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ViLo: The Virtual London Platform by CASA with ARKit
Yesterday I posted about CASA’s urban data visualisation platform, ViLo. Today we’re looking at an integration with Apple’s ARKit that has been created by CASA research assistant Valerio Signorelli. Using ARKit by Apple we can place and scale a digital model of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, visualise real-time bike sharing and tube data from — read more
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ViLo: The Virtual London Platform by CASA for Desktop
This is the first of three posts introducing CASA’s interactive urban data visualisation platform, ViLo. The platform enables visualisation of both real-time and offline spatio-temporal data sets in a digital, three-dimensional representation of the urban environment. I’ve been fortunate to work alongside the team and learn from them as the project has developed. Initially — read more
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The Human Race: Real-Time Rendering and Augmented Reality in the Movies and Beyond
Back in May at GDC 2017 Epic Games presented a revolutionary pipeline for rendering visual effects in real-time using their Unreal Engine. Developed in partnership with visual effects studio The Mill, the outcome of the project was a short promotional video for Chevrolet called The Human Race (above). While the film’s visual effects are stunning — read more
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Habitat: Drama and Adventure in Early Online World’s
Today while trawling the web I stumbled on this promo for an early MMO from 1986 called Habitat. Produced by Lucasfilm Games in collaboration with online service provider Quantum Link the game provided for real-time interaction between Commodore 64 users via dial-up modem. The advert repeatedly assures potential players of the possibilities for fast paced ‘drama — read more
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Point Cloud Gaming: Scanner Sombre in VR
Scanner Sombre is an exploration game which places the player in the depths of a pitch black cave system with nothing to guide them except an experimental headset and LiDAR like sensor enabling them to see in the dark. I first saw Scanner Sombre back in April at the EGZ Rezzed computer game trade fair. — read more
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Urban X-Rays: Wi-Fi for Spatial Scanning
Many of us in cities increasingly depend on Wi-Fi connectivity for communication as we go about our every day lives. However, beyond providing for our mobile and wireless communication needs, the intentional or directed use of Wi-Fi also provides new possibilities for urban sensing. In this video professor Yasamin Mostofi from the University of California — read more
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Open3D: Crowd-Sourced Distributed Curation of City Models
Open3D is a project by the Smart Geometry Processing Group in UCL’s Computer Science department. The project aims to provide tools for the crowd-sourcing of large-scale 3D urban models. It achieves this by giving users access to a basic 3D data set and providing an editor enabling them to amend the model and add further detail. The — read more
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VarCity: 3D and Semantic Urban Modelling from Images
In this video we see the results of a 5 year VarCity research project at the Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zurich. The aim of the project was to automatically generate 3D city models from photos such as those openly available online via social media. The VarCity system uses computer algorithms to analyse and stitch together — read more
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The Art & Science of 3D Cities at the Transport Systems Catapult
Back in March I attended a day long workshop the at the Transport Systems Catapult (TCS) in Milton Keynes on the subject of ‘The Barriers to Building 3D Synthetic Environments’. The aim of the workshop was to bring together key SMEs and Academics to collaboratively identify challenges and discuss solutions for the creation of virtual environments — read more
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A Brief History of Google Maps…and a not so Brief Video
In this long but useful presentation from 2012 Google Maps vice president Brian McClendon and colleages provide a detailed overview of the platforms evolution. Some of the key points are summarised below. In the mid 90s Silicon Graphics developed the ‘Space-to-Your-Face’ demo to demonstrate the power of their Onyx Infinite Reality CGI workstation. In the demo — read more