Procedural has joined ESRI’s Business Partner Program. Automatic creation and cloud-based visualization of photorealistic 3D cities from ArcGIS data with CityEngine and RealityServer. Presented on a Tegra Tablet at ESRI User Conference 2010 in San Diego.
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?
ArcGIS Explorer
ESRI has released a new version of its digital globe “ArcGIS Explorer”. The new version provides an improved interface; enhanced data support including kml/kmz; the opportunity to switch between 2D and 3D; a new presentation mode with titles, pop-ups, layers etc.; new online data libraries; a SDK for customization and plenty of projections to choose from. With the online data, there is also a direct link to BING maps and if some of you remember my previous article on the co-operation between Microsoft and ESRI, this is probably one of its first outcomes.
In the times of GoogleEarth, where is the niche for ArcGIS Explorer? Well, there are some good reasons, why ArcGIS Explorer might be worth a consideration for landscape planners: First, most of us are already working with ArcGIS and the workflow is easier than it is between ArcGIS and GoogleEarth, where you need CommunityViz or other plugins. Particularly, you can add plenty of geodata formats and your own DEM which is not possible in GoogleEarth. Then, the presentation mode is neat for planners who present to the public. And finally, the possibilities to choose a specific projection or even to customize your interface may meet expert needs that GoogleEarth cannot satisfy.
41TB of new imagery, vector data etc… The following URL will start a tour through some of the updated locations: http://bingmapsupdates.cloudapp.net
Currently, SIGGRAPH 2009 takes place and many visualization companies show their latest product versions. Autodesk focussed mainly on Maya, no news from LandXplorer here. However, they are currently working on a complete re-programming of the promising geobrowser, so that might still take a while.
Always interesting for landscape visualization is E-on’s software Vue (see the previous post on Vue 7) which will be released as Vue 8 until the end of the year. The new version will support 3D terrain modelling and even more advanced atmospheric models for haze and clouds. The image shows a recent test rendering in Cinema 11 with trees, wave and atmosphere model from the Vue 7 plugin for Cinema.
Schroth 2009
In their latest preview of ArcGIS 9.3.1, ESRI announced their intensified partnership with Microsoft, marrying ArcGIS with VirtualEarth.As we currently test in a series of planning workshops in the Rockies, the combination of GIS for spatial analysis and Virtual Globes for visualization and communication is very powerful. In the near future, I will tell you more about the workflow ArcGIS -> CommunityViz -> GoogleEarth / Biosphere3D, including some first screenshots.
For the forthcoming ArcGIS-VirtualEarth integration, please read the following ESRI press release (source: http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgisonline/whats_new.html).
ArcGIS Online 9.3.1 gives users quick and easy access to a set of foundation services for GIS projects, and provides a platform to discover and share geographic information.
A new agreement between ESRI and Microsoft gives ArcGIS users seamless access to Virtual Earth services. ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server, and ArcGIS Explorer users will be able to directly connect to Virtual Earth services to enhance their GIS projects.
With ArcGIS Online, users can
Better sharing of layers
More information can be found in the VirtualEarth Evangelist Blog (no guarantee for the objectivity or correctness for links to third-party blogs)
A workmate has drawn my attention to a new tool for constructing 3d city models: CityScape 1.6 by PixelActive. Although I had no time to try the demo yet, it seems to me that the included models fit best for cities in Norther America. The supported file formats include elevation data and Collada, which makes it interesting for city planners, too. Another interesting feature is the real-time animation. However, my guess is that it is most useful for game designers.
Last week, I had the chance to see Doug Eberhard, Senior Director of Autocad and head of the Digital Cities Initiative, speaking at the conference “The new dimension in GIS - 3D Analysis“, hosted by the British Columbia section of URISA. His focus were 3D city models and he promoted their future not only for visualization but also for analysis. According to him, the process and people behind need to catch up with the technology, i.e., processes and methods are needed for a collaborative workflow. All these issues are explored in the Digital Cities case studies with Seoul and Salzburg being the first two.
Interestingly, Mr. Eberhard showed lots of examples from LandXplorer (though without mentioning the name of the product) and gave a lot of credits “to the Germans”. Furthermore, he highlighted that CityGML and its interface ADE allow to incorporate extensions for analyses and that has huge potential from his point of view.
LandXplorer screenshort of Berlin (source: http://www.3dgeo.de)
Apparently, Autocad is promoting LandXplorer and CityGML now, which I find very encouraging. You can download an abstract of Mr. Eberhard’s talk at http://www.urisabc.org/assets/events/2009/3D/bios_abstracts/digitalcities.htm and if you like to see another presentation by Doug Eberhard, he will be at AGIT (Salzburg) as well as Geoweb (Vancouver).
E-on software has released a new version of their landscape modelling and visualization software vue. According to the offical feature list a number of key methods and technologies have been improved significantly. Amongst the features are ecosystem models, volumetric clouds, tree generation, global ilumination, etc.
A look inside their gallery shows some very detailed and realistic scenes, e.g. the Picture of the Day, Wednesday, December 10, 2008.
"Jungle" by Maciek Sikora
I have made some tests with an earlier Version in 2004 and I have to say that it was a lot of fun to work with vue. The main problem was to integrate GIS data and to create realisitc plant distributions. I wonder if this has changed by now, because the visual quality which can be achieved is very impressive.
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