CASA: MRes Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation

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Below we provide full details for 2012 entry on the new MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation (ASAV). The course reflects the current state of play in geographic, urban and architectural information systems with an emphasis on visualisation, analysis and modelling. Taught at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, home of digital urban, it is an innovative and exciting opputunity to study at UCL with a MRes acting as a pathway to a PhD or further career in ASAV.

Learn the science of cities and the art of visualisation at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis from September 2012   Cities have never been more important. More than a half of the world's population is now urban, presenting new social and environmental questions unique to the 21st Century.  As a student at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, you will learn to lead the way in collecting, analyzing and visualizing the datasets required to answer the big questions of the next century. At CASA, we have access to data relating to anything from the locations of London's buses in near real time through to passenger flows on the London Underground network and people's tweets about urban issues. In addition to our work with this so-called "Big Data", CASA is also renowned for communicating complex information and ideas to a wide audience of researchers, policy makers and non-specialists alike. The centre comprises a rich mix of researchers ranging from computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians through to geographers, architects and planners. This creates a vibrant and truly interdisciplinary research and teaching environment. The CASA MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation trains students in key techniques in Geographical Information Science, programming visualisations, 3D modeling and mathematical methods of spatial analysis, and with core modules on research methods and academic communication, builds towards a student-led dissertation, incorporating skills from the taught modules. The degree includes a group project which acts as a portfolio for the student's developing visualisation expertise within a piece of a collaborative coursework. The course contains technical and mathematical content, but there is no prerequisite for students to have programming experience - students can take an optional course introducing them to programming methods in term one if they choose, or learn these skills independently and at their own pace. More important is the desire to challenge yourself - we are looking for applicants from geographical, planning and related social science and humanities backgrounds as well as graduates of more mathematical or computational subjects who are keen to develop their existing skills in a new substantive field. To discover more about the course content and how to apply, click here: http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/casa/programmes/postgraduate/mres-advanced-spatial-analysis-visualisation Or download our course leaflet here: http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/downloads/MResASAV-2013.pdf Full-time study applications close 3rd August 2012. Modular flexible (part-time) study applications close 7thSeptember 2012. Term begins 24th September 2012.

Processing - Building Structures with Cellular Automata

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As part of the MRes of Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation in CASA, the course has been exploring various techniques relevant to urban modelling and visualisations, such as Cellular Automata  and (CA), Agents Based Modelling. These approaches can be abstract visualizations and in these terms, Flora from http://en-topia.blogspot.co.uk/ has been looking in CA by building vertical structures over time using Processing.

The clip was created in the context of the the visualization course by Martin Austwick, in the MRes ASAV 2011. 

Music: J.S. Bach Menuet  Gameboy Tetris.

Take a look at http://en-topia.blogspot.co.uk/ for more...

Visualising World Flight-Paths in 3D

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Robin of geotheory.org and a student on our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation course here at CASA, University College London has created an interesting movie looking at data from openflights.org.


Created in Processing the clip visualises 50,000 active flight-paths: 




Take a look at http://geotheory.org/ for more examples...

GPS Visualisation in Processing

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Over the last few weeks we have been kicking about with some books on 'Processing' the open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. We have been reading them with a number of thoughts in mind, one of which is the visualisation of GPS tracks. The people behind Spatial Nodes have done some good work, the movie below shows the tracks of 8 people in Amsterdam:

Tracks in the void from Steven M. Ottens on Vimeo.  
UrbanTick has also started looking into the technique with their first clip based around the UrbanDiary project, recorded between April and August 2009:



If you want to do these yourself a good start is to take a look at http://www.learningprocessing.com/ Daniels book at the site is one of the best tutorial books we have read in a while.

Also, Visualizing Data by Ben Fry is a good second step, link this with an Arduino Unit and things begin to get interesting in terms of the possibilities for interaction and visualistion of the urban environment.

We will have more on linking Ardunio, Processing and general visualisation in future posts.

Processing: A 3D City in One Minute

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We have featured the students work as part of the The Master of Advanced Studies in CAAD at ETH in Zurich quite a lot recently and we are quite fastidious as to what goes on the blog. It goes to show the quality of the output.


The following example by Jakob Przybylo, Min-Chieh Chen and Michele Leidi is a typical - this time creating a city using processing:


Processing City - Sandy City (Trailer) from mjchen on Vimeo.

The clip below provides an insight into the process:


Processing City - Sandy City (HD version) from mjchen on Vimeo.


Being able to create a city in one minute - using their processing application is impressive, it also allows output via .dxf, as such it can be imported into any number of rendering/modelling packages.

No word yet on a wider release, but it would be good to see if this could be made available....