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2007-12-30

2008 The Year of the Neogeographer

The last few months have proved interesting with a few professionals in the industry getting increasingly unsettled by the rise of the Neogeographer and with it a huge increase in information along with a general decrease in overall accuracy.

We are all for it to be honest and the forthcoming Digital Urban book provides a series of tutorials on how to use the best tools out there for the very purpose of Neogeography. The focus on accuracy has always perturbed us, surely its all about a sense of location and place, if the icon or information is a few metres off then to be honest who cares? If you need sub centimetre accuracy go down the Ordnance Survey, or other official map provider route, if you want massive amounts of geoinformation that allow a picture of a place to be developed then its all down to the people, Web 2.0 and ultimately Neogeography.

With this comes a prediction that 2008 will see a wealth of new tools allowing street level data capture and 3D modelling at low cost. Microsofts Photosynth is on the horizon and new software that takes images from Flickr to build 3D models is under development. Cameras and GPS tracking sticks are continuing to fall in price with software to geolocate images becoming increasingly easy to use.

Embedded below is a review of the forthcoming ATP Photofinder:



You can read the full review and find out more details on the Photofinder from here.

Also on the increasingly essential YouTube tobaiswac has placed a movie based on his walk from Wilshire Blvd in Downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean:



Covering 16 miles tobais took 1 photo every 10 steps providing an actually quite useful data archive of his route. If this had been linked to a gps it would of provided a simple yet effective street level tour, perhaps the next Open Street Map type project could be street level photography, after all who needs all those expensive vans and street capturing systems from the likes of Google and Microsoft (?).

2008 is the year of Neogeography and we cant wait, GIS and mapping in general has been too complicated for too long, it is at last coming to the masses and if that means some points are not quite in the right place, so be it, its not the end of the world is it.

2007-12-29

Virtual Earth & the Wii Remote

We picked this up via the James Fee GIS Blog, the Wii Remote has become a jack of all trades recently acting as a VR Headset Sensor, Whiteboard Input Device and now to control Microsoft's Virtual Earth.

The movie below is well worth a look:




One of the leading developers of interfaces using the Nintendo's Remote is Johnny Chung Lee of Carnegie Mellon University, embedded below is how to use the remote for headtracking, enabling desktop virtual reality.



Now if the headset can be merged with the Virtual Earth navigation you are really on to something.

Take a look at Johnny Chung Lee's site for more info and the source code, if we could just find a Wii in the shops we could try this out at CASA.

Urban Design: Chongqing SketchUp

Chongqing is the largest and most populous of the People's Republic of China's four provincial-level municipalities. With a population of over 4.1million the area is experiencing unprecedented growth.

Embedded below is a proposal conceived by Rêve architectes associés, rendered in SketchUp the compression shows in the quality but it provides a good indication of how good SketchUp can be when it is used well:



Rêve architectes associés is a chinese and french agency created in Shanghai by Zhang Liang et Vincent Pavard.

See the Rêve site for more details.

Papervision: 2008 The Year of the 3D Web?

3D plugins, browsers and languages come and go, Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) rode a wave of hype only to suffer as a result of being before its time. Viewpoint, our personal favorite of a few years ago, rode a similar wave attracting a strong community of developers before rather foolishly locking them out unless they purchased a license key and now we have Papervision.

Papervision is different, it has potential and may indeed bring to fruition the vision of a 3D Web that went before it in the VRML days. The key to Papervision is its open source nature and its integration with Flash, a plugin that to be honest is no longer a plugin but an essential component of many websites

The movie below showcases Papervision to date:



The engine entered public beta in July 2007 with a number of tutorials and demos emerging online at an ever increasing pace.

The focus on Flash is to be welcomed, perhaps 2008 will be the year of the 3D Web?

See the Papervision Wiki for full details, tutorials and demos.

Speed Painting a City in Photoshop CS3

Matte paintings are used to create "virtual sets" and "digital backlots". They can be used to create entire new sets, or to extend portions of an existing set. Traditional matte painting is done optically, by painting on top of a piece of glass to be composited with the original footage (Wikipedia).

The movie embedded below illustrates the process of painting a city background in Photoshop CS3, timelapsed over 6 minutes it provides an interesting insight into creating digital cityscapes:



Credit for the movie goes to titoff77, his work is inspired by Dylon Cole (Dylon's site is well worth a look, especially the Daredevil section for urban images.)

3D Visualisation: A Year Using Blender

When your covering architectural renderings from the leading design studios creating your own 3D models can be slightly intimidating. It is well worth remembering that free 3D modelling software such as Google SketchUp or Blender - the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems - allows anyone from the professional to the hobbyist to create models.

As such we intend to feature more movies from the general public over the next few months, kicking off with a look back by Baselinegenerator at his first year using Blender:



In some ways we like these movies more than the output of the high end studios with their access to render farms and the latest software. Midway through Baseline's movie the urban street flooding is impressive and a testament to open source modelling software.

We intend to cover more on Blender in future posts.

2007-12-28

SimCity New York (Movie)

It is interesting to see how close the Edushi (short for ECity in Chinese and pictured above) maps that we recently covered are to Sim City, see 'Edushi.com - Possibly the Best City Maps in the World?'

The movie below illustrates a detailed reconstruction of New York in Sim City 4 by way of comparison:



Uploaded by SimmyUK, Simmy states:
'Population is well over 300,000, with 150,000 commercial jobs and just under 1000 tech jobs. There is a very good mass transit system my city. The entire city is covered by an underground subway system. New York has very good Health and Education systems and there is plenty for my sims to do to relax'.
If we were going to create a Edushi style maps the easiest way would be perhaps to model in 3D Max and then import into Sim City to get that all important 'Sim City look'...

Build a City in 5 Minutes: Bryce 5/3DMax/Second Life

We love YouTube, it has opened up simple tutorials to the masses allowing techniques to be easily shared. One such nugget is a tutorial on 'How to Build a City in 5 Minutes' embedded below:



Uploaded by 'FreeTutorials' it makes an interesting use of a simple height map in Bryce to quickly create a city. The same technique can be used in 3D Max and interestingly Second Life using sculpt maps.

If you create a city using this method, send us a screen shot and we will run a quick post...

2007-12-27

Virtual Manchester: Model by ARUP

The market for producing 3D city models continues to expand, from lightweight web based applications to high end tools for council usage. Embedded below is the model of Manchester by ARUP.



ARUP is a global firm of designers, engineers, planners and business consultants providing a diverse range of professional services to clients around the world. They have a long reputation in city modelling through their in house research teams and the Manchester model is testament to this. The transport planning section (half way through the movie) is especially nice.

Covering 4562 buildings and 15 spatial zones detail is limited to the core areas with the majority of buildings lacking roof structure but where detail has been applied it has been done well...

2007-12-26

Building from a Box - Second Life CAD

As its Boxing Day (a public holiday celebrated in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia and many other members of the Commonwealth of Nations on December 26) we thought it would be timely to look at creating a building from a box in second life.

Thankfully the process is simple using AC3D to model and then export to second life. We had a similar script running from SketchUp but as they both only import boxes we assumed you were better off building direct (perhaps we were wrong as the movie below illustrates the potential):



The AC3D Second Life box export plugin works by generating a second life box prim for each object in the AC3D world. You can either make boxes in AC3D, or if you just want flat rectangles, you can simply make AC3D rectangles. You can use whatever shapes you like in AC3D e.g. spheres etc. but everything will appear in SL as boxes.

Take a look at AC3D for more details and Happy Boxing Day :)

2007-12-25

Architectural Visualisation: Richard Meier's Church of 2000 in Rome

Roberto sent us this exquisite visualisation of Richard Meier's Jubilee Church, Rome. Roberto built the model in Autocad architecture (ex architectural desktop) with rendering and animation via 3d studio max 9 using the internal mental ray release 3.5.

It is a beautiful animation that makes a very timely post as its Christmas Day :)



According to ever informative ArcSpace, the parish church 'for the year 2000' was conceived as a new center for a somewhat isolated housing quarter on the outskirts of Rome. The triangular site is doubly articulated to divide the sacred realm to the south, where the nave is located, from the secular precinct to the north, and to separate the pedestrian approach from the east from the parking lot to the west.

You can download a high resolution version of the movie via http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6DCSIAJ8

Happy Christmas

A quick post to wish all the readers of digital urban a Happy Christmas and Happy Holidays :)

Full blog posts will be back later this week, until then have a good one...

Andy

2007-12-20

Crysis - 3000 Barrels

We promise to get round to modding Crysis as soon as we get chance, in the meantime take a look at the 4 minute movie based around arranging 3000 barrels into buildings and knocking down them down:



It is an impressive showcase for the level of real-time visualisation possible using the Crysis Engine.

Picked up via Joystiq.

2007-12-19

Digital Urban: The Book (Update)


Apologies for the lack of posts so far today, been beavering away on a book based around the tutorials and concepts developed on the blog. At the moment details are sketchy but it's looking like a glossy coffee table type publication with simple step by step guides - like a recipie book for all things digital urban.


We are toying with titles, at the moment its 'Digital Geography - Geovisualisation for the Urban Environment' but perhaps it should be Neogeography? Any thoughts on the title or content would be great, via the email link top right, while we sit here writing it.


It should be timed to be out in time in Blurb form for a forthcoming conference in February with a full book on Amazon first quater of 2008.

We will get some more blog posts out soon as we can and the other book - Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces continues apace, we just need your images :)

2007-12-18

109 Razor Wire

No details on thelocation of this one but the image speaks for itself.

Thanks to Jusitndula on flickr for submitting it to our group, he notes that the graffiti/razorwire & marks a Modern/traditional architecture juxtaposition. You can view the full size image via Flickr.

If you would like to be in the book its simple, wherever you are in the world simply take a photograph of anything you think is a bad example of architecture, urban planning, streetscape or anything related to the city.

Once you have your photograph, at as high a resolution as possible, you can simply upload it to our newly created group on Flickr, Worlds Worst Urban Spaces and Place including a description of between 100 and 250 words.

We will then include the text and image in a blog post as well as the book, full credit will of course be included on the blog and on your page/section of the book.

An archive of all the submissions so far is on the companion Worlds Worst Urban Blog.

2007-12-17

A Tour of Stoke-on-Trent: Life In A Northern Town

This amused us while writing the panorama section of the Digital Geography book and looking for urban images: A Drive around Stoke-on-Trent.

Take in the wonders of the Lidl (a low cost supermarket), the local kebab house and the town incinerator amongst others. A few days ago we talked about Earthmine and a new kind of map, to be honest we cant see them driving around Stoke anytime soon:



Life in an Northern Town, as Dream Academy once sung, which can now rather helpfully be found on YouTube.

Although the drive around Stoke is a bit grim there is something about it that almost celebrates the English town.

Thanks go to the D'log blog for posting the link.

Worlds Worst Urban Spaces: Rozzol Melara,Trieste

Sol has uploaded some great images to our Flickr Group for the World Worst Urban Places and Spaces book. The photographs focus on the Rozzol Melara settlement in Trieste, Italy, taken in 2004 while Sol was researching is final these project entitled '31 Stories'.

In Sol's words:
The complex consists of a squared array. Adjacent blocks are connected by a small bridge. It's all about concrete. By entering the Complex you instantly feel uncomfortable. I have hardly had these in any other building. But this is a piece of real brutalist architecture. Wide and dark corridors where the residents even take their dogs for a walk, lots of echoing sounds, and yes on one of the pictures you can actually see a car driving inside the house, there's a ramp leading to the higher floors. Climbing up complex stairways, the structure really is a maze! A place definitely not to live in and as a place still very fascinating and disturbing.
The images do portray an unnerving place, it almost goes without saying that if the development was in the United Kingdom it would of probably been listed by now.

You can view the rest of Sol's pictures direct via our Flickr group, while your there upload your own images to appear in the forthcoming reader created book on the Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces.

An archive of all the submissions so far is on the companion Worlds Worst Urban Blog.

2007-12-14

SketchUp Styles - Drawing the City


Google's SketchUp Pro version 6 includes the ability to visualise your 3D models using various 'Styles', as the guide to the new features explains -

"Styles are collections of display settings, including new options like Watermarks and Sketchy Effects, saved in the new Styles palette. You can create, save, and organize Styles as well as share Styles with others. With a single click, you can quickly apply a style to any model by selecting it from the new Styles window"

The use of Styles provides a unique way to visualise models within SketchUp, albeit with a slight performance hit. The 4 minute movie below provides a real-time flythrough of a city created by Tsa on the 3D Warehouse cycling through variety of style modes.

Note the effectiveness of the 'sketchy' feature as well as the 'blueprint' and 'tracing paper' effects:



Music by BX748

The ability to view a city in what is almost a hand drawn mode provides a valuable way to present designs and communicate the cityscape.



Although the styles feature is only available in the 'pro' version of SketchUp you can download a fully functional version from the SketchUp site which allows a full 8 hours of use.

Download the city used in the movie from the 3D Warehouse.

Geographic Data in Second Life



Now we have a route from ESRI's ArcMap into Second Life it opens up all sorts of possibilities for importing geographical data into an environment that is ripe for public participation and collaboration type outreach activities.

The movie below details various population data sets displayed per London Borough, it is still beta but we think it shows potential:


Music by New Inception

If you have Second Life installed you can visit us by clicking here - you will get a red arrow pointing skywards, simply fly up to our section of Second Nature island.

If you do not have Second Life then we thoroughly recommend downloading and popping by for a visit.

2007-12-13

Goodbye London - Hello Phuket: 3D City Maps in Second Life


In the light of the Ordnance Survey asking us to remove our London Model from Second Life and while we wait for details on licensing we thought it was worth carrying on the work but this time with a different dataset.

Thus while Virtual London sits on a shelf due to data restrictions we have used Virtual Phuket as a prototype 3D Map system within Second Life.

The movie embedded below illustrates how sections of the model can be queried to view underlying data, loaded and scrolled by 'rezzing prims' from our server.



Music by New Inception

It is still early days but at least we can get on with the research now without any worries on copyright, just a shame its not London.

Thanks go to Joel for working on the system and Chuthatip Achavasmit for the Phuket data.

Earthmine: A New Kind of Map?

We have been keeping an eye on Earthmine for a while as the use of stereo panoramas to extract 3D information presents a rapid way to both create and populate a 3D model in a way that is easily understandable.

They have just put out a press release that states:
earthmineinc., 3D street side mapping company today announced it has finalized an exclusive agreement with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to license 3D data generation software and algorithms created by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and utilized on the Mars Exploration Rover Missions. earthmine recently unveiled its ground-breaking technology for collecting and delivering street-level three dimensional geospatial information for cities. The agreement with JPL and Caltech includes an exclusive and perpetual license for photogrammetric technology that allows for the creation of very dense and accurate 3D data from stereo panoramic imagery. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but Caltech has taken an equity position in earthmine.
The movie embedded below illustrates the technologyto such an extent that we think their use of the photogrammetric technology may of cracked the issues of rapid street level modelling:



Earthmine has the potential to be one of the most exciting technologies of the year, we are eagerly looking forward to a demo version...

See Earthmine's website for more info.

2007-12-11

Worlds Best Urban Places and Spaces

Our forthcoming reader contributed book 'The Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces' has spawned a companion entitled 'The Worlds Best Urban Places and Spaces' it comes courtesy of Russell Davies and Dan Hill.

To quote Russell on our notion of producing a blog reader contributed book:
I thought that was a really interesting idea, a great way to use a distributed publishing model. But, while chatting about it with Mr Dan Hill and, both of us being mindless optimists, we wondered if we could do a companion piece about The World's Best Urban Places and Spaces. That seemed like a good idea too. Accentuate the positive and all that. So we checked with Dr Hudson-Smith, he's cool with it, so here we go.
So over at the Russell Davies blog and City of Sound from Dan they have set up a Flickr group ready to receive to images for the book.

Two books to be honest is a great idea to celebrate the best and the worst of our cities and urban realms. While ours is the Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces it should be noted that its a celebration of everything that can be just a little bit 'crap' about our cities with a note that things can be changed. So its on a positive vibe, just looking at the monumentous cock-ups people can sometimes make in urban planning, architecture and urban design.

Embedded below is a slide show of the images submitted so far:



If you would like to be in the book its simple, wherever you are in the world simply take a photograph of anything you think is a bad example of architecture, urban planning, streetscape or anything related to the city.

Once you have your photograph, at as high a resolution as possible, you can simply upload it to our newly created group on Flickr, Worlds Worst Urban Spaces and Place including a description of between 100 and 250 words.

We will then include the text and image in a blog post as well as the book, full credit will of course be included on the blog and on your page/section of the book.

All we need is your images and then we can publish - as can Russell and Dan.

See Russells site for the Worlds Best Urban Places and Spaces and our earlier post for details on the Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces.

An archive of all the submissions so far is on the companion Worlds Worst Urban Blog.

We are looking forward to seeing both books in print, assuming the idea works of course...

Second Life with WindLight and the SpaceNavigator


As an update to our previous post on the Second Life beta using the WindLight atmosphere rendering system we thought it would be worth posting a movie.

The difficult part of capturing movies in Second Life is the navigation, especially when concentrating on the water or the sky to display the new atmospheric system. As such it was well timed to be able to use the SpaceNavigator in Second Life under their debug mode.

The SpaceNavigator is traditionally aimed at Google Earth, SketchUp, 3D Max etc so it is refreshing to use it in conjunction with Second Life, in many ways it adds a new way to view the virtual world:



Note the water reflections and notable improvements to the lighting and sky renderings using the WindLight viewer.

The beta viewer is well worth a download the latest version is available from here.

You can find out more details and purchase a SpaceNavigator from the makers - 3D Connexion

2007-12-07

Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World, Working Paper No. 125

We present our latest working paper entitled 'Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World'. The paper comes in at approximately 9000 words and explores visualisation in cities ranging from Twitter to Second Life and through to NeoGeography and The Paraverse. The abstract below provides a guide to its content and as the title suggests working papers are a work in progress so any feedback is welcome, the final version comes out in a book next year.

Digital cities are moving well beyond their original conceptions as entities representing the way computers and communications are hard wired into the fabric of the city itself or as being embodied in software so the real city might be manipulated in silico for professional purposes.

As cities have become more ‘computable’, capable of manipulation through their digital content, large areas of social life are migrating to the web, becoming online so-to speak.

Here we focus on the virtual city in software, presenting our speculations about how such cities are moving beyond the desktop to the point where they are rapidly becoming the desktop itself. But a desktop with a difference, a desktop that is part of the web, characterized by a new generation of interactivity between users located at any time in any place.

We first outline the state of the art in virtual city building drawing on the concept of mirror worlds and then comment on the emergence of Web 2.0 and the interactivity that it presumes. We characterize these developments in terms of virtual cities through the virtual world of Second Life, showing how such worlds are moving to the point where serious scientific content and dialogue is characterizing their use often through the metaphor of the city itself.

Download the full paper as a .pdf (1.8Mb).

Second Life Windlight

Second Life has a beta version of its viewer now available using the WindLight atmosphere rendering system.

The results are definitely a step up in the rendering quality of Second Life as the screen grab from our panoramic 'step inside' globes hopefully illustrates. The beta viewer is well worth a download with the latest version available from here.

Also if you put Second Life into debug mode you can capture high resolution screen shots, you can view the above image at 3840x2162 pixels here (800k)

Images To Date: Worlds Worst Urban Places and Space

Our Flickr pool is slowly but surely filling up with submissions for the forthcoming book on the Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces. The book is in the spirit of Web 2.0 in that its content is created by you the readers of Digital Urban.

Embedded below is a slide show of the images so far, on each image you can roll over 'notes' to read about the context of each photograph:



If you would like to be in the book its simple, wherever you are in the world simply take a photograph of anything you think is a bad example of architecture, urban planning, streetscape or anything related to the city.

Once you have your photograph, at as high a resolution as possible, you can simply upload it to our newly created group on Flickr, Worlds Worst Urban Spaces and Place including a description of between 100 and 250 words.

We will then include the text and image in a blog post as well as the book, full credit will of course be included on the blog and on your page/section of the book.

See our previous post for full details on the book including how to get involved.

All we need is your images and then we can publish...

2007-12-06

Worlds Worst Urban Spaces: Cheltenham


The latest addition to the digital urban reader contributed book on the Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces comes from Dawid Gorny who has recently moved to Cheltenham Spa.

Wikipedia describes Cheltenham as a large spa town and borough in Gloucestershire, England, near Gloucester and Cirencester. The town has a population of 110,013 (2001 census) and the people of the town are known as "Cheltonians". The town motto is: Salubritas et Eruditio ("Health and Education").

The town is located on the edge of the Cotswolds and has an image of being respectable and wealthy. Cheltenham has been a health and holiday spa town resort since the discovery of mineral springs there in 1716. The town is famous for its Regency architecture and is said to be "the most complete regency town in England". The small River Chelt flows under and through the town.

Too quote Dawid:

'I took this photo in Cheltenham on a bridge on Tewkesbury Road. Depicting a subway path under this bridge of note is the sign telling you that it is open to public but it isn't and has been closed since I live in Cheltenham. I think it's such a waste of space when it's not open and there is no zebra crossing on the bridge instead so you have to pass all the way to cross a road'
It is these small overlooked parts of our urban environments that add up to create a grim and to be honest slightly down heartening scene. The photograph is well worth viewing at full size via Flickr as you can start to appreciate why Dawid sent it in.

If you would like to contribute it is easy, simply go out into your local urban environment and photograph anything that you think is an example of poor architecture, urban design or use of space. It could be a photograph of a run down phonebox or a disused building, perhaps a concrete monstrosity from the 1970's or anything that you think fits.

Once you have your photograph, at as high a resolution as possible, you can simply upload it to our newly created group on Flickr, Worlds Worst Urban Spaces and Place including a description of between 100 and 250 words.

Its as simple as that, see our previous post for full details on the book and how to take part.

A full archive is kept at the Worlds Worst Urban Spaces and Places blog (note this will take shape over the coming weeks as content is sent in via Flickr)

Houdini 9: Learning Edition

Issue 99 of 3D World Magazine has a good review of Houdini 9.0, a software program that to be honest we haven't taken for a spin yet.

The review promoted us to go looking on YouTube and the demo reel (embedded below) is impressive:



Also of note is its ability to handle 1000's of 3D agents:



The best thing? They have a Free Learning Edition available for download, we'll be taking a closer look at this as soon as time allows...

Agents from NetLogo to 3D Studio Max

Those nice people over at GISAgents sent us an extremely interesting paper entitled 'Enactment Software: Spatial Designs using Agents-Based Models. Written by T. Narahara of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA it explores the integration of Netlogo with 3D Studio Max.

Narahara states that In the field of architectural design profession, it is fairly typical for designers to build 3-d models of their own building designs within the CAD (computer aided design) software environments such as AutoCAD, 3d Studio MAX. The proposed method introduces walking scale figures in geometric models.

The goal is to add a sense of place to the geometry, and augment the representation of its spatial quality for designers and audience. Through agent-based computation using NetLogo, they move inside the model and display various behaviors in reaction to spatial characteristics such as transparent surface, opaque surface, perforation and furniture.

The full paper, available as a .pdf, is well worth a read for anyone interested in 3DMax or agent based modelling in general.

Update - See NetLogo to 3D Max, Code and Example Movies.

See http://www.gisagents.blogspot.com for more details on agents in general.

2007-12-05

Demo Reels Newlands and Company

Continuing our series of demo reels - which are basically a companies showcase of the last years work - we feature the 2007 Transport and Architecture reels from Newlands and Company.

Architecture Reel 2007



Transportation Reel 2007



See the Newlands and Company site for more info on their projects and services.

The transportation reel is in our view more impressive but as ever with Newlands their output is up there with the best in the industry. We are not sure about the 'jazz' music however it reminds us of the music from Transport Tycoon, but maybe that's just us..

Technology Bubbles

Buzz words are all over the place at the moment with the newest latest development coming at an almost daily basis and to be honest we like it. Its good to be able to do visualise archtiecture, geography and the urban environment in general with increasing ease.

In short we like Web 2.0, Neogeography etc but there is a slight feeling that the market cannot sustain all the new start ups - see the amusing YouTube video below.



Why are we blogging about this? We are having amazing problems with Windows Vista to such an extent that we are about to throw in the towel and go back to XP. The only thing our computer is able to reliably do is YouTube and Firefox, everything else crashes (Office 2007 is the most unreliable piece of software i have ever used) and updates fail to install.

Video picked up via edparsons.com

2007-12-04

Digital Urban - The Book


Apologies for the lack of posts today, been beavering away on a book based around the tutorials and concepts developed on the blog. At the moment details are sketchy but it's looking like a glossy coffee table type publication with simple step by step guides to doing all the things you see on digital urban.

It should be timed to be out in time for a forthcoming conference in February with a draft complete by early January - thus our lack of posts today.

At the moment its going to be published by our department (CASA) through a self publishing route as we do like the glossy nature of Blurb etc. Although nothing is set in stone, the important point is high quality digital printing so if anyone is reading this who is a publisher or a printer do get in touch...

We will get some more blog posts out soon as we can and the Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces book continues apace, we just need your images :)

2007-12-03

Worlds Worst Urban Spaces: Manchester

Andreas Baeing has uploaded some stunningly grim images of his local urban environment to our Flick Pool the 'Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces' for the forthcoming reader contributed book.

Pictured above right is is an example of extreme CCTVing plus some barb-wiring, located in East Manchester. Andreas notes that living in England means, you are recorded on some CCTV system all the time. Which we have to say is true, the average person in the UK is recorded on CCTV 300 times a day.

Continuing Andreas's tour is, in his own words, a rather strange urban structure... It is the ventilation building for the Wallassey tunnel across the Mersey in North Liverpool. It is horrible and fascinating at the same time, somehow a reminder of early science fiction movies

And our final pick of Andreas's images from the pool is a vacant tower block in East Manchester. One can see that some of the rooms of been burnt out, he assumes by arson attacks.



If you would like to contribute it is easy, simply go out into your local urban environment and photograph anything that you think is an example of poor architecture, urban design or use of space. It could be a photograph of a run down phonebox or a disused building, perhaps a concrete monstrosity from the 1970's or anything that you think fits.

Once you have your photograph, at as high a resolution as possible, you can simply upload it to our newly created group on Flickr, Worlds Worst Urban Spaces and Place including a description of between 100 and 250 words.

Its as simple as that, see our previous post for full details on the book and how to take part.

A full archive is kept at the Worlds Worst Urban Spaces and Places blog (note this will take shape over the coming weeks as content is sent in via Flickr)

2007-12-01

Architectural Visualisation: 1st and Main

The architectural flythrough embeded below was created by Newlands & Company (NC3D) for Shorenstein Properties and GBD Architects project, "1st & Main":



This Class-A office and retail space is currently under construction in Portland, Oregon. The animation highlights many of 1st & Main's interior and exterior features and views, and is set in our Portland City Model to provide detailed, realistic context.

NC3D is a 3D visualization consulting firm specializing in transportation, architecture and urban design projects. We will be featuring their new 'Transportation Reel' in our demo reels section in a follow up post.

How To and Tutorials on City, Gaming, Architectural and Google Earth\Maps Visualisation

A quick post to note that our Tutorials thread has been updated to include the recent 'How To's'.

We now have 16 tutorials ranging from Google Maps and Google Earth to Oblivion onward to SketchUp and Nokia 95 panoramas to name but a few subjects.

Over the coming weeks we hope to add a few more, including a couple that have been requested on High Dynamic Range Photography and creating 'Panoramic Planets'. If there is a tutorial you would like to see simply drop us a mail via the link on the top right hand side.

View the complete list of our Tutorials.

VRMAG Issue 28

Panoramas are close to our heart here at Digital Urban, they are a quick and easy way to capture the cityscape and provide a unique view of our environment. VRMAG has just released issue 28 of their magazine that covers all issues relating to panoramas as well as featuring some of the best images around.

Of note is their new 'flash book' format whereby you can drag and turn the page, its well worth sitting down and having a flick through the latest issue.

Visit VRMAG

2007-11-30

Arc to Second Life: Geographic Data Direct to Second Life

As part of our research project funded by the National Centre for E-Social Science we are working on Second Nature Island (part of the NATURE group) on importing geographic data into Second Life.

We have just made a bit of a break through by importing data direct from a Geographic Information System (GIS) into our section of the world. As the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis the majority of our data is held in ArcMap, a GIS package made by ESRI.


The two images (each clickable for larger versions) illustrate the 32 London Boroughs extruded according to their embedded data. Each Borough can be queried and more importantly can now be visualised in Second Life.

It is still early days but an exporter from ArcMap to Second Life would be a unique step in the aim to share geographic data in collaborative environments.

Thanks go to Joel at CASA for writing the scripts.

2007-11-29

Edushi.com - Possibly the Best City Maps in the World?


Every now and then someone sends you a link that has the whole office gathered around your workstation. Edushi.com (short for ECity in Chinese) is such a link, a company that has mapped the 21 major cities in China and the majority of the provincial areas.

The maps are a visual feast of pixel art down to the finest detail and covering vast swathes of urban China. The interface is similar to Google Maps with the ability to pan, zoom as well as run searches for local businesses and transport links.


Edushi.com is part of the Aladdin Information and Technology corporation with the company stating that EDUSHI will be the next Internet revolution. They are currently looking to expand out of China and are looking for cities to partner with.

View Shanghai direct from here

The full list of cities (in chinese) from here - it is worth simply clicking and browsing the maps if you are not fluent in Chinese.

English language information on Aladdin and Edushi.

We are not sure it will be the next Internet revolution (unless perhaps in full 3D) but even in 2D is represent some of the best geographical visualisation of the city that we have seen for a while.

Thanks go to Nelson for sending us the link.

Importing Geographic Terrains into Second Life


Importing physical terrain data into Second Life is one of our goals as it allows 'table top' models of the earths physical geography to be viewed and discussed within a collaborative environment. It turns out the process is relatively easy with our first tests of a real terrain in Thailand and a made up terrain out of Terragen working well.


The image above (click for a larger version) is a 512x512 metre section reduced down for easy viewing, close up views can be obtained using the 'zoom' tool.

It is still work in progress but if anyone is interested we can put up a work flow once its refined.

Posts...

A quick message just to apologise for the lack of posts so far this week. We have been working on a paper for a book chapter entitled 'Iconic Simulations: Mirrors into a Recursive World'. Its almost there and then we can get back to the blog posts...

Up and coming is news on importing DEM's into Second Life and switching Virtual London for Virtual Thailand in Second Life, we have permission to use the data (see Virtual London: Removed from Second Life at Request of Ordnance Survey) which is ironic is some ways.

2007-11-25

Build a Virtual City - Shelter Buy a House Rebuild A Life





Shelter, the United Kingdom's national charity campaigning on housing and homelessness, has set up a virtual plot of land with the aim of building a city to help the homeless.


Shelter's vision is that everyone should have a home - somewhere decent, safe, affordable and permanent
.
Shelter helps more than 170,000 people a year fight for their rights, get back on their feet, and find and keep a home.

Running in Flash the city is made out of iconic pixelart with plots available to buy at varying prices according your choice of bulding. Green space is available from as little as £5 with houses starting at £10, the money goes direct to the charity.

Being able to help the homeless by purchasing a house in a virtual world is a unique and clever concept, the image below illustrates the interface and our house (far left) in the city:



  • A £10 terraced house could pay for a ten minute call to Shelter’s free national helpline.

  • A £20 Victorian house could pay for a 'starting at school' pack to help a child who has been homeless settle into a new school.

  • A £100 Georgian house could help provide a detailed consultation with a trained housing adviser.

  • A £500 department store could help run a monthly housing advice surgery in a local community centre.
Come and be our neighbour in Shelters Virtual City, your be in good company, Steve Fry lives in the windmill over the road...

You can go direct to our plot from here.

For more information see http://www.buildacity.org.uk/

2007-11-24

Mirror Worlds: Real World Virtual Cities, Twinty?


The term Mirror Worlds comes from David Gelernter's seminal book 'Mirror Worlds or: The Day Software puts the Universe in a Shoebox'. Essentially it is about software that mimics reality - the social, informational and visual space that is our environment.

Google Earth is an early example of a mirror world but it lacks the social space that give these representations of reality life and the all important street level, human environment. As such Twinty is worth keeping an eye on.

In their pre-release teaser the Twinty site states:
Imagine a virtual world that brings the dream of “virtual reality” back to life – a place bursting with real people and real experiences. Twinity is not an exercise in digital escapism. Instead, think of it as the virtual extension of your life. Even your avatar will look pretty familiar…
In the coming weeks a group of beta testers will begin exploring Twinity for the very first time. If you’d like to be one of them, fill out the form on the Twinty site and join the Beta.

Twinty is of note on two levels:
  1. It is based on the real world and apparently real cities;
  2. It will be possible to import objects via the Collada and thus from 3DMax, Blender etc
This opens up the possibility of importing city models into the city - a recursive city or a world within a world, we will be running a feature on Twinty as soon as its released.

Metaversed got a hands on with a earlier build , see Can Twinity Foster Creativity and Economy in Virtual Cities?

2007-11-23

Augmented Reality for Communicating Architecture

Augmented Reality (AR)is an interesting and underused concept in communicating the cityscape. Embedded below is an example of using AR in a exhibition environment illustrating the Master Plan for the Almada Waterfront by Richard Rogers:



Any 3D architectural model can be used in a AR context with a simple location marker, a webcam and freely available software. The unique concept of the movie above is integrating the marker onto a glove - it seems to work well.

See our previous Tutorial on Quick and Easy AR for full details on creating your own AR visualisation.

Automatic City Builder - Gamr7

The latest issue of EDGE (183) features an excellent article on Automatic City Building for games. Focused on Gamr7, it details their middleware aimed at enabling artists to quickly design and create detailed urban environments.

The cities are grown based on the meaning of buildings according to activity. Cities are of course complex and this procedural approach is interesting, a movie detailing the system to date is embedded below:



Note the above movie is only indicative of earlier work, a new demo is coming soon but for now due to NDA's this is all the info we have.

We look forward to seeing the latest version...

Gamr7 aim to have a working release by mid 2008.

2007-11-22

Back to the MetaVerse: The Roadmap

Its not often we say this, but 'The Metaverse Roadmap: Pathways to the 3D Web' is one of the best reports we have read for a long time. Written by a cross industry group of authors it provides a balanced, informed and educational overview of virtual worlds, digital earths and the concept of the MetaVerse.

The introduction to the report provides a good summary of its contents:

Taking its name from the immersive virtual world imagined by Neal Stephenson in his visionary novel, Snow Crash, the Metaverse Roadmap (MVR) is the first public ten-year forecast and visioning survey of 3D Web technologies, applications, markets, and potential social impacts.

Areas of exploration include the convergence of Web applications with networked computer games and virtual worlds, the use of 3D creation and animation tools in virtual environments, digital mapping, artificial life, and the underlying trends in hardware, software, connectivity, business innovation and social adoption that will drive the transformation of the World Wide Web in the coming decade.

The MVR explores multiple pathways to the 3D enhanced web, not a single path to a "3D-only" web. An array of 3D web enhancements are emerging, visual extensions to the participatory web technologies.

You can download the 23 page document direct from http://metaverseroadmap.org/

Worlds Worst Urban Spaces: Katowice, Poland

This one made us smile, the majority of the images in the book we are assuming will focus on architecture and the urban scene in general but this image with the human element just sums up that sinking feeling of a terrible town.

Submitted to our Flickr Pool by Craig Nunn, Craig provides the background to the image:
Whilst working as English teachers in Poland, Tomek and I would often ask our students where the worst place in Poland was. The unanimous answer was Katowice.

We decided to make a journey around Poland by train and made a point of stopping off in Katowice. The weather was suitably ominous, and we were greeted with a crumbling mass of dirty grey concrete. Katowice was truly breathtakingly dull and average, and we spent about ten minutes loitering around the station taking it all in, took this photo as a memento, and left on the next train.

It turns out Katowice was all we hoped it would be, because for the rest of the journey we were in awe of the beauty Poland has to offer elsewhere.

To take part you can simply upload your photography to our Flickr Pool, Worlds Worst Urban Spaces and Place including a description of between 100 and 250 words.

The image and text will then be used in a post and included in the forthcoming book written in the spirit of Web 2.0 by readers of this blog.

See the Worlds Worst Urban Spaces and Places blog for the latest posts and full details (note this will take shape over the coming weeks as content is sent in via Flickr)