Second Life Archives - Digital Urban

Incoming Metaverses: Digital Mirrors for Urban Planning

Andy — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 11:24:33 +0000

The planning process has been, arguably, slow to adapt and adopt new technologies: It is perhaps only now that it is starting to move into a more digitally focused era. Yet, it is not the current thinking around the digital that is going to change planning; it is the emerging metaverse. It is a change on the near horizon that is there but is currently largely unseen in the urban planning profession. The metaverse is, at first sight, a mirror to the current world, a digital twin, but it is more than this: It is an inhabited mirror world where the physical dimensions and rules of time and space do not necessarily apply. Operating across scales, from the change of use of a building up to a local plan and onwards to the scale of future cities, these emerging metaverses will exist either directly within computational space or emerge into our physical space via augmented reality. With economic systems operating via blockchain technology and the ability to instigate aspects of planning law, interspaced with design fiction type scenarios, they represent a new tool kit for the urban planner, spatial, economic, and social. We explore these emerging spaces, taking a look at their origins and how the use of game engines have allowed participation and design to become part of the workflow of these 3D spaces. Via a series of examples, we look at the current state of the art, explore the short term future, and speculate on digital planning using these incoming metaverses 10 years from now.

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Second Life and Science Sim: Time to Head Back into Virtual Space(?)

Andy — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:29:00 +0000

Back in the heady days of 2008 when Neogeography was the ‘in thing’ we looked into importing geographic, urban and climate information within Second Life. Progress was swift and we demonstrated how output from ArcGIS could be not only imported but also manipulated on the fly, along with step inside panoramas and live data feeds:

That was 2008, since then our land with NATURE in Second Life has sadly timed out and nowadays its hard to justify resources to rent virtual space. As such our thoughts are tuning to OpenSim, nothing new there of course but the clip below from Intel has got us thinking.

The movie demonstrates the progress in scaling the capabilities of the ScienceSim virtual world and features a collection of projects aimed at expanding the web to include interactive 3D applications.

ScienceSim is interesting and with the possibility of running several 1000 avatars on a server brings about interesting possibilities for virtual simulations.

For more information, see www.sciencesim.com

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Second Life and Science Sim: Time to Head Back into Virtual Space(?)

Andy — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:29:00 +0000

ScienceSim is interesting and with the possibility of running several 1000 avatars on a server brings about interesting possibilities for virtual simulations.

For more information, see www.sciencesim.com

The post Second Life and Science Sim: Time to Head Back into Virtual Space(?) appeared first on Digital Urban.

Digital Urban: Top Five Favourites

Andy — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:27:00 +0000

Summer seems to be a good time of year to dig out those movies that we have liked over our time on digital urban so far. First off we are going to look at our own movies (its slightly indulgent) that in the 1500 odd posts often get lost, we will run through why they were made, the software involved and their place in the bigger picture.

Full post with movies after the break below:

No. 5: Growing the Tube Network

The clip was produced in 3D Max, purely as a way to explore the rapid creation of transport networks for visualisation. It was easy to make – simply import a PDF of a transport network into a package such as illustrator and save as .dwg. This allows you to import into 3D Max and then the lines can be converted to ‘tubes’ – the network can be built up in under an hours work. Making the stations and naming the lines took a little more time but the result is interesting. The render has been used on the cover of a couple of books, been hung on the walls in the London Transport Museum and is the subject of future development with real network flows.

No. 4: Reactor and Particles in the City

Number 4 is a slight cheat as it contains two movies, firstly Reactor:

Secondly, Particles:

The movies were produced as part of exploring how 3D Max can be used for agent based modelling, we wrote a Complete tutorial on Reactor and Bouncing Balls in the City. The work is currently being imported into the Unity engine as part of our work on NeISS. Talking of which:

No. 3: Unity

Unity is our current engine of choice, simply for its ease of use for importing models and producing quality output that can run either online, via iPhones or on an iPad. As part of our work on Agent Based Models we are working on an exhibition space, below is the room layout:

Second up is an early prototype:

We are heading back to Unity in the next few months with an aim to create a complete exhibition space.

No. 2: Geography and Cities in Second Life

We used to have some land in Second Life as part of the Nature Publishing Groups presence. It allowed us to develop various urban, geographic and agent based models within the virtual environment.

The long term aim is to develop the techniques and move them into OpenSim, sadly all the above work is now lost in the ether….

No. 1: Step Inside Worlds

Number one is a look back at work before the days of Google Street View when the creation of panoramas was a work of art. Created from 36 photographs we took our panoramic images and put them into 3D space, allowing the camera to pan around the nodal point, our first example shows its age a bit but its still one of our favourites:

We developed the concept further with ‘step inside worlds’, allowing a series of panoramas to be embedded within a ‘holding’ scene and presents a looping movie suitable for large displays. The movie is just a concept but perhaps one that would work in a marketing suite or on display:

The clip was developed in 3D Max, but any 3D package would do, its simply a case of moving the camera around inside of spheres.

There are of course others, we have over 150 movies produced covering
all aspects of our work. We hope a few of them have provided some inspiration over the years or via our tutorials we have managed to show some useful tips and techniques.

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Digital Urban: Top Five Favourites

Andy — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:27:00 +0000

Full post with movies after the break below:

No. 5: Growing the Tube Network

No. 4: Reactor and Particles in the City

Number 4 is a slight cheat as it contains two movies, firstly Reactor:

Secondly, Particles:

No. 3: Unity

Second up is an early prototype:

We are heading back to Unity in the next few months with an aim to create a complete exhibition space.

No. 2: Geography and Cities in Second Life

We used to have some land in Second Life as part of the Nature Publishing Groups presence. It allowed us to develop various urban, geographic and agent based models within the virtual environment.

The long term aim is to develop the techniques and move them into OpenSim, sadly all the above work is now lost in the ether….

No. 1: Step Inside Worlds

The clip was developed in 3D Max, but any 3D package would do, its simply a case of moving the camera around inside of spheres.

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CG + Second Life Machinima

Andy — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:20:00 +0000

Below is a promotional movie of the activity for public industrial-academic complex of Tokyo Metropolitan University. The clip is composed of 2 elements, firstly 3D composite work using photographs of cities and campuses and secondly, machinima in Second Life using photographs of researchers and their work:

Normally we wouldn’t cover promotional movies on digital urban, but this is one caught our eye, that said we can’t personally see where Second Life was used in the clip, any ideas?

Thanks to Hidenori Watanave of http://archidemo.blogspot.com/ for sending this in.

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CG + Second Life Machinima

Andy — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:20:00 +0000

Normally we wouldn’t cover promotional movies on digital urban, but this is one caught our eye, that said we can’t personally see where Second Life was used in the clip, any ideas?

Thanks to Hidenori Watanave of http://archidemo.blogspot.com/ for sending this in.

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30 Days in ActiveWorlds: Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World.

Andy — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:28:00 +0000

30 Days in ActiveWorlds was a project aimed at documenting the development of a virtual environment from the beginning to end, the point where a plot of virgin land would develop into a community with a urban layout.

In the days long before Second Life it provided an early look at life, love, architecture and the threats of Armageddon from a terrorist group in a virtual world. It remains one of our favorite pieces of work to date:

If you would like to read the paper offline your can download – 30 Days in ActiveWorlds – Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World (pdf link)

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The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life

Andy — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:08:00 +0000

Web 2.0, specifically The Cloud, GeoWeb and Wikitecture are revolutionising the way in which we present, share and analyse geographic data. In this paper we outline and provide working examples a suite of tools which are detailed below, aimed at developing new applications of GIS and related technologies. GeoVUE is one of seven nodes in the National Centre for e-Social Science whose mission it is to develop web-based technologies for the social and geographical sciences. The Node, based at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London has developed a suite of free software allowing quick and easy visualisation of geographic data in systems such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Crysis and Second Life.

We are trying out the service by Issuu to share and view our documents online, if it works well then the digital urban booklet will go online next week (click the right button to turn the page):

These tools address two issues, firstly that spatial data is still inherently difficult to share and visualise for the non-GIS trained academic or professional and secondly that a geographic data social network has the potential to dramatically open up data sources for both the public and professional geographer. With our applications of GMap Creator, and MapTube to name but two, we detail ways to intelligently visualise and share spatial data. This paper concludes with detailing usage and outreach as well as an insight into how such tools are already providing a significant impact to the outreach of geographic information.

If you dont want to read it online you can download the full paper The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life in .pdf format (9.8Mb).

Thanks go to UrbanTick who pointed us to the service – you can see a preview of their book over at urbantick.blogspot.com

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Second Life: Agent Based Models Update

Andy — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:04:00 +0000

As part of joint work with gisagents.blogspot.com we have just finished another part of Agent-Street where agents and avatars can interact with each other. The idea here is to merge iconic and symbolic urban models in a multi-user real time environment:

Agent-Based Modelling in Second Life from Andrew Crooks on Vimeo.

The movie below details Agent-Street and how one can download the models we have created by clicking on the model vending machines. Such vending machines are common features in Second Life and allow users to store objects and scripts in their personal inventory for later use such as rebuilding the models on their own Land or in free sand-boxes. We have been using the Mauve Land for this (SLURL).

In our previous models avatars could only visualise and initiate the models. For example, in the pedestrian evacuation model users could only observe how agents exited the building (in a similar way to professionally developed 3D pedestrian modelling software packages such as STEPS – more on STEPS in a future post.). In this new model, we extend the basic pedestrian evacuation model, so that agents not only consider their environments but also other avatars. In this sense we are not only incorporating iconic and symbolic modelling styles but also adding a further human dimension, moving towards an augmented reality (i.e. as if the agents and the humans were in the same crowd). The movie below details how pedestrian paths change when avoiding an avatar, note how an avatar stationed near the exit impacts on pedestrian egress as agents have to move around it.

We have also set up a website outlining the work in detail (click here) or alternatively if you have a Second Life account this SLurl will take you to the Land, once you teleport to the area, follow the red arrow (beam of red light) into the sky to find Agent-Street. If the models are running slow let us know as we having problems with fish entering our land from a neighbouring island.

Thanks as ever go to NATURE for allowing us use of Second Nature Island to set up the experiments.

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