The aim was to use the open source Drupal content management system to provide an easy to use graphical interface for the augmented reality app Layar (which is both iOS and Android compatible).

At the 2012 Lyme Regis Fossil Festival we (The Buckland Club in collaboration with the Lyme Regis Development Trust)  finally managed to try out the app with the public, where it was received with enthusiasm (for some of the background to this project as well as some of the technical specifications see Writing a specification for our first Digital Asset).

One of the major issues with deploying a functional app in this environment is the lack of both wireless and 3G access. Even throughout the town there are many black spots where it is impossible to get signal of any kind on a wireless device.

The solution to this was to install a number of long range WiFi links between places in the town that had and were willing to share their internet connection and the places that we wished to test our apps with the public. Working with Victor and Pau from the Quick Mesh Project we managed to create a network of four WiFi nodes, including a battery powered portable node that could be used on the beach between tides.


Pau, Victor and I installing a WiFi node on the roof of the Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis.

I will write more about what we have been up to in Lyme Regis soon.

Lyme Regis Landslip Video

Just stitched together from a handful of photographs, while stepping back, so the stability leaves a lot to be desired!

(click image below for slideshow)

Augmented Reality for Geology (a Drupal approach)

Yesterday in a discussion with Jeremy Young we thought about the concept of having an augmented reality app that would point out a few major points of interest in Lyme Regis (we'll be down for the Fossil Festival again this year). The discussion came from playing with the Layar app, for which it is possible to provide custom data layers.

As there will be a few of us around at the festival this year (many of us living in an iPhone augmented world) I thought the idea was worth investigating a little bit more. The first challenge was to provide some kind of editing environment where we could collaboratively provide the relevant co-ordinates, altitude, text and image. Thanks to the Layar module for Drupal this was achieved pretty easily - adding items to the augmented reality layer becomes just as simple as filling out a form.

I created a handful of Points of Interest (including The Whole Hog - perhaps the world's best sandwich shop) and then submitted the necessary details to the Layar team (the layer is currently still awaiting approval).

The next issue was how we could add points (including photographs) while roaming around the town and seashore. The obvious answer was the ubiquitous iPhone (other smartphones are available), but mobile Safari doesn't allow uploads to websites.

The solution was Flickr (I use it to manage almost all my photographs). The Flickr app is easy to use and can upload photographs complete with titles, descriptions, location data and tags. Importing data from Flickr was achieved using a version of the FlickrSync module I had previously hacked to import geolocation data. The system can be set to only import photographs with specific tags - an easy way to only get the data I want. Individual users of the site will be able to associate their Flickr account and specify what tags they want to use to label items for inclusion in the layer.

I have also made an overview map that shows the points of geological interest around Lyme Regis that have been collected so far.

All in an evening (and a half)'s work.....