Latest Posts

By: Sander

the 3-way marriage between Lumion, Cityengine and Sketchup (or other 3d modelling software)is a powerful one. I think it benefits from the same things: the ease and speed to create beautiful things. A pity there aren’t many cga rulefiles available to use, I see you’re still using the 2010 standard template as are many people. The emphasis is too much on possibilities of the program and integration with other software instead of creating real usable content. Creating a rulefile yourself is imo still too hard.

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A Semester with OpenSim

Over the last few months I have been teaching a class in the Department of Computational Social Science entitled “Building Virtual Worlds” where we surveyed the role of virtual worlds for social science research. The emphasis of the class was on tools, software frameworks, and applications of virtual worlds.  On the applications side we discussed how virtual worlds are being used for History, Archeology, Healthcare, Tourism, Urban Modeling, Architecture, Agent-based Modeling along with more generally teaching and learning. We explored a variety of tools for building virtual worlds before focusing on OpenSim. The movie below shows some of the final outputs using OpenSim.
We used OpenSim 0.7.3, configured with the Standalone-Hypergrid mode and a SQLite database hosted on a Windows 7 server. The server simultaneously simulated 64 different regions, and at various points during the semester the server hosted well over 15000 primitives (prims) and ran hundreds of scripts across this landscape; one region alone hosted over 8000 prims. 
Why so many regions? We were interested in how many the server could cope with but also we wanted to have a virtual world representing the whole of the GMU Fairfax campus  (~4km2) and regions in OpenSim are limited to 256m by 256m. We built the terrain for the campus utilizing the National Elevation Dataset (NED) DEM from the United States Geological Survey which was first manipulated in ArcGIS before being processed in  L3DT (Large 3D Terrain Generator). Finally, the DEM was imported into OpenSim. The movie below should give a sense of what the basic terrain looks like.
Once the terrain was built, we populated it with buildings, however, we were not just interested in the external appearance of the buildings but also there internal structure for modeling and simulation purposes.  Therefore the class focused their attention on building a highly detailed Johnson Center.
Model of Johnson Center taken from Google SketchUp 3D Warehouse
Vector based, 2D CAD files were obtained and imported into Google SketchUp before using SketchLife to build the 3D initial building core, walls, doors and windows.

Constructing a vector-based model of the Johnson Center internal structure
The SketchLife final rendering of the Johnson Center
Once built in SketchUp using SketchLife the model was imported into OpenSim 

External view “in world” of what we accomplished in building the Johnson Center
In addition to using SketchLife for the JC, many objects such as chairs, staircases and tables were either built using the tool or those native to OpenSim.
An “in world” shot at ground level, on the 1st floor, viewing the atrium and clock tower
 in the Johnson Center
CSS class photo “in-world”
However, our work with OpenSim does not stop here, below is another movie of some ongoing work with one of our PhD students, Chris Rouly who is creating agent-based models embedded in OpenSim to explore past habitats among many other things.
I would like to thank the “Building Virtual Worlds” class and the Department for enabling this blog post.

Continue reading »

A Semester with OpenSim

Over the last few months I have been teaching a class in the Department of Computational Social Science entitled “Building Virtual Worlds” where we surveyed the role of virtual worlds for social science research. The emphasis of the class was on tools, software frameworks, and applications of virtual worlds.  On the applications side we discussed how virtual worlds are being used for History, Archeology, Healthcare, Tourism, Urban Modeling, Architecture, Agent-based Modeling along with more generally teaching and learning. We explored a variety of tools for building virtual worlds before focusing on OpenSim. The movie below shows some of the final outputs using OpenSim.
We used OpenSim 0.7.3, configured with the Standalone-Hypergrid mode and a SQLite database hosted on a Windows 7 server. The server simultaneously simulated 64 different regions, and at various points during the semester the server hosted well over 15000 primitives (prims) and ran hundreds of scripts across this landscape; one region alone hosted over 8000 prims. 
Why so many regions? We were interested in how many the server could cope with but also we wanted to have a virtual world representing the whole of the GMU Fairfax campus  (~4km2) and regions in OpenSim are limited to 256m by 256m. We built the terrain for the campus utilizing the National Elevation Dataset (NED) DEM from the United States Geological Survey which was first manipulated in ArcGIS before being processed in  L3DT (Large 3D Terrain Generator). Finally, the DEM was imported into OpenSim. The movie below should give a sense of what the basic terrain looks like.
Once the terrain was built, we populated it with buildings, however, we were not just interested in the external appearance of the buildings but also there internal structure for modeling and simulation purposes.  Therefore the class focused their attention on building a highly detailed Johnson Center.
Model of Johnson Center taken from Google SketchUp 3D Warehouse
Vector based, 2D CAD files were obtained and imported into Google SketchUp before using SketchLife to build the 3D initial building core, walls, doors and windows.

Constructing a vector-based model of the Johnson Center internal structure
The SketchLife final rendering of the Johnson Center
Once built in SketchUp using SketchLife the model was imported into OpenSim 

External view “in world” of what we accomplished in building the Johnson Center
In addition to using SketchLife for the JC, many objects such as chairs, staircases and tables were either built using the tool or those native to OpenSim.
An “in world” shot at ground level, on the 1st floor, viewing the atrium and clock tower
 in the Johnson Center
CSS class photo “in-world”
However, our work with OpenSim does not stop here, below is another movie of some ongoing work with one of our PhD students, Chris Rouly who is creating agent-based models embedded in OpenSim to explore past habitats among many other things.
I would like to thank the “Building Virtual Worlds” class and the Department for enabling this blog post.

Continue reading »

Two Opportunities for New Research Groups at the Wittgenstein Centre (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU) in Vienna

Tweet“New Frontiers Groups (NFG)” (Austrian Academy of Sciences) The NFG programme aims at investigator driven innovative research in order to promote promising academic careers. Applicants must hold a doctoral degree which was conferred no more than 7 years prior  to the submission deadline (15thJuly) and have the ability to lead an independent research group. Candidates with […]

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QRator wins the The Museums & Heritage Award for Innovation

QRator, the Museum focused ‘Internet of Things/Smart Places’ project developed jointly with us here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL Digital Humanities and UCL Museums, with funding from the UCL Public Engagement Unit , has won The Museums & Heritage Award for Innovation.  Known as ‘The Oscars’ of the…

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By: Urban Circus

Nice work guys. <br />this stuff looks nice. But real urban design, civil engineering, statutory and strategic planning work requires focus at the human scale. Humans are what it is all about. <br />The Urban Engine is all about getting down to street level user experience – cars, bikes and people – because that is where we live. <br />Feel free to contact us via www.u-c.com.au to have a go any time. We will send you a link.<br />We love City Engine, SketchUp and Max too – and it all fits into the same workflow. However, we tend to take real data from GIS / LIDAR / survey / CAD design and push that through as a context (via FBX) then start importing revitt / max / sketchup proposals into this base. This is what the Victorian Government now use on a daily basis in house for development assessment. We have also built a “2.5D” building volumetric tool to allow real simple forms to be made in about 12 seconds (easier than sketchup) – to be used live in meetings.<br />Cheers.<br />Dr Ben Guy

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Mapping City Flows as Blood

Blood is everywhere when it comes to describing cities. We have arterial roads, pulsing transport flows, and cities with different metabolisms. Thanks to great new datasets and visualisation software the analogy of cities with pulsing flows is being increasingly utilised for explanatory mapping. For example the work of UCL CASA’s Jon Reades above depicts the London Underground network …

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A Week in the Life of London’s Public Transit System

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages but have had a great deal on my plate (more posts and visualisations to follow in the next week I hope) so this has kept slipping, together with the six or seven other ‘draft’ posts I’ve got going. Anyway, this visualisation shows average entries at each and every Underground, […]

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