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Feb 09
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CityEngine: ESRI and Lumion a first look.

By arcGIS, Architectual Visualisation, CityEngine, data viz, ESRI, Lumion, Procedural Cities

Yesterday a license for CityEngine landed on our desk from the nice people at ESRI and to be honest we were a little too excited for our own good, after all its only software. However, CityEngine and its integration with ESRI ArcGIS, while maintaining full export capabilities to load into 3DMax/Lumion/Unity etc, is a game changer.

It moves GIS visualisation a step forward while at the same time bringing procedural city modelling into the mainstream game engine world. Over the coming weeks we will be putting the software through its paces and exporting into Max/Lumion and Unity as part of introducing CityEngines onto our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation. The clip below details out first output direct from CityEngine into Lumion, adding in a general landscape, sample trees and transport objects:

Linking in our previous post on ArcGIS Twitter Visualisation in Lumion it seems that the worlds of GIS and architectural visualisation/game engines are finally starting to become accessible.

Feb 08
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Demo – Live 3D Kinect Streaming: The Future of Webcams

By Posts

George MacKerron here in CASA has been looking at using a Kinect or three in our forthcoming ANALOGIES (Analogues of Cities) conference + exhibition.

Inspired in part by Ruairi Glynn‘s amazing work here at UCL, along with Martin at CASA who has been happily experimenting with the OpenKinect bindings for Processing, George has recently got to grips with the excellent Three.js, which makes WebGL — aka 3D graphics in modern browsers. As a fan of making things accessible over the web he has begun to investigate prospects for working with Kinect data in HTML5 and the results are intriguing – a live 3D, movable webcam…
Screenshot
View the live stream here or click on the screenshot to connect (note it needs Chrome at the moment), you can also pan and zoom around with the mouse. Hopefully George will be at his desk for the full effect.

For those without Chrome, the movie below details the concept:



We view this as a glimpse of the future of webcams, the next step is to up the resolution (bandwidth heavy)  and add image data. The implications for video conferencing or indeed that industry that academically we probably cant mention are notable…

Take a look at the blog post from George for full technical details.

Feb 08
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Taxi! Data Viz of 10,000 Taxi’s in Manhattan

By Posts

Taxi! is an analytical model that maps the trip data for 10,000 taxi rides over the course of 24 hours. Geographic location data for the origin and destination of each ride is combined with waypoint data collected from the Google Maps API in order to generate a geographically accurate representation of the trip:

Taxi! from Juan Francisco Saldarriaga on Vimeo.
The team used data from taxi rides originating or ending in the neighborhoods of Lincoln center or Bryant Park. The visualization recreates a ‘breathing’ map of Manhattan based on the migration of vehicles across the city over a period of 24 hours, displaying periods of intensity, density and decreased activity.

This project was a collaboration between Tom McKeogh, Eliza Montgomery and Juan F Saldarriaga. It was done for SEARCH class taught by Mark Collins and Toru Hasegawa (Proxy), at GSAPP, Columbia University, Fall 2011.

As part of the reseach they acknowledge the support of the CUNY High Performance Computing Center under NSF Grants No. CNS-0855217 and No. CNS-0958379.

For any additional information please contact Juan Francisco Saldarriaga at jfs2118@columbia.edu

As a side note we also like the music by Rob Viola of statikluft.com/

Feb 02
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ABM, SketchUp, ArcGIS and Lumion

By 3D GIS, 3dmax, ABM, arcGIS, CASA, CASA MRes, data visualization, Featured Game Engine, Lumion, Twitter Data, twitter maps

Over the past few weeks we have been exploring exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. Developed as part our Masters course in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation we are now looking into issues of scale, realtime rendering, rapid visualisation and 3D exhibition spaces.



Regular readers will know we have been exploring Unity due its interactive nature and ability to import various file types into its game engine (see Particles, Agents and Emergent Behaviour ). Unity is still an option but for rapid visualisation Lumion also offers distinct possibilities. The movie below details our first draft example of building an exhibition space (SketchUp), retexturing and adding various crowd/delegate models (3DMax) and the Twitter map (ArcGIS) using Lumion:



If Lumion offered a stand alone viewer rather than purely movie based output then it would be our engine of choice. As such it is currently a weigh up between Lumion and Unity, our Unity example is under development, we will post it soon as we can…

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