Building space in the machine: Digital tool kits for mirror worlds

2013

This technical report summarize results of three-year project which dealt with research in the area of reconstruction and generation of virtual cities. The project connects several fields of research like 3D reconstruction, procedural generation of cities and buildings, grammar extraction, agent technologies, cloud computing, user interaction and further. The unpublished results are presented together with references on published papers. All results and working data were collected at one place and references to this place are mentioned at appropriate parts.

Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Web3D Technology, 2020

Social media in virtual reality is in a high-growth market segment with influential products and services in virtual tourism, remote education, and business meetings. Nevertheless, previous systems have never achieved an online platform which renders a 6DoF mirrored world with geotagged social media in real time. In this paper, we introduce the technical detail behind Geollery.com which reconstructs a mirrored world at two levels of detail. Given a pair of latitude and longitude coordinates, our pipeline streams and caches depth maps, street view panoramas, and building polygons from Google Maps and OpenStreetMap APIs. At a fine level of detail for close-up views, we render textured meshes using adjacent local street views and depth maps. When viewed from afar, we apply projection mappings to 3D geometries extruded from building polygons for a coarse level of detail. In contrast to teleportation, our system allows users to virtually walk through the mirrored world at the street level. Our system integrates geotagged social media from both internal users and external sources such as Twitter, Yelp, and Flicker. We validate our real-time strategies of Geollery.com on various platforms including mobile phones, workstations, and head-mounted displays.

The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 2012

MIC is an EU funded project to explore the use of shared virtual environments as part of a public discussion on the issues of building the city of the future. An interactive exploration of four european cities-in the digital city models were translated urban places, family problems and citizens wishes-is a chance to see them in different ways and from different points of view, to imagine new scenarios to overcome barriers and stereotypes no longer effective. This paper describes the process from data to visualization of virtual cities and, in detail, the project of two interactive digital model (Trento and Lisbon).

Architectural Design, 2005

City modelling is a topic which has been on the agenda for a long time and two main approaches from different angles in this field can be identified. GIS experts have attempted over the years (in collaboration with programmers) to build information systems for cities by means of combining graphical information with related metadata. Architects also started to get involved in this field. However, they were mainly interested in the spatial aspects of a city model and created their own “city models” for different purposes. Today crucial questions concerning the creation itself are resolved, the vision of implementation into daily work becomes more and more important. In other words: “what to do” with the accumulated data. This paper intends to identify the core role of the architect in the field of 3D-city modelling.

2012

In 2007, under the headline “Digital Mapping Captures Glasgow,” the BBC reported the astonishing feat of the City Council’s having digitally scanned the entire center of that city, “replicating the façade of buildings to an accuracy of 5 mm.” (BBC News) The viewer is then invited see cinematic scenes of this virtual Glasgow, including a slow panning of the Beaux Arts city hall, a dizzying whirl around the tower of the Glagow Science Centre, followed by a seemingly supersonic flight along the River Clyde, reminiscent of a Star Wars battle scene. This virtual city, officially known as the Glasgow Urban Model, needs to be exceedingly accurate, the viewer is told, in order to assess the impact of new development, prepare for disaster plans, etc. However, the model seems to also have a purpose as public spectacle for those who reach its virtual realm from a distance. The BBC quotes Doug Pritchard of the Glasgow School of Art stating that the Glasgow Urban Model will “be used as a marketi...

This Work Team aimed to receive insights from different perspectives about the uses and possibilities of Virtual Worlds and 3D Environments. The questions we proposed for encouraging the arrival of works covered the main issues related to Virtual Worlds. Our intention was to motivate the participants in these Virtual Worlds from different approaches and with different purposes to share their experiences. Then, we drew our Work Group description by integrating the following topics: applications of these environments, ways of making the contents generated in these environments more accessible, sciences that are using them, advantages of utilizing these environments for educational purposes, specific educational tools for Virtual Worlds, experiences of institutions and enterprises which are present in these environments, which are the Virtual Worlds more widely used and accepted and why

We present two works on the "Virtual City" held at Palermo. They are about the three-dimensional reconfiguration of urban places that show evidence of "invisible" architecture; this is because in one case there were ancient monuments now destroyed, or in another case projects designed for the urban void and never made. The aim is to involve new forms of communication for the development of cultural tourism.

ACM Computing Surveys, 2013

Moving from a set of independent virtual worlds to an integrated network of 3D virtual worlds or Metaverse rests on progress in four areas: immersive realism, ubiquity of access and identity, interoperability, and scalability. For each area, the current status and needed developments in order to achieve a functional Metaverse are described. Factors that support the formation of a viable Metaverse, such as institutional and popular interest and ongoing improvements in hardware performance, and factors that constrain the achievement of this goal, including limits in computational methods and unrealized collaboration among virtual world stakeholders and developers, are also considered.

Town Planning Review, 2007

The term 'model' is now central to our thinking about how we understand and design cities. We suggest a variety of ways in which we use 'models', linking these ideas to Abercrombie's exposition of Town and Country Planning which represented the state of the art fifty years ago. Here we focus on using models as physical representations of the city, tracing the development of symbolic models where the focus is on simulating how function generates form, to iconic models where the focus is on representing the geometry of form in both two and three dimensions. Our quest is to show how digital representation enables us to merge and manipulate form into function and vice versa, linking traditional architectural representation to patterns of land use and movement. Mathematics holds the key to simulation of many kinds and computers now enable us to move effortlessly from the material world of atoms to the ethereal world of bits and back. These new tools also provide us with powerful ways of showing how the real is able to morph into the ideal and vice versa. We argue that this digital world which parallels the material, now gives us unprecedented power to understand and explore cities in ways that Abercrombie could only speculate upon, and we conclude by anticipating how we might respond to the new challenges posed by unlimited access to these virtual worlds.