Ever since computers were first developed in the mid 20th century, planners saw an immediate use for them in not only organizing large quantities of data about the city but also in the analysis of that data, the construction of simulation models of how cities functioned, and in forecasting the future form of cities. All these ideas were put in place in the 1950s and 1960s mainly in North America and there were even moves to automate the city planning process itself by formulating models that could generate idealised plans based on data pertaining to the current situation as well as to the specification of future goals.
This technology began with main frame machines where most techniques were operated offline but with increasing networking of computers and miniaturisation down to minicomputers along with the parallel development of personal computers, much of this activity came online. The convergence of communications and computing which has occurred in the last twenty years with the development of the internet and its graphical interface in the form of the world wide web has moved many of these functions into networked environments. The prospect now exists for all stages of the planning.
Marcus Foth in the edited book entitled “Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City” brings together in 29 chapters on recent research and development in the field of urban informatics from around the world. The book covers a plethora of topics including; community engagement, digital cities, digital identities, locative media, mobile and wireless applications, participatory planning, personal privacy, surveillance and sustainability.
It is a rather good book and the publishers have kindly allowed us to make our chapter 'The Neogeography of Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World' available online.
Abstract
Digital cities are moving well beyond their original conceptions as entities representing the way computers and communications are hard wired into the fabric of the city itself or as being embodied in software so the real city might be manipulated in silico for professional purposes.
As cities have become more “computable,” capable of manipulation through their digital content, large areas of social life are migrating to the web, becoming online so-to-speak. Here, we focus on the virtual city in software, presenting our speculations about how such cities are moving beyond the desktop to the point where they are rapidly becoming the desktop itself. But what emerges is a desktop with a difference, a desktop that is part of the web, characterized by a new generation of interactivity between users located at any time in any place. We first outline the state of the art in virtual city building drawing on the concept of mirror worlds and then comment on the emergence of Web 2.0 and the interactivity that it presumes.
We characterize these developments in terms of virtual cities through the virtual world of Second Life, showing how such worlds are moving to the point where serious scientific content and dialogue is characterizing their use often through the metaphor of the city itself.
The movie above comes out of the MIT SENSEable city lab, visualising GPS tagged photographs of Spain on Flickr. Analyzing the tagged information allows MIT to follow the trail that each Flickr photographer travels through Spain.
(Un)photographed Spain maps thousands of these public, digital footprints over one year. As photos overlap in certain locations, they expose the places that attract the photographer's gaze . In contrast, the absence of images in other locations reveal the unphotographed spaces of a more introverted Spain.
We knew this was coming and indeed it was possible via other routes but its still quite a notable move with ESRI teaming up with Microsoft to offer Virtual Earth directly within ArcGIS. The full announcement is below:
ESRI Expands Virtual Earth Access in GIS by Teaming with Microsoft
ArcGIS Users to Bring Dynamic Basemaps into Analysis and Service Applications
Redlands, California—March 26, 2009— ESRI announced today anew agreement with Microsoft Corporation that gives ArcGIS users fast access to Microsoft Virtual Earth for their geographic information system (GIS) projects. As part of ArcGIS Online at the ArcGIS 9.3.1 release, ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server users will be able to connect directly to Virtual Earth and quickly start their GIS projects with ready-to-use content.
"Our agreement with Microsoft defines a pattern of sharing geospatial data on the Web that promises to grow the GIS community," says ESRI President Jack Dangermond. "By bringing Virtual Earth into their GIS projects, people will have a greater opportunity to perform spatial analysis based on dynamic data."
ArcGIS users who are current on maintenance and have an Internet connection will have access to Virtual Earth for a variety of up-to-date mapping content.including aerial imagery, roads, and hybrid (aerial with labels) imagery. With a familiar look, imagery access will appear as another data layer in GIS. The imagery will provide excellent background maps on which users can overlay their operational data. This means users will be able to focus more on their business data than on its context.
For example, an electric utility can layer its distribution line data over a Virtual Earth aerial view of a neighborhood to create a map of its lines and customer connections. This Virtual Earth background layer is useful for editing the company's data and can be easily shared online with other company users.
ArcGIS users can build Web applications that support geospatial services through ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS Web Software Developer Kits (SDKs) , including APIs for JavaScript, Flex, and Microsoft Silverlight. This enables them to provide their clients with access to Virtual Earth content from their applications.
“ESRI and Microsoft share a long history of building geographic information systems solutions that combine both of our companies’ strengths,” said Chris Sampson, director of Virtual Earth at Microsoft. “By integrating Microsoft Virtual Earth across all ESRI ArcGIS products, we can provide our mutual customers with spatial analysis software that has instant access to comprehensive geographic data that can only be found in a software plus services solution.”
ArcGIS Desktop 9.3.1 users who are current on maintenance will be offered access to Virtual Earth at no cost. ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 users will have instant access to a built-in 90-day evaluation of Virtual Earth. After the evaluation ends, ArcGIS Server users will be able to purchase an annual subscription that will be based on transactions.
The movie above details the recently launched http://maps.cartifact.com/ -of note is the neat lens tool. The system is currently in beta but well worth a look, head over to http://maps.cartifact.com/ to give it a spin.
Day 4 at the AAG and sitting in a session on Virtual Learning Environments and Geographic Education – its one of the best line ups of the conference so far.
First up is Michael N .DeMers of New Mexico State University with a talk entitled: Using Second Life to Augment an Online GIS Course..
The use of the virtual world called Second Life as a platform to enhance a traditional WebCT-based online GIS class is examined. Second Life provides an ability to enhance the social presence often lacking from typical discussion-based online classes. The ability of students to get together builds community and promotes collaboration.
More than just providing opportunities for traditional delivery methods like slides and discussions, Second Life provides a powerful set of 3-D building tools that allow tactile learners an ability to express their knowledge in ways that are difficult to reproduce outside of such an environment.
While some students find virtual worlds very difficult to negotiate others, particularly gamers adapt very quickly. For non-gamers the use of Second Life is best used to provide ways for students to get together for in-world discussions and study. Second Life then, when used properly, and with the student learning style kept in mind, provides something for every type of learner.
Michael makes the point that Second Life is not a game, it is a free form virtual world which takes time to create and build things. It also takes time to learn which creates the barriers that many put up upon first entry. He creates a ‘lab in a box’ using wrapped up course materials, directions, maps etc included in a box that can be rezzed. Finally Michael notes that the impact on the learning cycle is notable as it provides the students with the ability to visualize, for example ‘map projections’ in three dimensions – something that is not possible via text book. It also encourages active experimentation
A really well presented and interesting talk
Second up is Merril Johnson of the University of New Orleans talking about:
Virtual worlds such as Second Life are emerging as intriguing windows into the future of technology. According to the Gartner Group, 3-D Web will become mainstream in the next two-to-five years as Internet users construct 3-dimensional personas in new virtual geographies. Many of these geographies are being populated by residents with identities not at all like those in the real world, who come together in communities dedicated to the exploration and development of constructed identities. In other cases, residents create identities and communities that reflect and augment the real world. In either instance, opportunities become available for students interested in the study of places and their inhabitants. The purpose of this presentation is to examine identity creation in virtual worlds, focusing on Second Life; how this phenomenon affects the "cultural" geography of virtual worlds; and how this new geography can be put to the service of geographical education. Third is L.Jesse Rouse and Susan J.Bergeron of West Virginia University with a talk on ‘Building and Experiencing Virtual Worlds.
Third up is L Jesse Rouse and Susan Bergeron – of West Virginia University, - also known as those nice people from Very Spatial, Jesse is presenting.
Technologies that drive videogames have been adopted to build educational tools from early 8-bit game platforms to today's high-end 3D graphics laden game environments. While videogames have been both lauded as the next step in education and condemned as frivolous, it is hard to argue against the prevalence of videogames in the lives of students outside of the classroom (or hidden out of sight of the teacher). In addition, there is a perceived disconnect between traditional teaching methods and those students, referred to as digital natives, who have grown up with access to digital technologies. It is important to look beyond VLE use, to all of the impacts that videogames can have in the classroom.
Staff and students in the Laboratory for Geographic Information Science and the Department of Geology and Geography at West Virginia University are involved in an ongoing project constructing a virtual world based on historic Morgantown, WV. The project began as a way to demonstrate the integration of GIS and Serious Games. The project became a way to not only create a reconstruction of an early 1900s town, but also to involve upper level students in GIS and Urban Geography in the construction of 2D and 3D data and learning about the historic development of the town. In addition, Computer Science student participants are able to apply their programming skills within a domain area. The creation of the virtual world supports not only outreach and introductory classes, but also provides technical experience for upper level students.
We are moving from the traditional classroom into the new digital classroom based on new media, serious games and virtual worlds etc. He uses a good term ‘Edutainment’ - a way to keep students interested and focused above and beyond the usual ‘powerpoint’ presentation.
Realworld data can be presented via ArcScene linked to SketchUp, the work has created over 400 buildings in which point ArcScene ‘falls over’. As such they have moved from ArcScene to create a ‘Spatial Experience Engine’ based on the XNA framework with a move away from polygons to represent architectural details towards textures to speed up the framerate. Information is embedded via the Census within the 3D space allowing the students to connect, learn and experience geographical information within the virtual space.
Again a really interesting and very well presented talk, the use of Second Life, games etc is starting to make notable inroads into geography and teaching. The game engine will be made available online soon as its complete.
Finally up Nicholas Hedley of Simon Fraser University, Spatial Interface Research Lab/Department of Geography.
Nick has another nice term – a ‘Geospatial Metaverse’, noting that T there has been a quantum leap in the capabilities of MMORPG’s creating new spaces for social interaction and simulation. These virtual worlds are beginning to cross into the real world with financial trading etc.
Nicks abstract is as follows:
Over the past decade, major advances in distributed virtual environment architectures have resulted in a new generation of interactive, low-latency shared virtual spaces accessible by users with modest and high-specification systems alike. Increasingly, reality and virtuality are woven into our everyday lives. In only five years, Second Life has become one of the most widely-used 3D virtual spaces for mainstream collaborative social computing, and is used by over 15 million people. There has also been a quantum leap in the capabilities of MMOGs and MMORPGs, allowing real-time collaborative interaction with complex and dynamic 3D virtual spaces with real-time physics - resulting in physically persistent virtual spaces.
Second Life and contemporary MMORPGs have created new spaces for social interaction, revealing exciting new possibilities for geographic exploration, learning, and collaboration. These environments may be virtual, but are a very real part of the lives of their user networks. They allow ever more seamless movement between real and virtual spaces. The boundary between the real and virtual in everyday spaces is quickly fading. Mixed reality interfaces take this to another level entirely, making it possible to create a virtually-enhanced 3D physical reality. This paper explores how the technologies of Second Life, serious games and mixed reality redefine the relationship between real and virtual spaces, and are evidence that a geospatial metaverse has emerged. Research examples by the author using each of these technologies will be used to demonstrate their potential in geographic education.
On show are some neat outputs using the CryEngine 2 –Virtual Ucluelet noting the ability to simply ‘paint’ geography within the game engine. Virtual environments are becoming part of peoples real lives and is this disconnecting us with the real geographic landscape. The level of work on show is notable, again really refreshing to see Crysis used for geography...
The talk ends with research examples of on-site Augmented Reality – Geospatial ‘XRay vision’, really excellent work.
A series of excellent talks, perhaps representing the cutting edge in geospatial visualization within the geography community. Our 3D Agent Based modeling work – ie 3D Max, Second Life, NetLogo etc work is this afternoon, presented by Andrew Crooks of gisagents.blogspot.com. The main session on Mapping for the Masses is tomorrow at 8am in the main conference centre.
We have also had the pleasure to record a podcast with Very Spatial, it should be online some point soon, it was great to meet and chat with the people behind it…
Session Description: The Geoweb has revolutionized digital cartography and GIScience. The revolutionaries are neogeographers. According to Turner (2006), "Neogeography is about people using and creating their own maps, on their own terms and by combining elements of an existing toolset". Toolsets involve user-generated geospatial content (aka volunteered geographic information): geotagged Flickr photographs, Google Maps Mashups, Open Street maps, and loopt. It's more than software or Internet apps, "The geoaware Web isn't a product we buy; it's an environment we colonize" (Udall 2005).
Neogeography is posited as antithetical to traditional geography. To neos, GIScience appears fixated on data accuracy, vetting and documentation. Critical GIS makes dire pronouncements for geospatial gadgetry. Neogeographers call for flexible and playful artistic engagement with place (a "dissident cartographic aesthetic", {Holmes 2006}). Birthed in wikipedia ideologies of egalitarianism and disdain for expertise, they believe in "radical openness" (Udall 2005). GIScience is seen as a closed (and, coincidentally, insufficiently computational) enterprise, relying on clubbiness and on proprietary software. With this characterization, can neo and paleo ever be reconciled?
The panelists come from both camps, consider four questions. 1. What is the landscape of neo and UGGC and what do they reveal about the Geoweb's deeper socio-political implications? 2. What can each camp offer the other and what barriers impede communication? 3. What role does expertise hold in colonizing the Geoweb? 4. If neo is the current thing then what is post-neo? Panelists will seek linkages among paleo, neo, and geo.
Andy Turner notes that traditional geographers are finding it hard to keep up - Neogeography is simply about the user and about getting information online that is geotagged – ie outside the realm of traditional GIS. Of course, as Andrew Skupin, states a lot of geography is not GIS based in the first place so most geography is and always has been outside the realm of GIS. Andrew recommended the term ‘Naive geography’ over Neogeography. In some ways we see the term Naïve Geography as slightly patronizing to people who geo tag their photos, user Google Earth etc.
Martin is interestingly sitting on the bridge between the two - noting one of Martins students view that user generated content is ‘a bit rubbish’ – we would note that it is very early days and the spread of systems such a OpenStreet Map has been phenomenal in terms of time vs coverage. User generated content opens up the process of map making to the masses and not just a finished ‘product’ ala National Mapping Agencies.
Renee notes that traditional geographers has been dealing with the issues that Neogeographers are asking about for decades in the form of GIS. The difference is as Andy notes is that Neogeographers don’t need to sit through a semester of mapping projections etc to display, map and analyze their data. We would agree, the traditional GIS course is out of date, sure there is a place for it but if education is about preparing students for the future and the job market then perhaps a stronger emphasis on Web 2.0 toolkits is needed.
Perhaps the real problem is with ‘traditional geographers’ they are not generally out in the world communicating and sharing via blogs, forums, instead quietly publishing in journals etc. While there is nothing wrong with the traditional academic viewpoint, new tools are opening up the creation of data to the masses and with that there is a need for up to date knowledge via systems such as blogs.
Our view? Perhaps traditional geography is the rabbit in the head lights, the next five years are going to be very interesting in terms of geography, its traditions, its methods and techniques.
The image above represents a hyperbolic view of the Guardian Angel Cathedral located just north of the Encore Casino in Las Vegas. A full size version rotated 90 degrees can be viewed via Flickr.
To look around click 'Load' below and the click and drag to navigate the scene, select 'Open' to view full screen.
Day 2 in Las Vegas and sitting in a session entitled ‘Urban Applications’.
A couple of interesting papers in this session, firstly a paper entitled Who is in your neighborhood? New approaches to define neighborhood context by Iris Hue of UC Berkeley and Weimin Li from Cal Poly Pomona.
Neighborhoods can be defined via various means according to scale and dimension, these factors can be summarized as being: Geo-Spatial, Personal, Social Network, Functional District, Political Community and Economic Entity.
In short, social and behavioral studies have established the importance of neighborhood context in shaping individual behaviors, attitudes, and health outcomes. Although scholars have developed well-theorized definitions of neighborhood, the empirical measurement remains arbitrary and unsatisfactory. On the one hand, Census geographies are often used as proxies for residential neighborhood without considering the exact location of an individual. This approach brings huge uncertainty to the matching of sampled individuals to their neighborhood. On the other hand, many social and behavioral studies employ neighborhood measures at different scale level, e.g., Census block group or tract or city. As a result, these studies sometimes arrive at contradictory results. Better approaches to measure neighborhood context are required to solve these problems.
The paper addresses the limitations and disadvantages of some commonly used measurements, subsequently applying advanced GIS technologies, e.g. geo-processing and geo-statistics, to develop spatially continuous neighborhood from data measured at various scales.
Their approach allows users to explore beyond the conventional definition of residential neighborhood and generate contextual measures beyond what current public data sources can provide. By mapping traffic networks and geo-coding major community amenities and commercial clusters, users can also examine neighborhood context based on activity-space. The approach also takes physical barriers, such as highway or river, as well as varying population density into consideration to develop more precise contextual measures.
Secondly a presentation by Alan G. Phipps from the University of Windsor (that’s not the UK Windsor, in case you were wondering…) with the notable title of: Three Computer-Programmed Applications of Google Maps
Alan notes that computer-programmers have been able for several years to code and display their own data on Google maps via the internet. Google's JavaScript map application is accessible with a personal key for free non-commercial use from its server. He has programmed three different types of Google map applications, and used them in teaching and research:
In demonstrating these types of maps, Alan notes firstly the requirement for pre-analyzed data due to lags in calls to the server from within a programmed application. Secondly, he notes a limitation in the number of displayed data-points before warnings pop up about a slow-running script.
For the last four years attending the AAG we have been amazed at how low profile Google Maps, Google Earth, Microsoft Earth etc systems are. We always feel like going to the AAG we would be at the heart of the it all, instead digital geography, neogeography and Google Maps hacks etc are still reasonably niche topics….
Trump Tower is the tallest residential building in Las Vegas, standing at 620 ft. Opened on March 31, 2008 the building also houses a hotel, the exterior windows are gilded with 24-carat gold.
We took the panorama from the top of the carpark at the Fashion Show Mall, click 'Load' to view and then click and drag to look around, to view full screen click 'Open'. If you look closely it needs a few tweaks, we should be out and about capturing some more tomorrow.
We are sitting in our first session of the conference; so far there are 18 people in a room that holds around 500. It’s a large conference with many simultaneous sessions so low numbers are par for the course, although it is a shame considering the high quality of work presented in this session.
First up is John Osth and Thomas Niedomysl, Exploring Human Interaction in Cyberspace, the Geography of YouTube.
Since the start in 2005, the website YouTube has grown immensely from being a garage-company to become one of the world's most visited websites. An important reason behind the success is the built in ability for users to participate in the creation of the website by watching, ranking, commenting and by uploading material to be watched, ranked and commented by others.
Though the users' WebPages may be designed differently, certain user information such as age and location but also links to interacting users is presented similarly, making collecting and analyzing possible. In this article, the geography of a sample of over 15 thousand different YouTube users and their interaction with other users is analyzed and visualized. The results show that despite the fact that the Internet annul the friction of distance, the interacting on the WebPages approximately follows the logics of real world geography.
John’s study aims to map the distribution of YouTube users, previous network theory literature predicts that a rich country domination is expected. Data has been mined from YouTube using a custom written program to retrive information from YouTube, including a users channel, country, city, friends, subscribers etc – Johns notes that into today’s increasingly digital world, user data is free and abundant.
15,101 channel owners were retrieved for the paper with over 70,000 connections. In terms of channel owners USA dominates followed by UK, Taiwan, Canada and HK, and Israel.
In conclusion – YouTube is predominately a rich world phenomena with interaction determined my language and cultural barriers.
Its always tricky to present research within a 15 minute timeframe, it was a well presented, interesting paper and one of those titles you wish you had thought of yourself….
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Second on is C. Alex de Freitas with a talk entitled: At the intersection of Digital and Physical Public Space: Free Wi-fi and the Changing Geographies of the City and Its Public. A paper from the first year of his PhD studies. Interest in the public spaces of the city in terms of Information Communication.
Wi-Fi presence can be difficult to discern in an urban setting. It can slip by largely unnoticed because of an apparent lack of infrastructure and the tendency for it to be used from indoors in a typically 'private' setting. Much of the existing research on Wi-Fi in public has focused specifically on the social interactions that it facilitates and its effects on the social interactions of co-present others. Other research has specifically addressed mapping signal strengths, Wi-Fi infrastructure and examining the business opportunities it may present.
Although some evidence from recent studies has suggested that Wi-Fi might reinforce or alter socio-spatial interactions, very few, if any studies have considered the possibilities of changes to spatial behaviour and what its existence in the urban environment means for people's movements within and experiences of everyday city spaces.
Through an adaption of a photo-diary approach tracing the daily lives of twenty participants spread across four North American cities, this research questions how we may be beginning to know ourselves and our worlds differently by virtue of Wi-Fi. Conceptions of space and time have been radically altered by the new forms of accessibility and connectivity that are afforded by ICTs such as Wi-Fi. There is a need to (re)conceptualise public space as less restrained by physical boundaries and more complexly intertwined and converging with changing digital spaces. The result of this is a new urban public spatial realm that is neither physical nor digital, but an intricate and relational combination of the two.
Technologies is new to literature, especially in terms of geography. Wi-Fi does not conform to traditional spatial boundaries, exiting in Hertzian Space, although difficult to visually detect, Wi-Fi now blankets our urban areas. In the popular media Wifi is often labeled as ‘ubiquitous’, conceptions of space and time have been radically altered by the new forms of accessibility and connectivity that are afforded by ICTs.
In short, are we beginning to know our cities and ourselves differently by virtue of Wi-Fi? It does seem that Wi-Fi is contributing to changing geographical understandings of everyday urban experiences, adding new dimensions to urban life that are deserving of further attention.
As a side note, free Wi-Fi is a rare commodity in Las Vegas, we are currently paying $12 a day for Wi-Fi in our hotel room to write these posts, conference Wi-Fi use is limited to 30 minutes within a 24 hour period.
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Third up is Place-Based Narratives and Participatory Digital Story Telling by Matt Kelly, University of Washington. The paper details an embryonic community outreach project (The Narrative Community - TNC) that will provide individuals with the capacity to produce spatial data and multi-media narratives about the places in which they live. Drawing on anecdotal evidence from StoryCorps and This American Life, I provide context for TNC by exploring the preponderance of place in contemporary digital settings. TNC will rely heavily on a participatory framework - from providing data production and story telling tools to individuals via sharing stations at public libraries, to aggregating spatial data and personal narratives via an interactive website - and the framework is possible by virtue of recent advancements in digital technologies. Participatory community data sharing and production sites, such as Neighborhood Knowledge California (NKCA), are used in this paper to illustrate the increasingly interactive nature of Internet technologies in general, and web-based geospatial technologies in particular.
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Finally fourth is Robert Ramsay, University of Toronto with a paper entitled Wireless/Boundless, the Urban Imaginary of Wireless Industry Practitioners. We like the term ‘Boundless’ it’s a neat way to refer to ICT’s in terms of geography. Primary drivers for municipal Wi-Fi is digital inclusion, public safety, city services and economic development. Slightly tricky to make notes on this one, but another good talk, we really did expect more people to attend this session, its always difficult to present to a large almost empty room but all the speakers have been great.
Talking of which, we have two papers here at the AAG with our main session on Friday, the last day of the conference, at 8.30 am - not the best of times to be allocated…
Circus Circus Las Vegas is a circus-themed 3,774 room hotel and 101,000 sq ft (9,400 m2) casino located on the Las Vegas Strip in Winchester, Nevada. The clown marquee at the entrance was provided by Young Electric Sign Company, and was constructed in 1976 - as pictured in the panorama below. Click 'Load' to view the panorama, click 'Open' to view full screen:
We did our MSc at Cardiff University, its a great place to study and as funded PhD studentships are increasingly hard to find we thought we would give any interested readers a heads up on six funded PhD studentships in the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University:
The School is pleased to be able to offer six funded studentships for doctoral research within the broad areas of planning and human geography. Two of the studentships are funded by the ESRC through its quota system and are available for 1+3 or +3 modes of study. The remaining four School-funded studentships are offered for a three year period and will cover Home / EU fees, provide a bursary of £12,000 per annum and include £2,250 to cover research expenses. Applications from overseas students will be considered for the School studentships but applicants will need to cover the difference between the Home and Overseas fee. While a research-based Masters qualification is desirable for the School studentships, it will be possible to undertake a tailored package of research methods training in the first year of study.
We would encourage applications from planners, human geographers and other social and environmental scientists. Preference will be given to applicants whose proposed research connects with the priority research themes of the School’s five research groups:
Applications should include a covering letter, a 1,000 word research proposal, a CV and the names of two academic referees. The research proposal should provide details of the academic rationale for the research and the proposed research strategy. Applications for the ESRC stundentships should be submitted by email to Blakeley Nixon (nixonb@cardiff.ac.uk) 27th March 2009 and for the School studentships to Shelagh Lloyd (lloyds10@cardiff.ac.uk) by 14th April 2009.
All applicants will also need to submit a completed University on-line application form for PhD study, which can be found at:
The movie above details a Revit model imported into Visibuild (currently in private Beta) using open source Realxtend virtual world platform.
See Archsl for full details and a really interesting post - this has huge potential for architecture in virtual worlds...
A couple of days without posts from us, our apologies we have been out of the office suffering from a nasty virus. Posts should be back to normal soon and next week we are running a session at the AAG in Las Vegas so that should come up with some interesting thoughts and outcomes.
If any readers are attending the AAG next week in Las Vegas, then us here at digital urban along with gisagents.blogspot.com have organised a session entitled "Concepts, Tools and Applications: The Rise of Neogeography." The session discusses the concepts, tools, applications and challenges arising when collecting, sharing and communicating data for the Neogeographer, exploring a wide range of topics from Digital Earths, Volunteered Geographic Information and through to Virtual Worlds.
The session will take place on Friday, 27th of March, from 8:00 AM - 9:40 AM (is an early start..) in the North Hall N116, Las Vegas Convention Center
We have spent the morning giving the demo version of CityScape 1.6 from PixelActive a spin and we can honestly say we are impressed. CityScape is an urban modeling tool that allows users to build both custom and real-world environments quickly and easily. The focus of the modeler is on allowing developers to concentrate on design rather than the labor involved in creation.
Of note is its support for Max/Maya via COLLADA opening up the possibility for rapid city building - we hope to have more thoughts on CityScape on the blog later next week.
Do you wake up in the middle of the night wondering how to do a traffic simulation ? Perhaps its just us then... in which case this is an open question on the best way to visualize traffic in 3D packages such as Max or Maya.
The render above is from our first test, we will have more posts on techniques in the next few days but for now any thoughts are welcome.
The movie above by Clark Vogeler was shot around the Silverlake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Griffith Park and Downtown areas of Los Angeles using a Nikon D60 with a Pclix intervalometer.
The fake tilt-shift was achieved via Photoshop, some of the interscetions and retail outlets work really well.
The movie above entitled 'World Builder by filmmaker Bruce Branit. World Builder was shot in a single day followed by about 2 years of post production. We really like it, its not often you get a story weaved around the creation of 3D worlds.
Take a look at Branit VFX for more info and thanks go to Stuart for sending this in.
The movie above is a draft look at our 3D London Tube Map with the lines laid out according to their geographic location. The movie was made as a test to explore mental ray settings in 3ds Max, total render time was 36 hours.
Below is the actual tube map, again visualised via 3ds Max:
Many cameras now come with a built in panorama mode that allows you to automatically stitch images together. Sony’s CyberShot DSC-HX1 with 'Sweep Panorama' Technology takes this a step further by allowing you to simply 'Sweep' the camera across a scene for an automatically stitched image. The camera will stitch up to up to a maximum 224-degree view horizontal or 154-degree vertical with an end image coming in at 7152 x 1080 pixels.
The clip below details the camera in action:
While interesting we would place this one in the 'gimmick' category, stitching software has advanced considerably in recent years and now any digital camera or indeed camera phone is capable of creating hand held panoramas at a higher resolution.
That said, perhaps it would be nice to have for capturing high rise buildings or urban landscapes on the fly.
We are currently looking at putting a new header in place, simply to update the look and feel of the blog, more tweaks will be made during the coming days.
Our Greeble City Tutorial provides a walk through on how to quickly and easily create a cityscape, complete with custom skyscrapers. Creating a city is all well and good but it is the fine details that brings a 3D city to life, the first of these is the road network.
Creating a road network in 3D Max is to be honest a tedious process but once they are in place complete with pavements (sidewalks) a basic render can begin to look more city like.
The renders here are from our 'City Roads Package' which is now available as a free download for 3ds MAX, courtesy of us here at digital urban. Complete with 38 high resolution textures the pack includes a series of objects that will snap together to create a grid or path layout.
Note as a temporary measure the file has been removed due to issues with the textures, we are working hard to resolve this and a new updated file will go online as soon as possible. For the time being a non texture mapped version is available here (.zip file) - it should still be of use as the roads can be snapped togehter to quickly make a city layout for use in our Greeble City tutorial.
If you do use the package we would love to include a render on the blog so do let us know.
Urban Tick over at urbantick.blogspot.com is becoming a 'must read' we know we are slightly biased as it comes out of the same lab as us here at digital urban, but the work is really starting to look interesting. Two posts grab our attention, firstly the Urban Diary Week 3 with two movies recorded in Google Earth with the satelitte view turned off - this is interesting as its using Google Earth purely as a visualisation engine. Secondly, a post on Ant Trails and couple of great movies on visualising their paths.
We would normally embed the movies in a post here but for this one we suggest heading over to Urban Tick and taking a look.
Below is a short paper we will be presenting in March at GISRUK 2009.
Crooks, A. T., Hudson-Smith, A., M., Milton, R., and Batty, M. (2009), Crowdsourcing Spatial Surveys and Mapping, in Fairbairn, D. (ed.), Proceedings of the 17th Geographical Information Systems Research UK Conference, Durham University, England.
This paper presents the potential of linking the GMap Creator software and the MapTube web service to create near-real time spatial surveys. Three different surveys will be presented which map people’s perceptions about certain questions, including the current financial crisis, anti-social behaviour and peoples thoughts on road pricing. Basic results will be highlighted for each and the geodemographic profiles of respondents will be explored. However, before discussing this, the underlying technologies that we use for the creation of the surveys: GMap Creator and MapTube, will be introduced.
1.1. GMap Creator
GMap Creator is a free piece of software that takes a shapefile and enables the creation of thematic layers which can be quickly and easily integrated into Google Maps in a simple ‘point and click’ manner (see Hudson-Smith et al. (under review) for more details). Using GMap Creator, it is possible to overlay pre-rendered thematic tiles on top of street and satellite views of Google Maps, making it possible to show complex areal coverage’s. The purpose of such a tool is to build feature rich cartographic websites that may easily be used and interpreted by individuals who have limited experience of spatial data handling (e.g. www.londonprofiler.org Gibin et al., 2008) rather than for more formal exploratory spatial data analysis.
1.2. MapTube
MapTube (www.maptube.org) combines the generic idea of YouTube where users can share information with the ability of GMap Creator to create thematic maps. MapTube provides a ‘place to put maps’ as we demonstrate in Figure 1, which highlights the most viewed maps currently on the MapTube site. MapTube acts as a portal for geographic data, data is not stored on the site. Every map hosted on MapTube is held on an outside server, and pulled in using the XML file which is automatically created when using GMap Creator. This allows data creators to maintain ownership of the data. MapTube allows one to view and compare different datasets as a series of layers (i.e. mashup) through the Google Map interface. However, we are currently working on an implementation for OpenLayers (see Milton, 2008).
Figure 1.MapTube home page showing the most popular maps.
2: Near Real-Time Spatial Surveys
Not only does MapTube allow people to share and view other people’s maps but it can also be used in more innovative ways. For example, as web surveys are often aspatial (e.g. surveymonkey.com), the ability to combine GMap Creator and MapTube offers a simple solution to build spatial surveys for large areas. Figure 2 shows the process of creating the near real-time maps. Users are asked a series of questions and to enter their postcode so that the results can be geo-coded. This is then sent to a web server, time stamped and stored in a database. Every 30 minutes (however, this can be varied) a script is run to create a new shapefile, compiling all the results from a survey, aggregating them into a spatial units (in this case postcode districts). The shapefile is then passed to GMap Creator along with an XML file containing information including: settings for colour thresholds, maximum level of zoom and the field name of the shapefile for which the map is to be created on. GMap Creator runs creates a series of image tiles which updates the map on MapTube which can then be served back over the internet.
Figure 2. The process of gathering, storing and creation of maps.
What follows are three surveys which map people’s perceptions about certain issues done in association various BBC organisations. For each survey no personal information was collected and participants were reassured that actual locations could not be identified. This was ensured through the use of postcode districts rather than the postcode unit or building address therefore preserving data confidentiality. Used in conjunction with MapTube, it allowed participants and other users to take other information and lay the maps on top of one other.
2.1. Mapping the Credit Crunch
A pilot study was carried out as an experiment to create a mood map of the credit crunch within the United Kingdom in conjunction with BBC Radio 4 iPM show . Based on what is the “singly most significant factor hurting the person the most about the credit crunch”, participants were asked to enter the first part of their postcode (postcode district) so their responses could be geo-tagged along with one of six options to choose from: mortgage or rent, fuel, food prices, holidays, other, or the credit crunch is not affecting me.
Between 26th April and 29th June 2008 there were 23475 responses to the survey with 48.8% of response saying that fuel was most significant factor hurting the person the most about the credit crunch (Figure 3). However there was spatial variation around the country with more respondents within Greater London saying it was either mortgage or rent, or food as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 3. Overall percentages for the Credit Crunch Survey.
Figure 4. Results of the Credit Crunch Survey Focused Around London (Note: the Colour represents the Most Frequent Response in the Postcode District).
2.2. Anti-Social Behaviour in East Anglia
The Credit Crunch Map has since led to BBC Look East, using the system to map peoples perceptions of anti-social behaviour.
Each respondent was asked “what problems do you face where you live?” Respondents had five options: drunken youths, noisy neighbours, boy racers, no problems, great community and no problems. The survey ran between 4th July 2008 and 12th September 2008. During this time 6902 responses were received. Figure 5 shows the overall percentages, with 33.7% saying drunken youths with the other categories broken down relatively evenly between 14 to 18%. Figure 6 maps the responses with drunken youths clustering around urban areas such as Norwich and Newmarket.
Figure 5. Overall Percentages for the Anti-Social Behaviour Survey.
Figure 6. Results of the Anti-Social Behaviour Survey Focused Around East Anglia (Note: the Colour represents the Most Frequent Response in the Postcode District, click here to see the map).
2.3. The Manchester Congestion Charge
There was a proposal for Manchester in introduce a congestion charge zone motorists pay to drive in and out of the city at peak times. The BBC North West Tonight program wanted people's reaction to the proposed Greater Manchester congestion charge, from within the city but also people who drive in from outside the region. As these people don't get a vote but may end up paying the charge (subsequently the people of Manchester said no).
People were asked the following question “If a congestion charge is introduced in Greater Manchester, along with significant investment in public transport, will you:” and then asked to select one of the following options: drive and pay the charge, drive at different times, use public transport/motorbike/bicycle, work or shop elsewhere, or I am not affected by these changes. The survey began on 14th October 2008. By the 10th December 2008, there were 14933 responses with 46.8% saying they would work or shop elsewhere (Figure 7). This online collaboration provided a unique picture of how well the proposal was going down across the north west of England as the map is updated every day (Click here to see the final map).
Figure 7. Overall percentages for the Manchester Congestion Survey.
3. Geodemographic Profiles of Respondents
While we only asked for respondents or their first part of their postcode, many entered their full postcode as can be seen in Table 1. We note that this in not a representative sample but it does provide an opportunity to further investigate who is responding to such surveys. To gain this understanding we use two geodemographic classification schemes. First, the Acorn classification from CACI which categorises neighbourhoods based on multidimensional socio-demographic attributes. The second being the e-Society geodemographic classification (Longley et al., 2008) which categorizes neighbourhoods based on their engagement with new information communication technologies.
For the analysis, index scores was calculated. An index score compares the over or under representation of a specific target variable against a base population (e.g. the national average). Where a score of 100 is the national average, 200 is double the national average and a score of 50 is 50% below the national average. From such analysis it is the middle and upper classes who are over-represented within the surveys as shown in Table 2, this potentially relates to demographics of the readers, listeners, and viewers Radio 4 and the BBC news. The over representation of E-business users in the E-society classification (Table 3) suggest many respondents are answering the questionnaire while at work. Furthermore the geodemographic profiles of responses to individual questions can also be explored as seen in Table 4. Across all demographic groups the biggest concern was fuel.
Table 1. Total Number of Respondents to Surveys and Number Who Entered Their Full Postcode.
Table 2. Index Scores of Respondents by Acorn Category Classification.
Table 3. Index Scores of Respondents by E-Society Group Classification.
Table 4. Percentage of Responses to the Credit Crunch Survey Broken Down by Acorn Category.
4. Discussion
This paper has demonstrated the potential of using GMap Creator and MapTube for near-real time spatial survey thus providing a resource to map the nations opinions to specific questions over space and time both statistically and geographically. The potential of this approach for gathering spatial information is enormous. For example, it could easily be used to gather other information such as fear of household burglary, the quality of primary school education and so on. We consider this in many senses this to be Web 2.0 and Neogeography in action.
However, the geodemographics of the respondents shows there is an inherit bias in who is answering the questions and there is the question to whether or not respondents are influenced by the maps before answering the questions. Further work is to explore how the maps evolve over time, as each response is time stamped and how this relates to news headlines. Additionally, we are currently exploring the geodemographic profiles of each survey in more detail. We have currently re-run the credit crunch with the BBC with slightly different options to the answer.
The question remains the same - "what single factor is hurting you most about the credit crunch?" But we decided to change the categories slightly:Mortgage or rent, Petrol, Food prices, Job security, Utility bills, or Not affected. This survey ran between 5th October 2008 and 3 February 2009 and has now closed. The final map can be viewed here. During this time we received 20,072 responses, which can be broken down as follows (Figure 8): Mortgage or Rent 11.05%, Petrol 4.7%, Food Prices 11.89%, Job Security 27.25%, Utility Bills 21.92%, and Not Affected 23.20%
The Return of the Credit Crunch on the BBC Site
Figure 8: Overall percentages for the Credit Crunch Survey
5. References
Gibin M, Singleton AD, Mateos P, and Longley PA. (2008) Exploratory cartographic visualisation of London using the Google Maps API Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy 1(2) pp85-97.
Hudson-Smith A, Crooks AT, Gibin M, Milton R, and Batty M (under review) Neogeography and Web 2.0: Concepts, Tools and Applications, Journal of Location Based Services.
Longley PA, Webber R, Li C, (2008) The UK geography of the e-society: a national classification Environment and Planning A 40(2) pp362-382.
Below is a 'Planet' view of the Windmill on Wimbledon Common in London:
The images were shot with a 10.5m lens in RAW mode, converted to a pysdo HDR image and stitched, you can see the full panorama by clicking 'load':
Click 'open' to view the panorama fullscreen, the image has been left slightly 'wonky' to provide more a feeling of height, it was captured using a 30ft pole.
Below is a short film made by Hootan Washian a student at the University of Technology in Delft. Created using Google Earth and SketchUp it explores living and working in Rotterdam:
The first part of the movie provides an interesting example of how Google Earth can be used to add a locational context and subsequently augmented with information via additional software such as After Effects.
