The have been a number of developments over the last few years that make ObservedEarth possible:
- Open data initiatives are making available large amounts of information available. ObservedEarth really only scrapes the surface of what is currently available.
- Compute capability of mobile devices is nearing that of desktop-class performance. This is especially true when leveraging GPU compute capability1.
- Data download speeds. Downloading several hundred megabytes of Landsat data is now trivial compared to that of a weekend Netflix binge2.
ObservedEarth is hoping to fill the gap between published open data and ‘non-technical’ users. Whether or not earth observation data is of interest to these users is something to be understood.
1: The Verge, Apple A9X. http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/9/9295923/apple-a9x-ipad-pro-chip ↩
2: Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/ ↩