Very informative video by the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) on their combination of ArcGIS with their scenario plugin and the 3D game engine SIEVE for visualization; all linked to a touchtable user interface.
Ecoinformatics Touchtable from VeRSI on Vimeo.
Presenting my own poster “Model-based Visualization of Future Forest Landscapes” on the use of Biosphere3D in the Kimberley project at CALP, I got in touch with other researchers in the field. LIAMA, the Sino-French Lab of Computer Science, Automation and Applied Mathematics in Bejing, presented a poster on GreenLab. GreenLab is a program for the stochastic, functional and interactive modeling of plant growth that also considers different growth conditions. According to Prof. Kang, the development of GreenLab goes back to AMAP and Philippe de Reffye, one of the AMAP developers, who is also guest researcher at LIAMA and contributed to the development of GreenLab. The libraries of GreenLab will also contain more Asian species which are still rare in 3D. With its potential for functional modeling, Greenlab may become another promising plant modeler.
Later in the day, I visited the Speedtree booth. Speedtree clearly aims at Game Developers and Movie Makers; therefore it does not need to integrate botanical rules but it has to provide artistic control and “directability”. Furthermore, performance and different LODs are important for game developers and in gaming, SpeeTree is the current state-of-the-art. For landscape architects, it may be over the top with the basic version of SpeedTree Studio selling for $850 while the professional version, including a world construction set, can cost more than $12k.
One of todays` highlights at SIGGRAPH 2011 in Vancouver was the approach of Prof. Deussen`s group in Konstanz and their partners at the universities in Shenzhen and Tel Aviv to use so-called “texture-lobes” for tree modelling from Lidar data. For more information, see http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/publikationen/2011/texturelobesfortreemodeling/website/
Texture-Lobes for Tree Modelling from Soeren Pirk on Vimeo.
The afternoon was dedicated to urban modeling, starting with a review of the latest literature by Peter Wonka (Arizona State University) and Daniel Aliaga (Purdue University). During the second part of the session, Pascal Mueller from Procedural/ESRI (CityEngine) presented issues encountered in practice and their new Urban Vision project together with the urban planning department of San Francisco and Urban Sim (Paul Waddell). The session closed with a visually very engaging case study by Michael Frederickson from Pixar, using CityEngine for virtual London in Cars 2.
What: Google Mapping Technology for Nonprofits
When: September 26-28, 2011, 8:30am – 5:00pm
Where: Morris J Wosk Centre for Public Dialogue at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia
Who should attend?: This workshop is intended for Canadian nonprofit technology specialists.
More information: http://vancouver.earthoutreach.org/home
The following YouTube video shows Redwood forests in California and asks questions on how climate change may impact their future habitats. The Save the Redwoods League calls viewers for participating in mapping Redwood stands and thereby, contributing to the research about climate change impact on this species.
First, I would like to apologize for the lack of recent posts under the LVIZ blog, but I and other contributors were traveling a lot, visiting various conferences and had report deadlines to match. In return, I will post several conference reviews over the next weeks with the biggest conference still to come in August: SIGGRAPH 2011 in Vancouver! The conference season started with the most important conference on human-computer interaction; CHI from May 7-12 at the new Vancouver conference center. CHI was far too large that I could address all session here. Instead I will focus on the sustainability workshop and the two sustainability sessions that were part of this year’s CHI.
The sustainability workshop at CHI was organized by Leo Bonanni (MIT Media Lab, USA), Daniela Busse (Sap Labs (Palo Alto), USA), John C Thomas (IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA), Eli Blevis (Indiana University, Bloomington, USA), Marko Turpeinen (HIIT, Finland), and Nuno Jardim Nunes (Univ of Madeira, Portugal). Every participant had prepared position papers which were first presented and discussed. During the second half of the one-day workshop, IBM researcher John C. Thomas, who is also involved in IBM Smart City, presented the pattern language approach (cf. Christopher Alexander’s pattern language) as a method to grasp the fuzzy categories of sustainability. The unconventional approach produced an impressive variety of sustainability patterns. Co-organizers Leo Bonanni and Marko Turpeinen also announced a Green Hackathon in Stockholm on September 30, 2011. Interviews with some of the workshop participants are also covered by the Sustainable Lens blog from Australia which is presenting sustainability issues as online radio shows.
On Wednesday, two sustainability sessions took place. The first session started of with a presentation by Conor Linehan from the Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre on Guidelines for Designing Educational Games. Linehan referred the evaluation of behavioral change through educational computer games to the Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) approach in psychology. The presentation was awarded and provided very valuable approaches for the evaluation of computer tools with an educational goal. The majority of the following presentations addressed the change of individual behavior through the visualization of individual consumption patterns, e.g., energy or water consumption. Most presentations were very nicely designed but from my point of view, some lacked from oversimplified conceptualizations of individual behavior change through more information. In the case of BeeParking, car use as an unsustainable behavior was even made more convenient through a smart parking system. In contrast, I was more impressed by the work of Philips Research in the Netherlands, who presented a game that is supposed to raise family awareness and change behavior about electricity use (download the paper here) and by James Pierce investigation of reacquisition and dispossession practices around second-hand objects (download the paper here).
It is good to hear that sustainability has its own SIG at CHI and it was even proposed to propose a sustainability track on its own which might lead to a higher number of sustainability papers at CHI. Either way, it is great to see that sustainability is also a topic inside the human-computer interaction community and I am sure that there is more to come.
I would like to draw your attention to a paper hot off the press that I am currently reading:
Original Research Article
Landscape and Urban Planning, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 3 February 2011
Christopher J. Pettit, Christopher M. Raymond, Brett A. Bryan, Hayden Lewis
► Results from our end user evaluation suggest that visualisation tools have an important role in raising knowledge and awareness of future landscape scenarios. ► Landscape visualisation is valuable as an environmental planning and investment tool in terms of guiding priority investment and encouraging a more strategic rather than reactive approach. ► Landscape visualisation needs to be further embedded into the decision-making process to quantify its impact to environmental planning. ► Future landscape modelling and visualisation projects need to consider resourcing a dedicated community engagement capability.
The AGIT symposium (www.agit.at) presents about 200 presentations, discussions and workshops about geoinformation and related disciplines in the German-speaking area. Paper abstracts can be submitted until February 1, 2011; other submissions (product presentation, forum and workshops) will close February 21, 2011.
Themes:
Methods and technologies:
Three weeks ago, Google had launched its new version 6 of Google Earth parallel to the Cancun conference, where Google Earth Outreach participated as well. Now, Google Earth Outreach together with the Mexican National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity CONABIO launched the first outreach project taking advantage of the newly implemented tree representations (download the kmz into GE here). The trees still look a bit sketchy in comparison to other products but the visualization seems to be based on credible and sophisticated vegetation data.
Source: Google Earth Outreach
This blog has already reported about the landscape renderer Vue and about CityEngine, a tool by Swiss company Procedural Inc. that allows creating 3d city models from scratch. Now, there is a new product marrying both, CityEngine Vue.