On our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation we are currently focused on Lumion and Unity for rapid urban or data visualisation. Yet our eyes are turning towards the possibilities offered by the CryEngine 3. With a 2013 release it is looking well timed for next years options.
The CryEngine with its Sandbox mode has always been streets ahead of other game engines. CryEngine 3 with its DX11 integration, dynamic A1 for agent based models and adaptive tessellation looks like opening up new possibilities for urban visualisation, data integration and crowd based simulation. The movie below looks at these possibilities:
Regular readers will know that we have a bit of a 'thing' for the interiors of churches/chapels, timelapse imagery and high dynamic range photography, as such the movie below is one of our favourites:
The Chapel is a short film by lookycreative.com paying tribute to an exceptional protestant temple in Zeliszów, Poland, designed by Karl Langhans and built in 1796-1797.
The variety of techniques behind the movie is notable, and thankfully the makers have made a 'Making of' movie, below:
Below is a 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit. The film charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes.
The film is part of the world's first educational webportal on the Anthropocene, commissioned by the Planet Under Pressure conference, and developed and sponsored by anthropocene.info
Anthropocene.info is a beta version. Phase two and phase three of the site development will be complete by the end of 2012.
Data used:
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme | igbp.net NaturalEarthData | naturalearthdata.com OpenStreetMap | openstreetmap.org National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency | nga.mil National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | noaa.gov National Aeronautics and Space Administration | nasa.gov Greg's Cable Map | cablemap.info
QRator, the Museum focused ‘Internet of Things/Smart Places’ project developed jointly with us here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL Digital Humanities and UCL Museums, with funding from the UCL Public Engagement Unit , has won The Museums & Heritage Award for Innovation. Known as ‘The Oscars’ of the museums world we are honoured to of won, to have a museum brave enough to trust and openly engage with the public via innovative software and devices (iPads) while taking on ideas based around the Internet of Things made all the difference.
QRator is a collaborative project between the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), and UCL Museums and Collections, to develop new kinds of content, co-curated by the public, museum curators, and academic researchers, to enhance museum interpretation, community engagement and establish new connections to museum exhibit content. It is supported by theUCL Public Engagement Unitunder the Beacons for Public Engagement programme – funded by the UK funding councils, Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust.
The project is powered by Tales of Things technology developed at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, which has created a method for cataloguing physical objects online which could make museums and galleries a more interactive experience. QRATOR takes the technology a step further bringing the opportunity to move the discussion of objects direct to the museum label and onto a digital collaborative interpretation label, users’ mobile phones, and online allowing the creation of a sustainable, world-leading model for two-way public interaction in museum spaces.
Notable thanks go to Steven Gray of CASA, Claire Ross of Digital Humanities, Jack Ashby and Mark Carnall of the Grant Museum of Zoology. With the support of Prof. Claire Warwick and Dr Melissa Terras of Digital Humanities and Sally MacDonald, Director of UCL Museums it goes to show what can be achieved via cross disciplinary research and a drive to just go and do it. Thanks also goes to Susannah Chan from UCL Museums and Public Engagement for inventing the mounts for the iPads and Emma-Louise Nichols and Simon Jackson from the Grant Museum who moderate the content day in and day out.
Over the last few weeks we have been looking at ESRI's CityEngine and how it can be used to create rapid urban scenes. As we noted it moves GIS visualisation a step forward while at the same time bringing procedural city modelling into the mainstream game engine world. Of course the heart of the CityEngine is the ability to import real world data but to get to grips with the interface it is sometimes easier to look at creating urban scenes from simple procedural rules.
As part of the MRes in Advanced in Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, here in CASA we have been looking at various techniques to visualise urban data. One such technique is the creation of a 3D exhibition space, allowing agent based models and urban data to be visualised within an architectural space.
The movie above combines the use of CityEngine in Lumion with SketchUp and 3DMax to insert an exhibition space into a city while burning the CASA logo into the street network. CityEngine is a notable step forward for ESRI, both in terms of visualisation and analysis, linking it with Lumion and SketchUp allows it to be taken even further, towards the ultimate city creation toolkit...
As regular readers will know we recently held a one day conference here at CASA entitled Smart Cities, Bridging the Physical and Digital. As part of the conference Steven Gray and George MacKerron built various exhibition pieces, including the London Data Table. Created in the shape of Greater London, the table had various visualisations projected onto its surface; from live aircraft positions, live traffic and bike hire usage to movies of public transport over 24 hours.
Steven, over on his Big Data Blog has written a write up on the logistics behind the build - How big do we make the table? Can we find a projector with a short enough throw to project to the table? How were we going to mount the projector etc....
Here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, we have just made live our latest in a series of services examining live data feeds - CityDashBoard. The system pulls in data from a variety feeds, developing our view that the next trend in OpenData is towards a live view of the city and live data feeds.
With the cities of Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester and Newcastle included, it is London with the largets amount of live feeds at the moment. As Duncan Geere noted in the write up of CityDashboard in Wired - the dashboard for the city pulls in TfL data, RSS feeds from BBC London news, geographical information from OpenStreetMap, weather data from Google, trends from Twitter, traffic cameras and water levels along the Thames. It also includes data from UCL's radiation detector.
Each section has a countdown to the next update with the weather from the Davis Vantage Pro 2 on the roof of CASA updating every 2 seconds, radiation every 5 seconds etc...
Based on a concept developed by Oliver O'Brien, Andrew Hudson-Smith and Richard Milton, here in CASA, the design and planning was developed by Duncan Smith and Oliver O'Brien with website development ultimately led by Oliver. Take a look at Olivers site for development details.
Last Friday (April 20th) over 350 members of the public attended our Smart Cities ‘Bridging Physical and Digital’ open day and conference at Senate House, London. The full day of talks, accompanied by the Smart Cities exhibition, was aimed at opening a discussion on the meaning behind the Smart City and, perhaps more importantly, how to make it a reality.
Four articles covering the day’s highlights and research announcements appeared in Wired with a further two in New Scientist, helping to make the event one of the most successful in the history of CASA.
Professor Michael Batty kicked off the day with the dynamics of urban places and how key technological developments can be used to gain an insight into the wider science of cities. Carlo Ratti, Director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab continued the theme with a keynote address, mixing computer science with architecture, art and design to envisage the digital city across a multitude of platforms.
Jon Reades was the first researcher whose work was picked up by Wired with a view on how data could be the solution to London’s stretched transport networks.
As Duncan Geere of Wired noted: “Reades is working on taking data from Transport for London and using it to draw out information that can be used to better-inform decisions about what parts of the network need to be tweaked for maximum impact. Some of the early results are already intriguing. A large proportion of commuting journeys aren't symmetrical -- they don't go to and from the same places. While in the mornings, people tend to travel straight to work in the quickest way possible, in the evenings they tend to stop off at a pub, or to see a friend and take a more circuitous route, reducing demand.”
With the first three talks complete the exhibition opened, showcasing a wide range of digital research from CASA presented in a physical from. As New Scientist asked: "have you ever looked at a pigeon and wished you could experience life through its beady eyes? Well now you can, thanks to the Pigeon Simulator – created as a new way to visualise the cities and its data feeds."
Data can be visualized in a myriad of ways, yet sometimes it is the simplest that are the most effective. The London Data Table cycled through a series of visualisations from live aircraft feeds through to data from the Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme to present a view of London from above.
Combining a projector with a short throw lens, a table cut to the outline of London and various processing scripts and movies allowed an instant view of complex data feeds. Another highlight was the touch table enabled ‘Riot Simulator’ mixing data from the recent London riots with research into urban and behavioral modeling made hands on with the help of Lego.
The concept behind the riot table was the focus of Sir Alan Wilson’s talk in the second part of the conference with modeling suggesting that an earlier police response could have shortened the London riots. As reported in a second article in Wired, we are within sight of being able to model this kind of event, and optimal police response.
James Cheshire and Martin Zaltz Austwick focused on the visualisation of global bike hire schemes. China, perhaps unsurprisingly, has some of the largest cycle hire schemes in the world. The patterns hidden in the datasets can be the key to understanding a variety of aspects of the cities. These hidden patterns can be linked to our overall level of happiness in places as it varies throughout the city. George MacKerron examined aspects of happiness in his talk linking in location via the ‘Mappiness’ iPhone application. In the third Wired write up of the day George notes that the results of Mappiness pinpoint coasts as the place where people are happiest, followed by mountains, moors, woodland and grassland. Urban areas come right at the bottom of the list.
Location is arguably central to the concept of Smart Cities.
Andrew Hudson-Smith focused on the Internet of Things but more specifically the Internet of Second Hand Things and tracking the Geography of Everything. Via a partnership with Oxfam earlier trials are taking place to tag and track second hand goods. Smart cities start with the fabric that creates place, the objects around us. From the view of a hyper-local-social system with bus stops that tweet up the views of a connected urban realm, the Internet of Things is central to making places and spaces smart.
Finally in a full day of talks Duncan Smith and Ollie O’Brien presented and launched a beta version of CityDashboard. CityDashBoard aggregates simple spatial data for cities in the UK and displays the feeds on a dashboard and map. Funded by JISC as part of the NeISS project the data feeds are diverse from real-time weather through to a background radiation count.
The day rounded off with a panel session consisting of Mike, Carlo, Alan and Andy, chaired by James and recorded for a forthcoming GlobalLab podcast. Finally the wine reception allowed a final opportunity to visit the exhibits, from the Xbox tube simulation through to Pigeon Sim, RFID powered Internet of Things demos and another outing for the Tweet-o-Meter.
It was a day of sensors, tracking, mapping, visualising, modeling and making which represented the diverse mix of research that goes on at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, all with a common theme of cities and making places, and those organizations that plan them, smart...
