A galaxy of your own

Last December, we wrote about our immersive Google Earth environment, Liquid Galaxy: eight 55-inch LCD screens showing Google Earth in a unified, surround view.

Liquid Galaxy at TED 2010

Since then, we’ve taken it to a lot of conferences, built Liquid Galaxies in Google offices all over the world and even put one in the Tech Museum in San Jose, Calif. We love watching people try it for the first time. Almost everybody wants to see their own house first; but then they start to explore, and we can never guess where they’ll choose to go next.

But we just couldn’t bring it to enough people—we could only go to so many conferences, and only friends and family of Googlers could try out the Liquid Galaxies in our offices.

So we decided to put the features that make Liquid Galaxy possible into the latest release of Google Earth, and open-source all the supporting work, from our Ubuntu sysadmin scripts to the mechanical design of our custom frames.


Not everyone will have the know-how to network computers together and get view synchronization working, but we tried to make it as easy as possible. If you think you’re up to the challenge, check out our Quick Start page. You can also contact our supplier End Point if you’d rather buy than build (or just need some professional assistance). Here’s a video they made that shows Liquid Galaxy in action:



Liquid Galaxies don’t have to be made from eight big LCD screens; the view sync features scale just fine from two to dozens of screens. And they can run more than just Google Earth; we’ve had success playing video in sync in our Liquid Galaxies, and even modified a Free Software video game for after-hours fun. We’ve daydreamed about making panoramic movies, head tracking or even real-time video from distant panoramic cameras. We’re excited to see what you come up with! Show off your creations in the liquid-galaxy discussion group.

Check out the Liquid Galaxy project at code.google.com.

By Jason Holt, Software Engineer, Liquid Galaxy 20% Team

Geek Time with Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds and Jeremy Allision were both in Sao Paulo, Brazil a few weeks ago for LinuxCon, where they were both presenters. Later in the week when they were waiting to go on a safari at the Sao Paulo Zoo, Jeremy seized the opportunity to go on a trip down memory lane when he asked Linus about the Sinclair QL they each owned while growing up. Because it was so hard to get software for it in Finland, Linus wrote his own assembler and editor (in addition to Pac-Man graphics libraries). They continue to reminisce about more archaic hardware like floppy drives, microdrives, 512 K RAM expansion packs and the Acorn Archimedes.

It’s a geek fest for fans of British computers from the ‘80s! Who knew that the Sinclair QL would play a role in the development of the modern free operating system?

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team

GenMAPP’s Summer Harvest

The GenMAPP organization’s efforts focus on building software tools to analyze and visualize biological data. We joined forces with Cytoscape, WikiPathways, PathVisio and Reactome for this year's Google Summer of Code to offer students a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of biology and computing.

This was our 4th year participating in the program and we reached some new milestones. We mentored 10 excellent students (more than any prior year) with a 100% success rate. We integrated and released more code from this summer’s harvest than in prior years. And most importantly, we continued to expand our development community, as many of this year’s students are enthusiastic about continuing to work with us beyond the summer.

Our projects this year covered a broad range of topics:

• Alternative Splicing Analysis Plugin for Cytoscape, by Anurag Sharma
• CyAnnotator and CyAnimator Plugins, by Avinash Thummala
• User Interface Development in PathVisio, by Bing Liu
• Tools for Exploring Pathway Relations in WikiPathways, by Chetan Bansal
• Expression Data Reader plugin for Cytoscape, by Dazhi Jiao
• Improving Cytoscape’s Labels Experience, by Gerardo Huck
• KEGG Global Map Browser, by Kozo Nishida
• Semantic Network Summary for Cytoscape, by Layla Oesper
• Reactome-WikiPathways Converter, by Leontius Pradhana
• Edge-Weighted Layout for Cytoweb, by Tomithy Too

As part of the open source experience, we invite our Google Summer of Code students to our annual Cytoscape Retreat. This is a great way to engage students in both our development and user communities. One student pointed out a truism that is rediscovered from time to time in our digital age, “face-to-face meetings turn out to be very efficient.” Here are some other gems of reflection and advice from our students this year:

“The most rewarding part was when I was told that I should merge my changes back from my branch into the trunk"

“It has been the chance to meet and interact with wonderful people from various parts of the world, be it virtual or physical. I had a chance to physically meet another graduate student from my university and a professor from USA due to Google Summer of Code.”

“They opened up my perspective about a lot of things — how the industry looks like, where people with similar skill domain as me put themselves in the society, how important the projects I am involved in are, and other subjects unimaginable if I were to not join Google Summer of Code.”

“Got a taste of open-source development which is just amazing and I would like to keep attached with this project even after this GSOC ends.”

“This program is a great initiative, I loved the amount of exposure the participating students get and it definitely is one of the most exciting summers someone can ever get.”

“The most rewarding part is to be able to go to the cytoscape retreat. It is absolutely helpful to the project, and helpful to get to know the mentors and others.”

“Be the best user of the software. If you are the best user, you write and participate [in] the software project spontaneously.”

“At the beginning of the summer, I really had my doubts on whether or not I had gotten in too far over my head. So I very much enjoy being able to look back at what I was able to accomplish and realize that I was able to supersede my original expectations for myself.”

“Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Your mentors are an amazing source of information, and they are really interested in helping you in any way possible.”

“Be cool.”

This post is cross posted from my Next Nucleus blog, where you can read more about our previous years with Google Summer of Code.

By Alexander Pico, Google Summer of Code Mentor for GenMAPP