Great blog on urban modeling and visualization at Digital Urban

I was doing some research for my upcoming talk at the FME User Conference later this week, and came across a really interesting blog called Digital Urban - lots of great stuff on 3D modeling and visualization, and related items.

A few examples of interesting posts include this one on a game called Prototype for which they are building some extraordinarily detailed and realistic models of New York City. Check out the following video in particular - the second half is where you really get to see the models they are building (I recommend the high definition version).


...this one on the Da Vinci Tower in Dubai, in which each floor can rotate independently, and the tower includes built in wind turbines which power it and neighboring buildings (there's a high resolution version of the video here).


... and finally I really liked this HDR image of New York by Paulo Barcellos, funnily enough the second time I saw a reference to HDR imaging today, a term I hadn't come across before but there's a good explanation at Wikipedia.

There's lots of other good stuff at Digital Urban too, so check it out!

Little Big Planet

For some time I have been interested in the possibilities of leveraging video game technology in the geospatial world. Back in 2002, I attended a conference conference where one of the main themes was how commercial video game technology could be used as a basis for military training and simulation software - the game market had become so big that its technology had moved ahead of what more specialized companies could do for the military. This is an example of a more general trend towards consumer-led computing (a term first coined by Garter) - whereas in the past, new computing ideas would generally develop first in the business world and later move into the consumer area, in many cases it is now the other way round. We are certainly seeing this in the geospatial world with the impact of Google, Microsoft and others.

Anyway, I thought that SketchUp was a pretty fun tool for building 3D models (I have used SketchUp to build models of potential future developments around Denver Union Station, and to design a remodel of my loft). However, there is a new game coming out for the Playstation 3 called Little Big Planet (no relation to Smallworld!), which puts a whole new spin on how to build 3D models. The ease of use, the fun factor and the way that they model the physics are really impressive. Check out the following videos on YouTube: