Front Page Archives - Digital Urban

CASA Cubes in the City

Andy — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:07:50 +0000

As part of a future ‘Easter’ themed promotion we have produced a short teaser clip around ‘cubes in the city’.

The movie was produced using ESRI City Engine, 3D Max and Lumion – it is also being used as part of our Masters course on Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation to demonstrate how simulation (MassFX) can be combined with procedural city creation and rapid visualisation…

Lumion has a few issues with lighting – there are some errors in the movie above – however for work created and rendered in under 3 hours its worth living with…

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Datascape – New 3D Dataviz tool from Daden

Andy — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:24:59 +0000

This is intriguing, a new 3D package to map and explore data – Datascape, by Daden Ltd, known perviously for their work in Second Life, provides an immersive environment in which users can explore and interact with data from almost any source.
David Burden, Daden’s Managing Director said “Datascape is ground-breaking and we’re expecting visualisations that tell a story and show how the additional power of immersion can lead to better understanding and communication”
The movie below provides an insight into the possibilities:

DATASCAPE – A VIRTUAL WORLD FOR YOUR DATA from DadenMedia on Vimeo.
Key Features
Datascape can be delivered as a standalone desktop application, or as a networked or internet delivered multi-user system. Using Datascape you can:

Import data from a wide variety of data sources, with native support for Excel, CVS and SQL and access to XML, JSON and other through ETL tools such as Kettle
Import data from web services such as RSS, Twitter and other feeds and real-time data
Visualise up to 65,000 entities at a time
Dynamically map and re-map data parameters onto plot features – with up to 10 features being available per plot point
Plot multiple datasets in the same subjective space
Filter, group, and highlight data
Use force-graph algorithms to plot network graphs
Plot geospatial and temporal data with time-on-a-stick
Save spaces for later analysis, or share them with other users, with over a dozen users being able to collaborate in the same space, each visible to each other
Animate data in time or space
“Scrub” data through a dynamic filter window

There is a free version available (limited to 2000 data points) linked to Dadens’ recently announced data visualisation competition. The competition is open to individuals, academics and commercial users with the winning entries being featured on Daden’s website and in a supporting press release. All submissions must be received by 17:00 GMT on 12 November 2012, via the Daden Website . Winners will be announced on 1 Dec 2012. Competition rules and entry details can be found on the website.

Read more about Datascape over at the Daden site

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CityEngine 2012 – New Features and ‘Sketch Tool’

Andy — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 09:12:10 +0000

CityEngine 2012 now supports easy-to-use editing tools for the quick sketching and texturing of 3D building models (read SketchUp):

Its only towards the end of the clip that you realise that the resulting 3D geometries can be saved back to the file geodatabase, allowing proceduaural modelling of your SketchUp style models….
CityEngine 2012 has a number of notable new features, head over to http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2012/10/03/cityengine-2012-1-released/ for full details.
Thanks to Flora of http://en-topia.blogspot.co.uk/ for sending this in.

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Geo-located Augmented Reality

Andy — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:31:42 +0000

With the latest version of Augmented Reality Player for iOS v1.2.0 users can now choose geo-location as a visualization option for their projects. The Geo-location feature allows to use GPS coordinates to locate a 3D model/animation on the earth’s surface. The software then tracks the 3D model coordinates in the real space using a suitable sensor fusion technique. This makes it possible to display virtual models in the real world without any marker:

Besides support for geolocated 3D models and animations, now the Player also supports skinning and morphing animations. In addition, users can freely move virtual models in the real environment using an intuitive interface.
The Geo-localization feature extends the spectrum of visualization possibilities of the ARplugin in many application domains, including architecture, engineering and cultural heritage.
Its an interesting development and we would be keen to know the level of accuracy achieved, for rural sites and to determine a rough idea of a developments impact on a view it seems to be useful.
The iOS ARplayer v1.2.0 is available for iPad and iPhone. It can be freely downloaded from Apple’s App Store and it works in association with the latest update of ARmedia Plugin Professional v2.2. Supported products include Trimble SketchUp, Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, Maxon Cinema4D and Nemetschek Vectorworks.
You can download the iOS ARplayer now directly from Apple’s App Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/app/armedia-player/id502524441
For more information see: http://www.inglobetechnologies.com/iosplayer

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An American Junction: A Tiltshift Timelapse

Andy — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 13:59:56 +0000

Below is a tiltshift timelapse of a junction in Pittsburgh, running at over 9 minutes at 30 frames per second with one photograph captured every second it was produced using the IPad 3 and Miniatures:

Miniatures adds a tiltshift effect to each frame, making creating HD timelapses amazingly easy to capture, we simply set the iPad up against a window and left it running while we went back to our conference here at Ubicomp2012.
Minatures Pro is 4.99 via the Apple Store, with a variety of options, including a neat blur feature between frames, its well worth a look.

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Live London Dashboard now with realtime Olympic tweet counter

Andy — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 11:43:20 +0000

Ollie here in CASA has just posted a new temporary panel on the London CityDashboard which shows Twitter activity at the London 2012 venues. The panel is using data from new Twitter collector tools in the Big Data Toolkit, developed by Steven James Gray, again CASA, as part of his PhD.

As Ollie notes ‘for each venue, the collectors count the number of Tweets in the last hour that have latitude/longitude information stamped on them, that are located within an area radiating around the centre of each stadium or arena. Its worth noting that this excludes the majority of relevant tweets, as most mobile Twitter applications don’t include this information by default’, you have to turn on Geo Location.

So far the Olympic collectors set up by Steven (@frogo) have 22 machines each collecting Tweets from each of the Olympic venues all over London and we have managed to collect over 1.4 million tweets from the last 14 days of the Olympics (Each has been sent from the vicinity of each venue hence why the individual numbers are low).
The Big Data Toolkit will be entering a beta testing phase in the next couple of months, to allow anyone to collect and map tweets – the aim is to make it as easy as possible while also maintaing the feed for data analysis.
You can view the live data either within our other feeds via our London CityDashboard or direct at http://bigdata.casa.ucl.ac.uk/olympics/
For more detailed information take a look at Ollie’s Suprageography site and Steven’s Big Data Toolkit.

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Live London Dashboard now with realtime Olympic tweet counter

Andy — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 11:43:20 +0000

The post Live London Dashboard now with realtime Olympic tweet counter appeared first on Digital Urban.

Using Oyster Card journeys to understand how, why and where we travel in London

Andy — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 10:25:47 +0000

Researchers from UCL have analysed millions of Oyster Card journeys in a bid to understand how, why and where we travel in London.

Professor Michael Batty (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) and Dr Soong Kang (UCL Management Science and Innovation) applied the techniques of statistical physics to their mountain of raw data.

The pair joined forces with a computational social scientist and a physicist, both based in Paris, to explore patterns of commuting by tube into central London:

They used Transport for London’s database of 11 million records taken over one week from the Oyster Card electronic ticketing system.

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Raising Risk Awareness on the Adoption of Web 2.0 Technologies in Decision Making Processes

Andy — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 10:53:58 +0000

Future Internet has published the latest paper as part of the Special Issue Government 2.0 entitled Raising Risk Awareness on the Adoption of Web 2.0 Technologies in Decision Making Processes by Marco Prandini and Marco Ramilli of the Università di Bologna:

Abstract
In the recent past, the so-called “Web 2.0” became a powerful tool for decision making processes. Politicians and managers, seeking to improve participation, embraced this technology as if it simply were a new, enhanced version of the World Wide Web, better suited to retrieve information, opinions and feedbacks from the general public on subjects like laws, acts and policies. This approach wa
s often naive, neglecting the less-obvious aspects of the technology, and thus bringing on significant security problems. This paper shows how, in the end, the result could easily be the opposite of what was desired. Malicious attackers, in fact, could quite easily exploit the vulnerabilities in these s
ystems to hijack the process and lead to wrong decisions, also causing the public to lose trust in the systems themselves.
Keywords: Web 2.0; e-government; security; decision making
You can view the full paper over on Future Internet.

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Kickstarting Open Source City Software: Transit App for iOS 6 and Beyond

Andy — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:17:25 +0000

The way we get around is changing. We increasingly combine bikes and transit. And in many cities we’re seeing a birth of whole new modes of transport like bike-share and carshare. Over at OpenPlans they build open source tools that are responsive to these changes and let us imagine new ways of moving and with the announcement of iOS version 6, Apple has dropped Google Maps and with it, previously built-in support for travel directions via public transit they are looking to kickstart a solution :

With support, OpenTripPlanner Mobile, an open source application developed by OpenPlans will put transit back on the iPhone.
The app will also add new features that Google Maps didn’t have, allowing users to combine walking, bikes, bike-share and transit together, finding the fastest and most efficient trips regardless of mode of transportation.

The people over at OpenPlans are a talented bunch, their New York Bike Share Trip Planner for example is nicely done. The more funds they raise the more features and data coverage they be able to add. We like the fact that all of the data and source code created as part of this project will be made available for free as open source. Also, OpenPlans will release a developer API that allows you to access the back-end trip planner as a hosted service.
Open source tools to help make cities better, head over Transit App on KickStarter, at the time of writing they have raised $12,299 out of the $25,000 goal.
Thank go to the Urban Mobility Daily

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