Quick and Easy Arch Viz - Lumion

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Realtime rendering has moved on a long way in recent years - a prime example is Lumion® a real-time 3D visualisation tool for architects, urban planners and designers.

Suited for creating videos, still renderings and live demonstrations with a quick turnaround Lumion provides high quality output and best of all there is a free version, the movie below provides a look at version 1.0:

In terms of cityscapes Nano 3D Virtual Studio entered the Lumion architecture visualization competition 2011, the results are impressive:

 

Version 2 is incoming, take a look at http://lumion3d.com/ for full details, we may be including this as part of our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, its an interesting tie between Unity and Lumion. Thanks to Tom Vilans for sending in his thoughts on Lumion....

GEMMA Early Beta

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Finally we are nearing the end of the project (ok technically at the end but its both complex and exciting so we might squeeze in a few more days yet) we would like to introduce the world to GEMMA, the Geospatial Engine for Mass Mapping Applications. 

GEMMA was designed to allow anyone to make complex map mashups with a minimum of geographic knowledge. So easy in fact that even the most modest of users will be able to quickly collect data and visualise it in a few clicks, no worrisome logins, data downloads or nasty terms and conditions . Hopefully, GEMMA will get everyone excited about making their own maps, from a map of all their local Tesco locations through to a map of the number of cars that pass by their house. Building maps online takes time and often basic programming knowledge. GEMMA solves this problem by integrating many of the popular CASA products, along with some new features and iPhone app, combined into one easy to use platform allowing you make an interactive map that can be shared with the world.

So what are GEMMA’s main features?

Basically it’s a structured mashing application. A little bit from MapTube, a little bit from Google MyMaps, a little bit of opening up the wealth of data from OpenStreetMap. Add your own measured data with the accompanying iPhone app that is super simple to use – choose what you want to count, start tapping the screen to count, and then upload. Back in the GEMMA website, login and add.

With GEMMA you can stand on street corners and easily measure the demographics of, for example,Boris Bike users, create a shiny PDF of the data, and stick it up on a wall or embed it into your homework. We provide a unqiue shortcode for sharing with the world, or GEMMA will remember it in a list for future access.

How would you use GEMMA?

If you’re a Geography student who needs to prepare some maps for your course work on local population groups, you may need to collect counts of people for various locations around your local town and  compare that with the Output Area Classifications (OAC). What are you going to do? In the past you would have had to go and find an OAC map of your area and annotate it with the various bits of data you collect but you have left it to the last minute, again, and don’t know what to do! That’s where GEMMA steps in. Take a look at the video to see how easy using GEMMA actually is:

You can view the PDF created in the video here and take a preview look at  GEMMA.

The iPhone Application will be available to download from the iTunes App Store and we will let you know in this blog when it’s available. The GEMMA website is still in the BETA stages and we are just cleaning up the interface to make it easier for you to use as soon as it’s ready you’ll be able to use the web app from this link.

So who built GEMMA?

A few of the people at CASA, namely  Steven Gray, Ollie O’Brien our Principle Investigator Andy Hudson-Smith and finally Richard Milton who built some of the backend features that GEMMA requires to work so a big thank you to him. We will try and get a team photo together soon as we can.

As Ollie notes he has already blogged about the different APIs and libraries used. With any significant web project these days, good use of the rich tapestry of libraries out there is invaluable. Why write a polished Javascript-based UI from scratch when there is the powerful, beautiful and simple JQuery UI? Why spend ages creating sortable, resizable tables when JQuery Datatables will do that for you? Mapnik 2 has a whole host of new features, let’s use them. Let’s use authentication APIs from Twitter and Google rather than writing our own – the last thing people on the web need is yet another logon and password to remember (although, as Steve who did this part can attest, it’s not that easy – or smooth – for developers to take incorporate third-party identity management.) Let’s use custom-styled maps in the Google Maps API, and let Google take the strain of rendering them (it’s dead easy to create a grayscale layer for the Google Maps API).

If you sat Ollie down and asked the work he was most personally proud of, the answer would be GEMMAs PDF creation. During the project he has blogged about a couple of fairly cool things he has been able to do with WMS and SVG inputs for Mapnik and Cairo respectively, which looked to be a challenge. Steve on the other hand has been central to the GEMMA iPhone app, an app that allows anyone or any group to count anything, anywhere and have it mapped in realtime. From pedestrians and traffic through to flora and fauna, if it can be counted it can be mapped. The creation of a whole new mapping service with surveys, open data, custom markers and a bespoke iPhone app within a single interface has honestly been a challenge and one that has led to intense project meetings in the GEMMA lab.

Through it all we feel we have honestly come up with something unique, we hope you are as excited about GEMMA as we are and it doesn’t stop here. GEMMA has so far been a short, focused project. It’s tough to stop once you’ve started going – there’s so more we could do. We have more features to add to GEMMA in the pipeline so if you are interested in or have a feature that you would like to see in GEMMA then do get in contact.

Good news is that the developer team (Steve, Ollie and Richard) won 'developers of 2011' at the recent JISC GeoAwards. Personally I am very proud of the team, papers and further development coming soon...

Thanks as ever go to JISCGeo for allowing the creation of a Geographic Engine for Mass Mapping Applications.

3D Map of London's Urban Complexity

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Dr Duncan Smith, a Research Fellow here in CASA and author of our latest blog - Urban Geographics has produced an interesting visualisation of London's Urban form:

The visualisation of the density and function of the built-environment shows the dominance of the intensifying city-centre, corridors of commercial development and the smaller scale centres in Outer London. The data comes from the Valuation Office and the Greater London Authority. For more info and a write up of the background to the viz, take a look at http://www.geographics.blogs.casa.ucl.ac.uk

Crowd Density at the Lord Mayor's Show 2011 (London, UK)

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Sometimes you walk to the end of lab, here in CASA, get introduced to a visitor and have to take a step back at the resulting demo. Yesterday i had the pleasure of meeting Tobias Franke of the University of Passau's Embedded System Lab who is part of a team looking at realtime crowd densities. Tobias has run a trial during the 2011 Lord Mayor's Show in London. The "hotter" (i.e. red) the blobs are, the denser the crowd was at that location, the resulting visualisation is impressive:

The data was been gathered by a smartphone application collecting live sensor data from users. The heatmap and the corresponding visualization was realised by Martin Wirz of the ETH Zurich's Wearable Computing Lab with Prof. Eve Mitleton-Kelly (director of the Complexity Group at the London School of Economics) involved in the development as policy maker. The overall system allows emergency services to gain an almost-live insight into the crowd density at large scale events with data has been collected and processed using the CoenoSense backand system (www.coenosense.com). The software has been developed as a part of the Socionical research project (for more information see socionical.eu), in short we were impressed at the real time crowd viz via a smart phone app...

Instant City Generator for Cinema 4D

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Building a 3D city can take time and sometimes an off the shelf solution is the best option for moving a project forward. As such the City Kit by GreyScaleGorilla is well with a look. Running in Cinema 4D the kits allows the rapid construction of cityscapes with a range of customisation options, the movie embedded below provides a good overview:

At $149 CityKit is well worth a look, head over to http://greyscalegorilla.com/citykit/ for full details.

I Look and Move

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Below is a stop-motion animation captured in Moscow, it lasts for 1 minute 30 seconds and consists of 1072 images. You see only feet in the clip with images captured at the level of the human eye. Frames were prepared by hand and all the scenes were shot in Moscow, even the beach scene was shot in the capital, next to the Moskva River:
We like the iPhone/Map section and the jumping off a building, its really nicely made. Over at http://teeter-totter-tam.ru/ (great domain name) they have a full 'making off' write up, it is well worth a look...

Augmented Reality Travel Guidebook

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Augmented reality (AR) applications have the potential to change the city experience by overlaying the digital information on the physical environment. Yujin Yin a student on the MA Digital Media at Gildsmiths Univversity of London asks, what is the ‘identity’ they deliver for objects and spaces within the city? Does the augmentation of the city truly enhance our experience of urban life? These questions are explored via an augmented reality travel book:



AR Planet, Seoul from yunnew on Vimeo.

The travel guidebook, aims at achieving possibilities of augmenting the urban space with a very personal point of view (perception) and memories (narratives). Yujin notes that this approach might tackle the institutionalised and commercialized AR technologies that dominate the current market.

Author: Yujin Yun
Technical Coordinator: Moon Jung Hyun
3D Designer: Sam Oh

MA Digital Media, Goldsmiths University of London

Robots of Brixton

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Brixton has degenerated into a disregarded area inhabited by London's new robot workforce - robots built and designed to carry out all of the tasks which humans are no longer inclined to do. The mechanical population of Brixton has rocketed, resulting in unplanned, cheap and quick additions to the skyline.

The film follows the trials and tribulations of young robots surviving at the sharp end of inner city life, living the predictable existence of a populous hemmed in by poverty, disillusionment and mass unemployment. When the Police invade the one space which the robots can call their own, the fierce and strained relationship between the two sides explodes into an outbreak of violence echoing that of 1981:




The movie was made with support from:

Kibwe Tavares - Direction, animation, modeling, lighting, texturing etc...

David Hoffman - Photographer Brixton riots archive.hoffmanphotos.com/
Mourad Bennacer - Sound Designer designsonore.tumblr.com/
DJ Hiatus "The Great Insurrection" hiatusmusic.net
For more projects take a look at factoryfifteen.com.


Quite pleased we managed this post without any mention of skynet, our robot overlords (which i for one welcome) or electric avenue. An inspiring movie, both in its use of tech, subject matter and context....

Low-Cost Mapping and Publishing Methods for Landscape Architectural Analysis and Design in Slum-Upgrading Projects

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Future Internet carries on the theme of web based mapping with its latest publication by Paar, P.; Rekittke, J. Low-Cost Mapping and Publishing Methods for Landscape Architectural Analysis and Design in Slum-Upgrading Projects . Future Internet 2011, 3, 228-247.

The research project “Grassroots GIS” focuses on the development of low-cost mapping and publishing methods for slums and slum-upgrading projects in Manila. In this project smartphones, collaborative mapping and 3D visualization applications are systematically employed to support landscape architectural analysis and design work in the context of urban poverty and urban informal settlements. In this paper we focus on the description of the developed methods and present preliminary results of this work-in-progress.

The paper is part of a special issue edited by Dr. Christopher Pettit Principal Research Scientist and Research Manager, Spatial Information Sciences, Department of Primary Industries Victoria, Australia and Dr. Arzu Coltekin,Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 80750 Zürich, Switzerland.

The journal is open access, you can download the full paper at http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/228/

SketchUp/3D Max and Mental Ray: School of the Future

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7am and rummaging around Vimeo we stumbled upon work by Ramy Hanna, his work on the School of the Future is simply inspiring:


The entire model was made using SketchUp with rendering via an import into 3DMax and Metal Ray, final edits were made using Adobe AFX. Head over to http://www.ramyhanna.com/ for more movies and techniques from Ramy.