Landscape Visualization

Visualizing Landscape Architecture

I would like to draw your attention to a new book by Prof. Dr. Elke Mertens about visualization in landscape architecture. The book is very well presented by Birkhäuser, a publisher famous for his excellent books about architecture, and gives a great overview of various visualization techniques in landscape architecture. Please note that the book is available in English and German. The following is a quote from the Amazon description of the English version:

“We don’t sell gardens; we sell images of gardens.” This observation on the part of a landscape architect makes it clear just how important it is that a design be effectively communicated to the community, clients, and the public. Drawings, models, simulations, and films communicate the designers’ proposed ideas and solutions, but they also convey their attitude toward the use of nature and the environment. With myriad possibilities – including computer programs as well as hand drawings and models, which continue to be widely used – and strong competition in the field, there is now a huge variety of visual representations, with agreed-upon rules but also a great deal of freedom. In three large sections, this books sifts through the currently commonplace and available techniques and evaluates them in terms of their informative value and persuasive power, always illustrating its points with analysis of examples from international firms. An introductory look at the development thus far is followed by a systematic presentation of modes of representation in two, three, and four dimensions – in the plane, in space, and in the temporal process. The second section deals with the sequence within the workflow: from the initial sketch through concept and implementation planning all the way to the finished product. The third section deals with the strategic use of visualizations in the context of competitions, future schemes, and large-scale landscape planning. The focus in this section is not on the familiar use of the relevant techniques, but rather on the methods and forms of visual representation in contemporary landscape architecture.”

Visualizing Landscape Architecture at Springer

Visualizing Landscape Architecture at Amazon

Major adaptation and mitigation

Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF, and in collaboration with the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP), particularly Ellen Pond, the City of Kimberley, and the Columbia Basin Trust (CBT), I analysed the benefits and limitations of interactive virtual globes for stakeholder engagement in climate related scenario planning over the last 12 months. The results have now been published as SNSF report and can be downloaded here.

Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. “Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.”

Natural Earth Vector comes in ESRI shapefile format, Natural Earth Raster comes in TIFF format with a TFW world file, all Natural Earth data use the Geographic projection, WGS84 datum.

Unfortunately, only zip-File Download and no OGC Web Feature or Web Raster service is provided.

Microsoft Photosynth is a photogrammetric software that creates 3d buildings from multiple photos, e.g. shot by random tourists. Our colleagues from the urbandigital blog are very much in favour of Photosynth and see great potential in it for urban visualization or as a kind of 3d scanner. Now, Microsoft has taken the logic next step and integrated Photosynth with Bing 3D. It may be criticized that the Microsoft approach requires Silverlight which is still not standard. However, Bing users can now create buildings automatically from photos whereas Google Earth users are modeling their content in Sketchup. It will be very interesting to test both approaches in comparison and to see which one will finally find more users.

Another interesting approach by Microsoft is mentioned by Chris Dannen in the Fast Company blog: In the long-term, Microsoft wants to extract semantic information automatically from the user-generated photos. In this point, Microsoft meets latest research in photogrammetry, e.g. in the “Nachwuchsgruppe der Volkswagen Stiftung” in cartography at the University of Hanover, where the automatic extraction of facades from photos is researched.

With regard to landscapes, vegetation is still not an issue - neither for Google nor for Microsoft. How about the automatic extraction of vegetation information from photos? There is a lot research about the recognition of vegetation in orthophotos - how about linking this to the automatic population of virtual landscapes with realistic plants?

Now that the Copenhagen Summit comes close, ETH Zurich has started a Climate Blog with contributions by 20 ETH professors and numerous student and guest authors. Unfortunately, the blog is in German but due to the high impact of climate change for our future landscapes and with regard to our work on climate change visualization at CALP, I inlcuded the ETH climate blog in the LVIZ blogroll. Please follow the blogroll on the right or go directly to http://blogs.ethz.ch/klimablog/.

The very useful GIS tool MapViewSVG has been renamed “Mappetizer“. According to the developer, the latest version Mappetizes 8.1 additionally has integrated support for OpenStreetMap (OSM) data (example). Yet, we didn´t have the opportunity to test this new functionality but considering our interest in open source solutions and especially geodata under creative common licenses such as OSM, we are curious about testing Mappetizer 8.1 as soon as possible.

The following call for papers was first published at Digital Urban

We have a final call for papers in geographic/urban visualisation - the deadline for abstracts has passed but as we are running a workshop send them to us via the contact page and we will sort out the initial submission process.

The Joint International Conference on Theory, Data Handling and Modelling in GeoSpatial Information Science will be held on May 26th to 28th 2010 in Hong Kong.

This conference will be a notable event in the international community of Geo-spatial information Science (GISc) in 2010, organized by: Commission II of the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and Commission of Geographic Information Science and Commission of Modelling Geographical Systems of the International Geographical Union (IGU). The conference will join together the Symposium of Technical Commission II of ISPRS, the Symposium on Spatial Data Handling and the Conference on Modelling Geographical Systems from IGU.

ISPRS is a society regrouping scientific societies from more than 100 countries working in domains related to photogrammetry, remote sensing and geographical information science. 2010 will be a special year for the society as it will be celebrating its centenary anniversary. The ISPRS Technical Commission II Symposium is organised every four years alternately with the ISPRS Congress and is among the major events in ISPRS calendar regrouping leading scholars from the GISc and related communities. Last editions of the symposium were held in Ottawa, Canada (2002) and Vienna, Austria (2006) jointly with SDH.

You can find the submission guidelines and template from here.

Also take a look at the new Geovisualisation and Virtual Reality site (its hosted in CASA) where you can sign up to become a member.

Check out or become a member of the new Blog dedicated to Geographical Visualization and Virtual Reality managed by Dr. Christopher J. Pettit (Melbourne) and Dr Andy Hudson-Smith (London) Working Group II/6 of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS): http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/geoviz/

You will find several live video recordings of the MODSIM 2009 / ISPRS WGII/6 session on Visualisation in support of management decisions.

The Manhatta Project explored the ecology of today`s area of New York for the pre-settlement time in 1609. Their research shows that 55 different ecosystem types existed in the area. With the help of GIS, the ecosystems and habitat relationships were reconstructed and finally visualized (with “Hollywood technology”). In the following video, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson explains in detail how his team worked on the Manhatta Project. He finishes his remarkable talk with an outlook how to vision the city of the future now.

Thanks to Kristi for drawing my attention to this great example of landscape visualization, based on landscape ecology.

CITIES FOR EVERYONE: Liveable, Healthy, Prosper
Promising vision or unrealistic phantasy?
The role of Urban Planning and Urban Technologies on the path towards improved Quality of Live, Health, Sustainability and Prosperity in our Cities

will be the topic of

REAL CORP 2010 - 15th International Conference on Urban Planning, Regional Development and Information Society

in

Vienna / Austria from 18 - 20 May 2010,
www.corp.at

The CALL FOR PAPERS is open until December 23rd 2009 (abstract, approx. 1000 characters; full paper until Feb. 28th).

______________________________________-

CITIES FOR EVERYONE: Liveable, Healthy, Prosper!
Promising Vision or Unrealistic Phantasy?

Cities are places of competition, stress, inequalities, traffic jams, environmental stresses and strains and permanent struggle.
Cities often are an aggressive environment, not only for children, the elderly and the weak.

But even more then that cities are the centers of economy, culture, creativity, science and innovation and therefore provide the best perspectives and biggest chances for many people—CITIES ARE ATTRACTIVE!
Meanwhile more then 50 percent of world population lives in cities, soon it will be about 70 percent.

REAL CORP 2010 asks for CITIES FOR EVERYONE, that are LIVEABLE, HEALTHY and PROSPER!
Is this a promising vision we should work on or is it an unrealistic fantasy? Is it possible to keep and even improve the advantages of cities and reduce the negative effects? Or does the one require the other?

What are the possibilities and contributions of URBAN PLANNING and REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT?
And where can ICT, URBAN-, TRANSPORT- and ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES help to improve quality of live, health, sustainability and prosperity in cities.

Some of the major aspects and questions to be dealt with and on which we invite you for high-quality paper submissions are:

· Examples and Visions of „Liveable Cities for Everyone“

· Keeping Balance: Managing Complex Urban Infrastructures

· Housing and Real Estate perspectives, High-Tech & Low-Cost Housing

· Perspectives for Future Transport and Mobility

· Re-mixing the Urban Fabric, Future Housing and Working Environs

· Urban and Environmental Technologies to improve Quality of Life

· Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) in the Urban Context

· Healthy Cities / Health in Cities

· Safety and Security vs. Privacy and Total Surveillance

· Data, Information and Knowledge Infrastructures for Planning, Management and Decision Support

· Understanding Cities: Tools and Technologies to support Decision Makers, Citizens and Experts in their Understanding of Cities

As REAL CORP 2010 is co-organized with ISOCARP, the International Society of City and Regional Planners (www.isocarp.org) and REAL VIENNA, the CEE/SEE-focused Real Estate and Investment fair (www.realvienna.at), it is an explicit goal to enhance the experts-dialogue between Real Estate Business, Urban Planning and Technology Providers.

There will also be a buisness-exhibition and possibilities to present companies and products - if interested please contact us per email at office@corp.at

REAL CORP 2009
is a joint event and co-organized by

* CEIT ALANOVA - Central European Institute of Technology, Department for Urbanism, Transport, Environment and Information Society ( www.ceit.at),
* CORP association ( www.corp.at)
* ISOCARP, the International Society of City and Regional Planners ( www.isocarp.org)
* REAL VIENNA, the CEE/SEE-focused Real Estate and Investment Fair (www.realvienna.at)

It would be great to welcome you to Vienna in May 2010 as a speaker or participant.
As usual, complete information and latest news is always available on the website

www.corp.at