Its taken a while but sometimes the wait is worth it. The latest blog out of CASA is written by its founder - Professor Mike Batty. Entitled 'A Science of Cities' it is a site to bookmark as it is written by one of the leaders of the field. As Mike states - it has been a long time coming, but the Science of Cities is beginning. You can go back to the time of Newton to sense its origins and there is little doubt that Leonardo thought a little about how we might construe such a science. And if Leonardo knew about it, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Greeks had ideas about it.
In fact one of Mikes favourite quotes is reproduced in the frontispiece of Jane Jacobs (1969) book The Economy of Cities (Random House, NY), and it is from Herodotus’s The Histories:
“I will tell the story as I go along of small cities no less than of great. Most of those that were great once are small today; and those that in my own lifetime have grown to greatness, were small enough in the old days”.
One year in the making with the goal of illustrating the duality between city and nature the timelapse below by Dominic Boudreault is one of the best we have seen. Locations include Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, New York and Chicago:
Big Data Tool Kit, located a couple of desks away from Digital Urban in CASA at University College London, has just made live his visualisation of the #1yeartogo London 2012 tag. Powered by a mix of our MapTube visualisations and behind the scenes collection tools CASA are streaming in the live hastags to create a series of heat maps.
The first map details a worldwide heat map of all tweets containing the #1yeartogo hashtag and the second illustrates the tweets within the UK. In the first 3 hours of collection there were over 5,000 geo-located tweets in the database. Each map automatically updates every 5 minutes.
These visualisations show the first live test of our new heat map visualisation that will be made available to the general public in the next few weeks on MapTube. Many thanks as ever go to Richard Milton who has been working hard over the past few months on these upgrades.
The Virtual Library of Birmingham, built by Daden Limited, has opened its doors to the public allowing access two years before the real life building is ready for occupancy. The virtual model allows visitors to explore and learn more about the public spaces within the new library as well as leave their comments.
Birmingham City Council contracted Daden to deliver an interactive virtual model of the new library in Second Life. The purpose of the REIP (Regional Efficiency and Improvement Partnerships) funded projects was to support community engagement, and to inform the internal fit-out:
Daden used the architect's images, plans and drawing to build the Virtual Library of Birmingham in situ on Centenary Square in Second Life. Working with the Library of Birmingham team, Daden also created a warehouse of furniture and objects. They trained the Library of Birmingham team in the skills necessary to make changes and to also furnish the Virtual Library, as and when more detail was known regarding the internal spaces.
We have always been fans of Second Life, despite its sometimes muted reception at research grant meetings, although we cant help but think that perhaps the whole virtual world scene needs a revamp. That said, the use of rating systems for place and space in the model is a really nice innovation by Daden.
PocketGuide is an iPhone/Android and Ovi app that provides a professionally voiced audio tour of the city based on your GPS location. The innovative part comes in as while taking the tour the app is tracking your route and allows the ability to share a 3D tour of tour trip along with embedded photographs and audio:
Crowdsourcing (Howe, 2008) is the term of used for methods of data creation, where large groups of users who are not organised centrally generate content that is shared. From direct public involvement via citizen science initiatives, such as the well documented Galaxy Zoo, through to simply tapping into online data feeds, we are arguably in a new era of volunteered information and knowledge creation.
The notion that there might be value in harvesting the knowledge of individuals is based on the observation that, although large in number of individual estimates may be incorrect, their average can be a match for expert judgment. Judiciously handled, randomly sampling the opinions or calculations of a large number of users might lead to data and information that is surprisingly accurate and that, in some cases, cannot be recorded in any other way (Surowiecki, 2004)......
We discuss in brief the issues and opportunities surrounding crowdsourcing in this months newsletter from the National Centre for Research Methods:
Here at digital urban, we are enthused to announce that the first episode of The GlobalLab podcast from CASA is now available on iTunes.
The GlobalLab is a podcast about cities, global connectivity and the impact of technology produced by the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (UCL-CASA). Each episode features the latest news and perspectives from urban analysis, social complexity and innovation, as well as interviews with cutting-edge researchers from UCL-CASA and guests from further afield.
As i mentioned in the previous trailer post - this as an exciting development in our outreach at CASA, thanks go to Martin and Steven for pushing this forward and of course the Beacon Bursary Scheme at the UCL Public Engament Unity for funding the equipment.
Some city animations simply stand out - Megalomania is one of these stunning examples, perceiving the city in total construction. The built environment is explored as a labyrinth of architecture that is either unfinished, incomplete or broken. Megalomania is a response to the state of infrastructure and capital, evolving the appearance of progress into the sublime.
Constructed predominantly using 3d Studio Max and rendered with Vray. Organic movement sequences were originally filmed on a Canon 5D mkII, tracked in PF Track and developed in CG. Demolition created using Rayfire. All compositing done in Adobe After Effects, edited in Adobe Premiere Pro. Audio recorded and coordinated using Adobe Audition.
An Urban Sensation is a proposal from Dan Foster-Smith, a graduate from Designing Interactions at the Royal College of Arts. It is aimed at developing an open source infrastructure that would enable the virtual reconstruction of our sensory stimuli at any location. The infrastructure enables our sense of sight, sound and smell to be emulated. For the sense of sight live CCTV footage is overlain on a 3D model of the urban environment. This allows you to move around the city space exploring visual soundings in real time. Combined with a GPS trace you can then re-live you visual surroundings or experience the visual surroundings of another person or just ponder what it would be like to be at hypothetical location:
We really like the use of CCTV to drape footage over a 3D model, it is well worth heading over to http://sensoryemulation.com/ to find out more on the technique as well as Dans own page for more projects.
For the launch of the Nike Free Run+ 2 City Pack series, YesYesNo was invited to develop software that would allow runners to create dynamic paintings with their feet using their Nike+ GPS run data. During the two day workshop at Nike headquarters, we invited the participants to record their runs and then using our custom software we imported the metrics from their run, to create visuals based on the speed, consistency and unique style of each person's run.
We really like the resulting visualisation:
Using the software the participants were able to play with the mapping and adjust the composition of their run which was then outputted as a high resolution print for them to take home. We also worked with the Innovation Lab at Nike to laser etch the runner's name, the distance they ran and their run path onto a custom fabricated shoe box, which contained a pair of the 'City Pack' shoes from their city of origin.
The second part was a retail installation which visualized a year's worth of runs from the Nike+ website. We made custom software that played back runs throughout three cities: New York, London and Tokyo. The runs showed tens of thousands of peoples runs animating the city and bringing it to life. You can see individual runs, as well as the collective energy of all the urban runners. Credits: Produced in collaboration with DualForces.
YesYesNo Team: Zach Lieberman, Emily Gobeille and Theo Watson.
Software was made with openFrameworks v007b and uses Moka's ofxTileSaver addon.
As regular readers will know we have a bit of a thing about city timelapses here on digital urban. The smooth passing of time can communicate a cities movement and structure as frames are captured every few seconds. As such below is a timelapse by Chris Kaliszewskientitled 'Leaving Mazatlan':
Somehow the height and speed of the ship departing the mexican port make for a captivating sequence.
Fresh from the yesterdays Clockwork City and again produced in 3D Max by T0R0YD is the City Roller Coaster:
We know the chances of any such ride being built are slim but it does somehow make The London Eye and other such urban structures look a little on the tame side...
The Clockwork City is an urban structure concept whereby entire districts move, thus negating the need for transport systems. Need to get to work? Wait 10 minutes until your work place moves into walking distance:
We really like the animation and communication of the concept by T0R0YD. Modelling was carried out in 3D Max with rendering via Mental Ray.
Picked up via http://www.bloomberg.com/ below is an interesting look at the rapid city growth in China with the aim to move people from farms to factories:
Kangbashi currently has 30,000 residents, out of a planned 1 million, creating an amazing scene of the empty cityscape...
Urbanflow Helsinki is a concept by Nordkapp and Urbanscale to envision and build an operating system for everyday life in the cities.
This concept is a first of many, and revolves mainly around the situated screens and their potential use cases. Please check back here and Urbanflow.io in August for more detailed information about the case and it's background.
We like the last line - 'it will happen somewhere, lets make it happen here'. We used almost the same line in terms of London only yesterday with regards a different project... it will happen somewhere and we really hope to see Urbanflow in Helsinki soon. Thanks to akazero on Twitter for sending this in.
A early heads up that the trailer for the forthcoming podcast from CASA - The Global Lab is now available on iTunes. Global Lab is a podcast about cities, global connectivity and the impact of technology produced here at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. Each episode features the latest news and perspectives from urban analysis, social complexity and innovation, as well as interviews with cutting-edge researchers from UCL-CASA and guests from further afield.
This podcast is an opportunity for researchers to discuss their work in a way accessible to a wider audience, and to involve people from UCL and the wider community. Martin Austwick of http://sociablephysics.wordpress.com/ fame and Steven Gray from http://bigdatatoolkit.org/ are planning to get researchers from all the major projects at CASA to talk about their work in the next few months, and give people the opportunity to present and edit in the long term. The first episode, featuring Martin De Jode, from TalesofThings, will be out in the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime, you can listen to the teaser trailer and subscribe via iTunes...
We view this as an exciting development in our outreach at CASA and part of a new plan to ramp up tutorials, blogging and general communications. As part of this a new website showcasing all of CASA's research is coming soon, and as for Digital Urban, we are about to be back in play after some juggling of workloads...
