Andrew Hudson-Smith' Digital Urban

George MacKerron here in CASA has been looking at using a Kinect or three in our forthcoming ANALOGIES (Analogues of Cities) conference + exhibition.
Inspired in part by Ruairi Glynn‘s amazing work here at UCL, along with Martin at CASA who has been happily experimenting with the OpenKinect bindings for Processing, George has recently got to grips with the excellent Three.js, which makes WebGL — aka 3D graphics in modern browsers. As a fan of making things accessible over the web he has begun to investigate prospects for working with Kinect data in HTML5 and the results are intriguing - a live 3D, movable webcam... View the live stream here or click on the screenshot to connect (note it needs Chrome at the moment), you can also pan and zoom around with the mouse. Hopefully George will be at his desk for the full effect.
For those without Chrome, the movie below details the concept:




We view this as a glimpse of the future of webcams, the next step is to up the resolution (bandwidth heavy)  and add image data. The implications for video conferencing or indeed that industry that academically we probably cant mention are notable...
Take a look at the blog post from George for full technical details.

Taxi! is an analytical model that maps the trip data for 10,000 taxi rides over the course of 24 hours. Geographic location data for the origin and destination of each ride is combined with waypoint data collected from the Google Maps API in order to generate a geographically accurate representation of the trip:



Taxi! from Juan Francisco Saldarriaga on Vimeo. The team used data from taxi rides originating or ending in the neighborhoods of Lincoln center or Bryant Park. The visualization recreates a ‘breathing’ map of Manhattan based on the migration of vehicles across the city over a period of 24 hours, displaying periods of intensity, density and decreased activity.

This project was a collaboration between Tom McKeogh, Eliza Montgomery and Juan F Saldarriaga. It was done for SEARCH class taught by Mark Collins and Toru Hasegawa (Proxy), at GSAPP, Columbia University, Fall 2011.

As part of the reseach they acknowledge the support of the CUNY High Performance Computing Center under NSF Grants No. CNS-0855217 and No. CNS-0958379.

For any additional information please contact Juan Francisco Saldarriaga at jfs2118@columbia.edu

As a side note we also like the music by Rob Viola of statikluft.com/

Readers will know that as part of the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, here in CASA, we are exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. As part of the course we are looking at collecting data from the Twitter API and using the resulting .csv file as an input into a variety of software, including Processing and ArcMap. Data so far has been focused on displaying the output from ArcGIS as a slightly more traditional map, albeit in 3D via Lumion:





Taking a step back it is possible to take a more abstract view of the data visualisation and use the Twitter data collected to create a digital elevation model for direct landscape visualisations.


As we have mentioned in previous posts there are of course many arguments on the pro's and con's of visualising data in such a way, indeed the visualisation is developed to open up the debate as part of the MRes course allowing various visualisation techniques to be compared from the same data set. 


Sometimes however an abstract route to visualising data can quite liberating in a world of visualisation dominated by more traditional and academic output, the screenshot above illustrates Kingston Peak with Soho Mountain dominating the background. The movie below details the landscape as a fly-through:







In future posts we will explore issues of scale as we take the landscape and move it into an online exhibition space.


Update  - see Data Space: Agent Based Models, SketchUp, Visualisation, ArcGIS and Lumion for the exhibition space developments...

Over the past few weeks we have been exploring exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. Developed as part our Masters course in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation we are now looking into issues of scale, realtime rendering, rapid visualisation and 3D exhibition spaces.




Regular readers will know we have been exploring Unity due its interactive nature and ability to import various file types into its game engine (see Particles, Agents and Emergent Behaviour ). Unity is still an option but for rapid visualisation Lumion also offers distinct possibilities. The movie below details our first draft example of building an exhibition space (SketchUp), retexturing and adding various crowd/delegate models (3DMax) and the Twitter map (ArcGIS) using Lumion:




If Lumion offered a stand alone viewer rather than purely movie based output then it would be our engine of choice. As such it is currently a weigh up between Lumion and Unity, our Unity example is under development, we will post it soon as we can...

As part of the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, here in CASA at The Bartlett, University College London, we are exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. As part of the course we are looking at collecting data from the Twitter API and using the resulting .csv file as an input into a variety of software, including Processing and ArcMap.

One such known example is the London Twitter map by UrbanTick, developed using the data collector created by Steven Gray and imported by Fabian into ArcMap, it developed a style of its own as the 'NewCity Landscape' collection. From a digital urban point of view the next stage of the map is a 3D extension, a transformation that proved surprisingly difficult due to the nature of combining the worlds of traditional GIS and game engines such as Lumion.

We are still in the early stages of development but the movie below illustrates the NewCity Landscape Map of London visualisation in Lumion as a 'Twitter Island':



Music by Pigeman over at MP3 Unsigned. There are of course many arguments on the pro's and con's of visualising data in such a way, indeed the visualisation is developed to open up the debate as part of the MRes course allowing various visualisation techniques to be compared from the same data set.

We will have more updates as the visualisation develops, along with a walk through of how to build it. If your interested in such output our MRes is now open for applications, entry 2012-2013...

As Editor of Future Internet i am pleased to announce that Nathan Jurgenson of the University of Maryland has just published a new paper entitled 'When Atoms Meet Bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution': 


The rise of mobile phones and social media may come to be historically coupled with a growing atmosphere of dissent that is enveloping much of the globe. The Arab Spring, UK Riots, Occupy and many other protests and so-called “flash-mobs” are all massive gatherings of digitally-connected individuals in physical space; and they have recently become the new normal. The primary role of technology in producing this atmosphere has, in part, been to effectively link the on and the offline. 


The trend to view these as separate spaces, what I call “digital dualism”, is faulty. Instead, I argue that the digital and physical enmesh to form an “augmented reality”. Linking the power of the digital–creating and disseminating networked information–with the power of the physical–occupying geographic space with flesh-and-blood bodies–is an important part of why we have this current flammable atmosphere of augmented revolution.


The full paper can be read over at Future Internet

We are pleased to note another new paper in Future Internet Journal as part of the special issue on on NeoGeography and WikiPlanning:



The Street Network Evolution of Crowdsourced Maps: OpenStreetMap in Germany 2007–2011 Pascal Neis 1,* , Dennis Zielstra 2  and Alexander Zipf 1  1 Geoinformatics Research Group, Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg, Berliner Street 48, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany2 Geomatics Program, University of Florida, 3205 College Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33314, USA

The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project is a prime example in the field of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Worldwide, several hundred thousand people are currently contributing information to the “free” geodatabase. However, the data contributions show a geographically heterogeneous pattern around the globe. Germany counts as one of the most active countries in OSM; thus, the German street network has undergone an extensive development in recent years. The question that remains is this: How does the street network perform in a relative comparison with a commercial dataset? By means of a variety of studies, we show that the difference between the OSM street network for car navigation in Germany and a comparable proprietary dataset was only 9% in June 2011. 


The results of our analysis regarding the entire street network showed that OSM even exceeds the information provided by the proprietary dataset by 27%. Further analyses show on what scale errors can be reckoned with in the topology of the street network, and the completeness of turn restrictions and street name information. In addition to the analyses conducted over the past few years, projections have additionally been made about the point in time by which the OSM dataset for Germany can be considered “complete” in relative comparison to a commercial dataset.


You can download the full paper direct from the Future Internet Journal site.

Lumion is a 3D engine for rapid visualisation, it allows models to be quickly imported and integrated within more complex scenes. 
One of its strong points is support for the COLLADA  - COLLAborative Design Activity file format for interactive 3D applications file format, allowing models to be easily exported from Google SketchUp. As a quick test of its capabilities we headed over to the Google 3D Warehouse and downloaded three models of iconic London buildings. By simply importing into SketchUp and then exporting in .dae (COLLADA) we were able to create the following movie:




The clip was created with the free version of Lumion, it really has never been easier to create rapid visualisations, the next step is to import various other data sources to create a more informative output.

We are pleased to announce a special issue of  Future Internet, Volume 3, Issue 4 (December 2011).  Focussed on Landscape and the Internet and edited by Dr. Christopher Pettit Principal Research Scientist and Research Manager, Spatial Information Sciences, Department of Primary Industries Victoria, Australia and Dr. Arzu Coltekin,Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 80750 Zürich, Switzerland, the issue represents a series of notable papers:
Table of Contents: Olaf Schroth, Ellen Pond, Cam Campbell, Petr Cizek, Stephen Bohus and Stephen R. J. SheppardArticle: Tool or Toy? Virtual Globes in Landscape Planning Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 204-227; doi:10.3390/fi3040204
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/204/



Philip Paar and Jörg RekittkeArticle: Low-Cost Mapping and Publishing Methods for Landscape Architectural Analysis and Design in Slum-Upgrading Projects Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 228-247; doi:10.3390/fi3040228
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/228/



Mark Imhof, Matthew Cox, Angela Fadersen, Wayne Harvey, Sonia Thompson, David Rees and Christopher PettitArticle: Natural Resource Knowledge and Information Management via the Victorian Resources Online Website Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 248-280; doi:10.3390/fi3040248
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/248/



David Parsons, Ramesh Lal and Manfred Lange
Article: Test Driven Development: Advancing Knowledge by Conjecture and Confirmation
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 281-297; doi:10.3390/fi3040281
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/281/



Haifeng Li and Bo WuArticle: A Service-Oriented Architecture for Proactive Geospatial Information Services
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 298-318; doi:10.3390/fi3040298
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/298/



Subhash Sharma, Christopher Pettit, Ian Bishop, Pang Chan and Falak ShethArticle: An Online Landscape Object Library to Support Interactive Landscape Planning
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 319-343; doi:10.3390/fi3040319
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/319/



Saviour Formosa, Vincent Magri, Julia Neuschmid and Manfred SchrenkArticle: Sharing Integrated Spatial and Thematic Data: The CRISOLA Case for Malta and the European Project Plan4all Process Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 344-361; doi:10.3390/fi3040344
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/344/



Sabrina Lai and Corrado ZoppiArticle: An Ontology of the Strategic Environmental Assessment of City Masterplans 
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 362-378; doi:10.3390/fi3040362
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/362/



Arzu Coltekin and Tumasch ReichenbacherReview: High Quality Geographic Services and Bandwidth Limitations
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 379-396; doi:10.3390/fi3040379
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/379/


Full details can be found over at the Future Internet Journal. 

Sometimes you walk to the end of lab, here in CASA, get introduced to a visitor and have to take a step back at the resulting demo. Yesterday i had the pleasure of meeting Tobias Franke of the University of Passau's Embedded System Lab who is part of a team looking at realtime crowd densities. Tobias has run a trial during the 2011 Lord Mayor's Show in London. The "hotter" (i.e. red) the blobs are, the denser the crowd was at that location, the resulting visualisation is impressive:


The data was been gathered by a smartphone application collecting live sensor data from users. The heatmap and the corresponding visualization was realised by Martin Wirz of the ETH Zurich's Wearable Computing Lab with Prof. Eve Mitleton-Kelly (director of the Complexity Group at the London School of Economics) involved in the development as policy maker. The overall system allows emergency services to gain an almost-live insight into the crowd density at large scale events with data has been collected and processed using the CoenoSense backand system (www.coenosense.com). The software has been developed as a part of the Socionical research project (for more information see socionical.eu), in short we were impressed at the real time crowd viz via a smart phone app...

Richard Milton here in CASA is working on our new National Centre for Research Methods funded TAILISMAN project. One aspect of the project is looking into data visualisation, here we present a guest post by Richard on the automatic visualisation of data from the London Datastore...

This started out as an experiment in how to handle geospatial data published in Internet data stores. The idea was to make an attempt at structuring the data to make searching, comparison and visualisation easier. The London Datastore publish a manifest file which contains links to CSV files that are in the correct format for MapTube to handle, so I wrote a process to make the maps automatically. The results are one thumbnail map for every field in the first hundred datasets on the London Datastore. I stopped the process once I got to a hundred as it was taking a long time.


 A section of the results are shown below:

You can view the zoomable version via the full 10,000 pixel image created using the Image Cutter.
The name of the dataset and name of the column being visualised are shown in the top left of the map, while the colour scale is a Jenks 5 class range between the min and max of the data. This sort of works, but raises more questions than it answers about the data. To start with, one interesting thing that jumps out of the data is that there was a step change in London population around 1939, from the “London Borough Historic Population” dataset. The first problem with this is that there is no structure to how the thumbnail maps are placed on the image. The idea is to use a data classifier and group maps according to how similar they are, so distance would be proportional to similarity. This work is still in progress. The next problem is with the colour scales, as it commits the cardinal sin of not showing one. The maps are supposed to be representative, so all use the green Jenks 5 classes, but it’s obvious that this has gone wrong on most of the maps. The reason for this is that the London Datastore include data in the CSV files at different geographic scales. Most of the maps show London at Borough level, but also contain data for England, Scotland and Wales which mess up the automatic colour scale. The top range ends up being the larger geographic areas which you can’t see, so the maps end up with just four classes on them. On some of the maps you can see the Government Office Regions (Midlands, Wales, South East etc), along with Borough level data for London. A map showing data at different geographic scales. London has data at Borough level while the rest of the country is at GOR level. The final problem, which also relates to different geographic scales, is to do with almost all the maps visualising either a count of people or events. Most maps are a population of some kind, so displaying population density rather than count would make a lot more sense. As a proof of concept, this demonstrates that we can handle the maps automatically from an Internet data store. One thing that’s obvious from looking at the zoomable map view is that you need the ability to click on one of the thumbnails and go straight through to the full size map with all the information about what is it. There is also no search facility so you can’t find anything, but the next proof of concept is where things will start to get interesting....
We will be following progress and the forthcoming TALISMAN project blog with more results in the new year.

The Sky Scratcher is a kickstarter project which at the time of writing has 38 hours to go - in short there is still time to back it.


If we had a cat here at digitalurban it would without doubt be the Sky Scratcher - a revolutionary, architectural spin on the cat scratching post.  Built from more than 125 corrugated cardboard die-cut pads, a bamboo plywood base and center pole, the goal is to use Eco-friendly materials that are both safe for your cats and aesthetically pleasing to the human eye. 


Set up my Mike Estes, his love for all things creative drove him to reinvent the cat scratching post with The Sky Scratcher. Mike states that not only will your feline friends enjoy scratching to their hearts content, you will also enjoy a high quality piece of art that will add a stylish accent to any room in your home or office...



We would love to see this enter production, head over to the Sky Scratcher page on KickStater to give them your backing...

Spinger have published, in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, a paper by Ralph Barthel, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Angelina Karpovich, Martin de Jode and Chris Speed based around our TOTeM/Internet of Things work. Entitled, An Internet of Old Things as an Augmented Memory System, the full abstract and download link are below:


Abstract


The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates new contexts for augmenting things with stories in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things (IoT). Tales of Things is a tagging system which, based on two-dimensional barcodes (also called Quick Response or QR codes) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, enables the capturing and sharing of object stories and the physical linking to objects via read and writable tags.


Within the context of our study, it has functioned as a technology probe which we employed with the aim to stimulate discussion and identify desire lines that point to novel design opportunities for the engagement with personal and social memories linked to everyday objects. In this paper, we discuss results from fieldwork with different community groups in the course of which seemingly any object could form the basis of a meaningful story and act as entry point into rich inherent ‘networks of meaning’. Such networks of meaning are often solely accessible for the owner of an object and are at risk of getting lost as time goes by. 


We discuss the different discourses that are inherent in these object stories and provide avenues for making these memories and meaning networks accessible and shareable. This paper critically reflects on Tales of Things as an example of an augmented memory system and discusses possible wider implications for the design of related systems.


http://www.springerlink.com/content/v8405w81p2j35451/

Crowd, transport and urban simulations are at their roots down to 'Agents' or 'Objects' that are assigned a set of rules as to how to moves in relation to both the environment and other agents around them. 3D Studio Max has a built in 'Crowd and Delegate' system which can be used to assign behaviour and therefore create realistic traffic of pedestrian systems in 3D space.

The movie below displays our first tentative steps to explore emergent behaviour via the introduction of simple rules. The movie starts out with a basic 'wander' behaviour where the agents only knowledge is the shape of the surface. Moving on we assign each of our 'cubes' (of which we have become quite fond of...) a level of vision so they can see ahead and therefore avoid each other and objects in their environment.


Crowd and Delegates - Emergent Behaviour from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Thirdly, the agents seek a 'sphere' which could be viewed as a source of food. While being aware of each other and tweaking the way the cubes move a swarm behaviour emerges. Finally, we introduce competing groups with two priorities, firstly to eat and secondly to stay as a group. The majority choose the group over the food but a couple stray off in search of sustenance and lose the other members.

Previous steps in our visualisation of agent based models are based around a simple flocking examples. This model is an attempt to mimic the flocking of birds, while the resulting motion also resembles schools of fish. The flocks that appear in this model are not created or led in any way by special leader rather, each bird is following exactly the same set of rules, from which flocks emerge.

We have exported the model into 3D Max providing the visualisation below, as ever these are early days but the results seem to run well with 300 'birds' over 1000 frames. The birds are rendered as cubes at the moment for proof of concept:




Flocking in NetLogo exported to 3D Max from digitalurban on Vimeo.
Music "Funkmelon Blooz" (Electronica)

The birds follow three rules: "alignment", "separation", and "cohesion". "Alignment" means that a bird tends to turn so that it is moving in the same direction that nearby birds are moving. "Separation" means that a bird will turn to avoid another bird which gets too close. "Cohesion" means that a bird will move towards other nearby birds (unless another bird is too close). When two birds are too close, the "separation" rule overrides the other two, which are deactivated until the minimum separation is achieved.

The three rules affect only the bird's heading. Each bird always moves forward at the same constant speed.

If we were using the built in Crowd and Delegate system a true 3D flocking system would be possible, but it would be pure visualisation, by importing via NetLogo you gain access to the raw data and thus spatial analysis is possible. It is also quick to model and provides the best of both worlds - 3d visualisation and complex modelling.

While 3D Max is of use for crowd and particle simulation when it comes to modelling complex systems an external package is required, such as NetLogo. The movie below details our first steps at CASA (home of digital urban) to export a basic traffic model from NetLogo into 3D Studio Max. The import script was written by our new PhD student, Ateen Patel and opens up a vast array of opportunities to both visualise and model the city.




Music by The Tedd-Z Cookbook, Aerodrome (Funky Shuffle Remix)

NetLogo is a cross-platform multi-agent programmable modeling environment that is widely. It is particularly well suited for modeling complex systems developing over time. Modelers can give instructions to hundreds or thousands of independent "agents" all operating concurrently. This makes it possible to explore the connection between the micro-level behavior of individuals and the macro-level patterns that emerge from the interaction of many individuals.(Nation Master Encyclopedia).

How does this relate to the city? The next part is to put in real geographical data and to get the agents movies and reacting to each other on a spatial network, more on that to come. Perhaps using a particle system as per the movie below:



Particles in the City from digitalurban on Vimeo.
All of these models are going into our exhibition space to allow a step by step guide to the principles of agent based modelling. At the moment we are weighing up two options - Unity and Lumion. Our previous trials in Unity are below:





Unity is great, it is a fully featured game engine, however we are also looking at Lumion. Lumion, aimed more at direct visualization, is remarkably easy to learn, the movie below is the result of our first 20 minutes working with Lumion from first load to final output. It is merely proof of concept, but taking the output from Max and dragging into Lumion is refreshingly simply:




We will have more on Lumion in future posts...

The skyscraper is perhaps the most recognizable icon of the modern urban landscape. Providing offices, homes, restaurants, and shopping to thousands of inhabitants, modern skyscrapers function as small cities- with infrastructure not unlike that hidden beneath our streets. At the time of year when your looking for a book on all things urban then The Heights by Kate Ascher, author of The Works: Anatomy of a City provides a great graphic tour through the inner workings of skyscrapers.


Exploring the interconnected systems that make life liveable in the sky Kate provides a unique illustrated view of the development, operation, safety and history of the skyscraper. Just how do skyscrapers sway in the wind, and why exactly is that a good idea? How can a modern elevator be as fast as an airplane? Why are skyscrapers in Asia safer than those in the United States and onwards.... 


Along the way, The Heights introduces the reader to every type of person involved in designing, building, and maintaining a skyscraper: the designers who calculate how weight and weather will affect their structures, the workers who dig the foundations and raise the lightning rods, the crews who clean the windows and maintain the air ducts, and the firefighters-whose special equipment allows blazes to be fought at unprecedented heights. 


More than a technical survey, Ascher’s work is an ode to the most monumental aspect of modern civilization. Full of illustrations and anecdotes, The Heights is a good art style guide for anyone interested in high rises...

Core to GEMMA (our Geographical Engine for Mass Mapping Applications) is the OpenStreetMap feature highlighter. The feature highlighter allows users to search for any term and have it mapped with via points or original OpenStreetMap feature.
Ollie at CASA has used the feature to map the occurrences of the “High Street” road name – and a few regional variations, namely Main Street, Front Street, Market Street, Fore Street and The Street. Using GEMMA, and the high level of completion of OpenStreetMap in the UK and Ireland, allows us to visually show the spatial patterns of such street names:


As Ollie states, it turns out that Main Street is popular in the Midlands and in Scotland and Ireland, and Front Street is popular in the North-East of England (around Newcastle) while High Street is used nearly everywhere in the UK – but only sparingly in Ireland. Market Street is popular in the Manchester and Devon areas. Fore Street is popular in Cornwall and The Street very popular in Essex and Kent.
GEMMA is in early beta, aimed at allowing anyone to create a map via its online interface and iPhone app, you can find out more and try it out via the GEMMA blog. We also provide a unique map url shortener, so you can share your maps with ease - the map above can be viewed live at http://gemma.casa.ucl.ac.uk/apps/canvas/?m=7tj
Thanks go to Ollie over at http://oliverobrien.co.uk/ for creating the map, let us know if you create a GEMMA map....

Realtime rendering has moved on a long way in recent years - a prime example is Lumion® a real-time 3D visualisation tool for architects, urban planners and designers.


Suited for creating videos, still renderings and live demonstrations with a quick turnaround Lumion provides high quality output and best of all there is a free version, the movie below provides a look at version 1.0:




In terms of cityscapes Nano 3D Virtual Studio entered the Lumion architecture visualization competition 2011, the results are impressive:
 


Version 2 is incoming, take a look at http://lumion3d.com/ for full details, we may be including this as part of our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, its an interesting tie between Unity and Lumion. Thanks to Tom Vilans for sending in his thoughts on Lumion....

Finally we are nearing the end of the project (ok technically at the end but its both complex and exciting so we might squeeze in a few more days yet) we would like to introduce the world to GEMMA, the Geospatial Engine for Mass Mapping Applications. 
GEMMA was designed to allow anyone to make complex map mashups with a minimum of geographic knowledge. So easy in fact that even the most modest of users will be able to quickly collect data and visualise it in a few clicks, no worrisome logins, data downloads or nasty terms and conditions . Hopefully, GEMMA will get everyone excited about making their own maps, from a map of all their local Tesco locations through to a map of the number of cars that pass by their house. Building maps online takes time and often basic programming knowledge. GEMMA solves this problem by integrating many of the popular CASA products, along with some new features and iPhone app, combined into one easy to use platform allowing you make an interactive map that can be shared with the world. So what are GEMMA’s main features? Basically it’s a structured mashing application. A little bit from MapTube, a little bit from Google MyMaps, a little bit of opening up the wealth of data from OpenStreetMap. Add your own measured data with the accompanying iPhone app that is super simple to use – choose what you want to count, start tapping the screen to count, and then upload. Back in the GEMMA website, login and add. With GEMMA you can stand on street corners and easily measure the demographics of, for example,Boris Bike users, create a shiny PDF of the data, and stick it up on a wall or embed it into your homework. We provide a unqiue shortcode for sharing with the world, or GEMMA will remember it in a list for future access. How would you use GEMMA? If you’re a Geography student who needs to prepare some maps for your course work on local population groups, you may need to collect counts of people for various locations around your local town and  compare that with the Output Area Classifications (OAC). What are you going to do? In the past you would have had to go and find an OAC map of your area and annotate it with the various bits of data you collect but you have left it to the last minute, again, and don’t know what to do! That’s where GEMMA steps in. Take a look at the video to see how easy using GEMMA actually is: You can view the PDF created in the video here and take a preview look at  GEMMA. The iPhone Application will be available to download from the iTunes App Store and we will let you know in this blog when it’s available. The GEMMA website is still in the BETA stages and we are just cleaning up the interface to make it easier for you to use as soon as it’s ready you’ll be able to use the web app from this link. So who built GEMMA? A few of the people at CASA, namely  Steven Gray, Ollie O’Brien our Principle Investigator Andy Hudson-Smith and finally Richard Milton who built some of the backend features that GEMMA requires to work so a big thank you to him. We will try and get a team photo together soon as we can. As Ollie notes he has already blogged about the different APIs and libraries used. With any significant web project these days, good use of the rich tapestry of libraries out there is invaluable. Why write a polished Javascript-based UI from scratch when there is the powerful, beautiful and simple JQuery UI? Why spend ages creating sortable, resizable tables when JQuery Datatables will do that for you? Mapnik 2 has a whole host of new features, let’s use them. Let’s use authentication APIs from Twitter and Google rather than writing our own – the last thing people on the web need is yet another logon and password to remember (although, as Steve who did this part can attest, it’s not that easy – or smooth – for developers to take incorporate third-party identity management.) Let’s use custom-styled maps in the Google Maps API, and let Google take the strain of rendering them (it’s dead easy to create a grayscale layer for the Google Maps API). If you sat Ollie down and asked the work he was most personally proud of, the answer would be GEMMAs PDF creation. During the project he has blogged about a couple of fairly cool things he has been able to do with WMS and SVG inputs for Mapnik and Cairo respectively, which looked to be a challenge. Steve on the other hand has been central to the GEMMA iPhone app, an app that allows anyone or any group to count anything, anywhere and have it mapped in realtime. From pedestrians and traffic through to flora and fauna, if it can be counted it can be mapped. The creation of a whole new mapping service with surveys, open data, custom markers and a bespoke iPhone app within a single interface has honestly been a challenge and one that has led to intense project meetings in the GEMMA lab. Through it all we feel we have honestly come up with something unique, we hope you are as excited about GEMMA as we are and it doesn’t stop here. GEMMA has so far been a short, focused project. It’s tough to stop once you’ve started going – there’s so more we could do. We have more features to add to GEMMA in the pipeline so if you are interested in or have a feature that you would like to see in GEMMA then do get in contact. Good news is that the developer team (Steve, Ollie and Richard) won 'developers of 2011' at the recent JISC GeoAwards. Personally I am very proud of the team, papers and further development coming soon... Thanks as ever go to JISCGeo for allowing the creation of a Geographic Engine for Mass Mapping Applications.

With recent developments here in CASA we somehow managed to miss the addition of automated 3D models into Google Earth for London. The mix of hand made and we presume LiDAR derived models is stunning with resolution down to modelling the chimneys on many buildings:


The quad at University College London is notably impressive, as is Trafalgar Square. The model is far from complete but we assume other areas are on their way.

Music: London Town by Rod Kinny on unsigned.

Dr Duncan Smith, a Research Fellow here in CASA and author of our latest blog - Urban Geographics has produced an interesting visualisation of London's Urban form:

The visualisation of the density and function of the built-environment shows the dominance of the intensifying city-centre, corridors of commercial development and the smaller scale centres in Outer London. The data comes from the Valuation Office and the Greater London Authority. For more info and a write up of the background to the viz, take a look at http://www.geographics.blogs.casa.ucl.ac.uk