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Feb 05
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Street Slide: Coming Soon to Bing?

By Bing, Street View, streetslide

Systems such as Google Street View and Bing Maps Streetside enable users to virtually visit cities by navigating between immersive 360° panoramas, or bubbles. The discrete moves from bubble to bubble enabled in these systems do not provide a good visual sense of a larger aggregate such as a whole city block. Multi-perspective “strip” panoramas can provide a visual summary of a city street but lack the full realism of immersive panoramas.

The movie below provides an overview of the system:




In a paper at SIGGRAPH Microsoft presented Street Slide, which combines the best aspects of the immersive nature of bubbles with the overview provided by multiperspective strip panoramas. They demonstrated a seamless transition between bubbles and multi-perspective panoramas presenting a dynamic construction of the panoramas which overcomes many of the limitations of previous systems.

As the user slides sideways, the multi-perspective panorama is constructed and rendered dynamically to simulate either a perspective or hyper-perspective view. This provides a strong sense of parallax, which adds to the immersion.

You can view the paper here (13Mb, .pdf), with Microsofts Patent recently approved, it looks like this should be coming to Bing soon.

Feb 05
Love0

New York: Pinball Skyline

By manhattan skyline, New York, pinball skyline

The short below was developed by Lizzie Oxby, a multi-award winning director who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1996 to remind her of the joy of the New York skyline, the clip is based around three photographs:

Manhattan 4.33pm from Lizzie Oxby on Vimeo.

Entitled ‘Manhattan: 4.33pm’ the movie has been selected as a finalist in Raindance’s Welcome to the Extraordinary competition.

See lizzieoxby.com for more of her work.

Feb 04
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Norway: 4000 Bus Stops that Tweet, Record Stories and Provide the Time of the Next Bus via QRCodes

By Cities Tweets, kolumbus, talesofthings

Today sees the launch of our latest collaboration via the Tales of Things project – this time with a Norwegian transport company, Kolumbus. Tales of Things has been utilising Kolumbus’ already existing QR codes to allow passengers to leave stories for one another. When a passenger visits one of Kolumbus’ more than 4,000 bus stops they will find a QR code which when scanned with the free Tales of Things’ app on with the iPhone or Android it will not only link them to timetable information, but also allow them to leave a message on the bus stop.

Each stop contains a unique code, so the timetable information and tales are site specific. Through tales of things, passengers can leave messages about experiences they have had in the area, anecdotes about places they are going, leave a message for a loved one or maybe leave a treasure trail for your friends. In addition to this, each time a bus stop is scanned, it ‘tweets’ to the world that a new story, message or memory has been left.

In essence we think of this as a mix of Facebook and FourSquare for Bus Stops, where users leave behind stories, messages and memories while at the same time seeing when the next bus is.

The things can be geo-located through an on-line map of the world where participants can track their object even if they have passed it on. The object can also update previous owners on its progress through a live Twitter feed (which is unique to each object entered into the system).

Einar Hougen, project manager in Kolumbus, states: “When we learned about this exciting UK research project, we instantly recognized the parallels to our own QR tagging of bus stops, which we believe is the largest adaptation of QR codes of this kind in Norway to date. Scanning a QR code at a Kolumbus bus stop gives instant access to current departure times, right on your mobile phone.

In Kolumbus, we are happy to support this research project by sharing our QR mechanism and allowing all our bus stops to be accessible in the tales of things world of objects. Via our tech blog, next.kolumbus.no , we know there are many tech savvy users among our travellers. This will give them the opportunity to join this project, -and hopefully have a bit of fun at the same time!”

ABOUT KOLUMBUS

Kolumbus is the public transport company for Rogaland county, Norway, serving the public with bus and high speed boat routes in the areas of Stavanger, Haugesund, the Fjords, Dalane and Jæren.

For more information on Kolumbus visit http://www.kolumbus.no/

http://next.kolumbus.no/2011/02/04/talesofthings/ and of course you can tag your own objects, places, spaces or bus stops via Tales of Things.

Feb 03
Love0

London Cycle Flows: A Sociable Physics Animation

By boris bikes, city flows, london, london cycle hire

The animation below details the real-time behaviour of hire bikes in London on October 4th 2010, the day of a major tube strike, and the busiest day for the scheme to date.

Departure times and journey durations are real; routing is calculated from OSM data; average speed from journey duration and route length.

London Hire Bikes animation from Sociable Physics on Vimeo.


In the visualisation, the fixed circles represent stands – when a stand flashes red, it means that one or more bikes have left it – and a yellow flash means a bike has arrived. The bikes themselves are represented by the Boris Barclays Blue Tadpoles whizzing around – leaving at the right time, travelling at their correct average speed, and taking a (generally) realistic route.

The movie was created by Martin Austwick of Sociable Physics, here in CASA with the help of Ollie O’Brien (again CASA) for collection and routing.

We are a bit biased on such work, here at digital urban, but its great….

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