Kiwi software developer Emma Peace will show her new interactive spatial data visualisation software, Visual Cortex, at the 6th International Shallow Survey Conference to be held at Te Papa, Wellington on 20-24 February.

Emma’s company, Presentation Cartography, will showcase a specialist self-driven interactive display of the Wellington region using shallow survey datasets and topographic information. Not only will users be able to interactively fly through and explore the Wellington region’s topography and zoom into the harbour using Emma’s flight paths, they can also dive 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.

Emma says, “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 I’ve 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 stitch them together into a single data set”.

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+ countries, and from as far afield as Canada, Norway and Finland, China and the Czech Republic.

‘Shallow survey’ refers to surveying in water depths of less than 30 metres, generally around a country’s coastline and with a particular focus on ports and harbours. With close to 99% of New Zealand’s trade carried by ship, accurate shallow surveys are critical to record unseen hazards that may pose a danger to shipping, and other commercial or recreational enterprises. Shallow surveys are also important for nautical charting, marine habitat mapping and monitoring, coastal zone management, natural resource evaluations, seafloor-searches (ie: for shipwrecks, air-crashes, container etc), marine security, marine archaeology, marine archaeology, and channel clearance and dredge monitoring.

For more information: www.shallowsurvey2012.org