News aggregator

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....

Location: Long Lake, Oneida County, Wisconsin, USA Photographer: Kevin Kratzke Event: Best of 2005

Continuing the publication online via Issuu of our papers we include our recent paper written with Andrew Crooks, Michael Batty, and Richard Milton from CASA entitled "Mapping for the Masses Accessing Web 2.0 Through Crowdsourcing" as published in Social Science Computer Review.

"The authors describe how we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data. The authors begin with GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base. Click the right arrow to turn the page:


The authors then describe MapTube that enables users to archive maps and demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be shared, and to create new maps from the bottom-up using a combination of crowdcasting, crowdsourcing, and traditional broadcasting. The authors conclude by arguing that such tools are helping to define a neogeography that is essentially ‘‘mapping for the masses,’’ while noting that there are many issues of quality, accuracy, copyright, and trust that will influence the impact of these tools on map-based communication."

Keywords: network economies; neogeography; web-based services; map mashups; crowdsourcing; crowdcasting; online GIS.

The paper can be downloaded from here (pdf link).var addthis_pub="andrewcrooks";

Location: 7 Hillcrest Ave, Eltham, Victoria, Australia Photographer: Nick Milligan Event: Gardens

Location: San Francisco, California, USA Photographer: Lee Nelson Event: Best of 2007

Old school readers will be familiar with the movie below, but with over 1400 posts some of our favourite movies have got lost and the following is one of them:

Panoramic London Churches - HD from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Amazingly easy to make it lead on to the following Worlds within Worlds clip:

Worlds within Worlds: Using Panoramas for Sense of Location and Place from digitalurban on Vimeo.

In short, embedding panoramas in a x/y/z space allows movies to be created where the camera automatically pans around a scene, it can be done in any 3D software.

A quick post as few years ago we wrote a tutorial on creating a 'zoom' movie from Google Earth, it involved all sort of issues with paths and local caches and reversing frames. Nowadays its simply a case of 'right clicking' in Google Earth and dragging the mouse:

Google Earth Zoom from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Google Earth fixes on the location (in our case the CASA offices) so you can drag back and forwards for a smooth zoom in/out. The movie was recorded using Snapz Pro on a Mac but any screen recording tool would do. Its nice to know that this is so much simpler now, although slightly worrying that i almost take a digital earth zooming out and back in at high resolution within 15 seconds for granted...

The movie below combines timelapse techniques with tilt/shift and a focus on the city of Tokyo - we like it a lot:



We must get out and do a London version...

The last 12 months has seen a turning point in terms of bringing geographically aware augmented reality to mobile devices. Significant developments in locational technology such as the inclusion of a built-in digital compass, GPS (Global Positioning System) and accelerometers into mobile phones have allowed not only location but also heading, and pitch to be detected and therefore incorporated into data display systems. These built-in technologies have brought augmented reality to the hands of the masses, and the phones themselves have sparked a market driven boom in fusing augmented reality with location-based services (LBS).Currently applications are in their infancy and mainly focused on specific topics such as ‘show me where the closest x is’. This however represents the tip of the iceberg with the addition of a GIS into the mix there is notable potential for the industry.

The short paper below was written by Sung-Hyun Jang of the GIS and AR blog and us here at digital urban as part of a larger wide ranging technical report for the Association of Geographic Information which is coming out soon. You can read the short below via Issuu:





To keep up to date with all things GIS and AR, head over to Sung's GIS and AR blog.

Location: Vladimir region, Russia Photographer: Vladimir Popov Event: Performing Arts

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)

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

Produced by Danny Bull the movie below uses ambient sound in place of dialogue or narration, this non-verbal portrait crosses language barriers and gives insight to the culture that is Downtown Miami:

A Day in the City from Danny Bull on Vimeo.
Although not the kind of movie we normally feature here in du, it grabbed us sufficiently to makes us think that perhaps we need to include more photographic/film based work.

Location: Kristiansand, Norway Photographer: Bjørn Kåre Nilssen Event: Diversity

The 'Attractive City Generator' is an an interactive installation by Sofia Georgakopoulou, Edyta Augustynowicz and Setafnie Sixt. It was created as part of the The Master of Advanced Studies in CAAD at ETH in Zurich. The students task was to explore urban design methodologies with the use of parametric programs based on object oriented programing, with their particular area of interest focosed on interactivity in urban planning. The video below is extremely impressive, indeed it raises the bar for student projects:




We featured some other work from the course earlier in the week, detailing a 3D City based on Conway's Game of Life, with this quality of output compared to other courses we have seen ETH is up there with some of the best.

At the moment we are mid-writing with various, papers, technical reports and book chapters all seemingly with the deadline of next week. As such and while looking back through previous papers and grants we have identified the 10 phases and buzz words that are either on the rise or on their way down.


Buzz Words on the up...

GeoCloud - geographic data and visualisation tools via cloud computing, we used it in a paper last year and it still feels timely.

Digital Recursion - the activity of representing and accessing digital media which is nested in some form within computer networks. A phrase by Mike Batty, again in a joint paper from last year (see our publications page), he has a tendency to come up with catchy terms.

Web 3.0 - although annoying to many after the over use of Web 2.0, Web 3.0 is arguably read/write/execute with the operating system and the web being one and the same.

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) - is the harnessing of tools to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals (Goodchild, 2007). Not a new term by any means but still a good one to use in any paper or grant involving geographic information. Indeed its one of the those phases you wish you had come up with yourself.


Steady

Mirror Worlds - representations of the real world in scaled down simplified form that were originally pictured as working in parallel to the reality itself but with strong interaction both ways between reality and it mirror. The term was first popularized by David Gerlernter.

Social Shaping - although not a new term by any means it crops up a lot in papers and grant applications at the moment. In short the term can be linked back to MacKenzie and Wajcman's 1985 publication 'The Social Shaping of Technology' where they state that the characteristics of a society play a major part in deciding which technologies are adopted.

With the rise of browser technologies the concepts behind social shaping provide an interesting take on which tech comes to the forefront and we would argue their ever shortening lifespan.


Buzz words on the way down...

Digital - technology that uses discrete (discontinuous) values. By contrast, non-digital (or analog) systems use a continuous range of values to represent information. Slightly worrying as that's the name of the blog, it just feels a bit 90's...

Neogeography - a diverse set of practices that operate outside, or alongside, or in a manner of, the practices of professional geographers. As we mentioned in a previous post, that was 2006-2009, its time to move on.

Far Down -

The Grid - increasingly being replaced in papers by mentioning Web Based Services, which it could be argued can also be seen as The Cloud. The Oxford e-Science Centre define The Grids as:
The name that describes the next significant development in Internet computing. A term first coined in the mid '90s to describe a vision for a distributed computing infrastructure for advanced science projects, the Grid was first properly explained by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman in their book The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure.The Grid is currently lost in the trough of disillusionment and all those hours sat at conferences talking about it feel a bit wasted.

Web 2.0 - the term Web 2.0 has been around since 2004 and is still at the forefront of many academic discussions on the future of technology. Coming about as the result of a discussion between Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty on the status of the web, Tim puts forward a list from 2004 which puts the term into context:

Web 1.0
Web 2.0

DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication

Wikipedia notes that Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. Web 3.0 is nipping at its heals as a new dawn of read/write/execute leaves Web 2.0 behind.

This post should perhaps be filed under 'ways to write anything but that tricky bit in the paper that's due next week'...

This is a nice concept - taking photos of things you 'notice' and uploading them to flickr with the tag 'noticings' and a geolocation. Noticings are interesting things that you stumble across when out and about.



In short, Noticings is basically a game about learning to look at the world around you, as their site states - Cities are wonderful places, and everybody finds different things in them. Some of us like to take pictures of interesting, unusual, or beautiful things we see, but many of use are moving so fast through the urban landscape we don't take in the things around us.

You need a camera, and a way of recording where a photo was taken. That might be adding it by hand to the image within Flickr, or it might be a GPS. The ideal device to play Noticings is a camera with GPS built-in, such as the camera on a Smartphone like an iPhone or Android device.

Head over to http://noticin.gs/ to take part, we like it a lot!

Thanks to Ben over at Section 9 for sending this in.

Hammer Chen got in contact this morning regards a video tutorial detailing how to create a cityscape with 3D Max 2010. Is a good movie, we like the link to Google Maps:



Hammer works as a technical director / trainer in Gemhorn Inc, an Autodesk local reseller in Taiwan, you can see the full tutorial via his blog post.

Location: Ballyclerihan, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, Ireland Photographer: Peter O'Donnell Event: Gardens

Sometimes its good not to be digital - the movie below, expertly made by brusspup, shows how to build a 3D city out of paper:



Best of all, you can download the template here: http://img442.imageshack.us...