Between the Poles: SimCity with real data: modeling real cities in 3D in a Web environment

Geoff Zeiss

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Lidar News
Gene Roe's laser scanning industry news
Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGEO
OSGeo was created to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software and promote its widespread use
Proven guidelines for reducing underground infrastructure damage at airports, university, industrial, and commercial campuses, and towns
There are proven measures that an administration, owner, or municipal government responsible for an airport, university, industrial or commercial campus, or town can undertake to reduce the risk of underground utility damage, the associated disruptions to operations and business and the danger for workers and the public.
Sharing information about the location of underground utilities
The U.S. devotes an estimated $10 billion annually to locating underground infrastructure. Every construction project requiring excavation involves significant efforts in locating underground utilities prior to and during construction to reduce the risk of injuries and unexpected project delays. But this information is rarely shared and the location of underground infrastructure is recaptured over and over again. There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database.
Growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction
Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects. While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.
Progress in geospatial, civil, and BIM interoperability promises efficient workflows for infrastructure
The BIM and geospatial interoperability challenge is the latest symptom of the broader problem of integrating AEC and geospatial workflows, that has contributed to low productivity in the construction sector. After the announcement about a year ago by Jack Dangermond and Andrew Anagnost of a new relationship to build a bridge between Autodesk and ESRI technologies, I thought it a good time to review progress toward interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds.
Geography2050: Accurate location information about underground infrastructure is essential for powering our future planet
I thought it would be worth while to include here a talk I gave at GEOGRAPHY 2050 Powering Our Future Planet at Columbia University in New York about the importance of accurate location information about underground infrastructure for the future development of the energy grid. With some notable exceptions accurately recording the location of subsurface infrastructure including oil, gas, electric power and other energy infrastructure is ignored - perhaps this is a case of out-of-sight is indeed out-of-mind. The reality is that knowing the location of underground energy infrastructure is critical for national security, for disaster planning and management, for public safety and for economic efficiency. Everyone is aware of at least one disaster resulting from or exacerbated by not knowing where our energy infrastructure is - the explosions in San Bruno in California (2010) and Belgium (2004) immediately come to mind.
Deep learning enables automated extraction of building footprints and road networks from satellite imagery
Automated feature extraction from satellite imagery has made major progress in the last year. Accurate building footprints extracted from high resolution satellite imagery are becoming available from companies such as Ecopia, which has just announced a partnership with DigitalGlobe, whose satellites are capable of 30 cm (approximately one foot) resolution. Also NVIDIA has demonstrated the ability to automate detection of many road networks using sophisticated algorithms and multi-spectral high resolution imagery.
BIM + geospatial interoperability would avoid another CAD + GIS quagmire
A specific challenge currently facing the AEC and geospatial industries is integrating building information models (BIM) and geospatial infrastructure and building models. There are parallels between what happened in the 1990s in unsuccessfully addressing CAD+GIS interoperability and the current challenge of BIM+geospatial interoperability. But there are also important differences which provide grounds for optimism that the availability of both BIM and geospatial standards, a vibrant open source geospatial community, and a new willingness on the part of major software players in the BIM and geospatial industries will make it possible to successfully address the latest interoperability challenge facing the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) and geospatial industries.
BVLOS drones improve power line inspections amid increasing fire and storm risks for utilities | Utility Dive
Transmission line inspections for vegetation management and other purposes are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. We saw the devastating effect of vegetation encroachment in the recent California fires, which in part have been blamed on failure to maintain properly cleared transmission lines. With drones that can cover great distances in a single flight and provide detailed and accurate aerial imagery of transmission lines and other infrastructure, it is now possible to almost completely automate this expensive process. Automating transmission line inspections for vegetation management using BVLOS drones not only saves money, but also could improve the resiliency and reliability of the transmission grid.

« Is cheap solar PV disruptive in the electric power industry ? | Main | BIM standard IFC4 published as ISO16739 »

September 20, 2013

SimCity with real data: modeling real cities in 3D in a Web environment

At FOSS4G in Nottingham I was looking forward to hearing Peter Smart and Rob Hawkes talk about their ViziCities project which is intended to bring real world cities to life using open, big-data and open source technologies including WebGL (3D), Web Audio API, GeoJSON, Web Workers (HTML5 multi-threading), and PostGIS. But they weren't able to make it. Fortunately their web site and blog contain a lot of information about the development of the Vizicities project.

Peter and Rob describe Vizicities as an interactive 3D city vizualisation platform that is beautiful, fun and engaging, the intersection of data, art and play. It has been described as SimCity with real data. And the SimCity relationship is more than skin deep. The authors themselves say that "It's undeniably SimCity-esque though will encompass many aspects beyond that comparison; ranging from data visualisation, to game design, art, and general awesomeness." And it appears that Richard Shemaka, the principle engineer at Maxis for data layers in SimCity is a fan of the project.

Data sources

The data is from free data sources for London and the UK like Data.gov.uk, the London Datastore, Ordnance Survey OpenData, OpenStreetMap, the Office for National Statistics, and Police.uk for most of what was needed (census data, crime, geographic features). Finding accurate building outline and height data is a problem in the UK. They've had to make do with simple building outlines from Ordnance Survey's VectorMap dataset. Unfortuantely this does not include height data for the buildings so they've had to kludge this.

3D visualization including thematic and heat maps

They first focussed on visualizing buildings, natural features, and roads in 3D. A secondary focus of the project is the visualization of thematic data such as demographics. This includes heat maps.

London Underground in 3D and real-time

One of the objectives from the beginning was to visualize public transport in London in real-time and 3D. They started with the London Underground network in 3D with the aim to place real-time trains moving along 3D tracks. You can see a video of the result. Remarkable.

Even more remarkably this has all been developed since February which shows the power of modern open source web development technologies.

Posted at 12:38 PM in 3D data, 3D Visualization, Digital Cities, Open Data, Open Source, Open Source Geospatial, Transportation infrastructure, Underground infrastructure, Web/Tech | Permalink

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Between the Poles

Geoff Zeiss

October 2024

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September 20, 2013

SimCity with real data: modeling real cities in 3D in a Web environment

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