Visioning and Visualization: People, Pixels, and Plans

The Planetizen Top10 book list for 2009 suggests a very interesting book on participation and visualization:

Visioning and Visualization: People, Pixels, and Plans

  • Authors: Michael Kwartler and Gianni Longo
  • Publisher: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (April 30, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1558441808
  • ISBN-13: 978-1558441804

If anybody has read the book already, please contribute your review to this blog. Otherwise, I will provide you a review as soon as possible.

Job opening at the Macaulay Institute Aberdeen

The Macaulay Institute in Aberdeen is currently seeking a landscape and visualisation modeller and a spatial planner. For further information, please refer to
http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/jobs/

Sketchup 7 is out now

According to Google, the new publisher of Sketchup, version 7 is out now (Source: Official Google Blog). Among the various new features, the possiblity to assign dynamic behaviour and attributes (only the Pro version) seems particularly interesting to me. In consequence, the construction of semantic models with Sketchup is getting another step closer.

Upcoming conferences: CORP, Imagina

REAL CORP 2009

As Manfred Schrenk already had announced at the end of this year’s REAL CORP, the 14th International Conference on Urban Planning and Regional Development in the Information Society, won’t take place in Vienna but in the Design Centre Sitges, Spain. The Call for Papers is open now and details are available at http://www.corp.at/

IMAGINA

The Imagina is an event, focussing on the 3D visualization community in industry, architecture, media and entertainment. This year’s imagina could become interesting for researchers in urban and landscape planning as well because it focuses on the use of 3D in town and country planning. Among the speakers are officials from cities like Manchester, using 3D visualization already, and Prof. Dr. Thomas Kolbe, who will present on CityGML.

More information is available at http://www.imagina.mc/

Autodesk buys 3D Geo (LandXplorer)

In August Autodesk already published a press release, announcing that they buy the German company 3D Geo, a spin-off of the Hasso-Plattner Institute in Potsdam that became well-known for their LandXplorer software. LandXplorer is basically an authoring system for 3D geodata that allows to construct, analyze, store and manage 3D city models for various export formats (GeoBrowser, VirtualReality, GameEngines, WebApplications). Among other features, LandXplorer is one of the first software packages to support CityGML. The full text is available at http://www.3dgeo.de/news.aspx?Article=143

Autodesk said that they will keep the office in Potsdam as future development center in Europe and that they will further develop LandXplorer. This might even open a chance that LandXplorer will become a meta-platform to link single Building Information Models on a larger scale, i.e., as part of a semantic 3D city model.

Upcoming conferences on Geovisualization and Digital Cities

Here is a link to a conference on geovisualization in Hamburg, Germany, which is organized by the International Cartographic Association, the German Cartographic Society, and the HafenCity University Hamburg.

Also watch out for the Geoweb 2009 – 3DCityscapes in Vancouver. We are awaiting the 1st Call for Papers and an update of the GeoWeb 2008 website these days.

Should we include 3d city models in this blog?

I am wondering if we should include the topic of virtual 3d city models or – as they are called lately – digital cities in our blog. After some considerations I think that we should include this topic for two main reasons.

First of all the authors of this blog come from research in landscape and environmental planning and we tend to have an all-embracing understanding of landscape. This means that the word ‘landscape’ is an concept which includes topography, vegetation and wildlife, land-use, housing, climate, etc.. In this all-embracing concept cities are part of the landscapes around us.

Secondly we do not do landscape visualization just for the fun of visualizing a landscape, but because we think that landscape visualizations can support planning descisions and communication processes in planning processes. Thus we have an aim, a goal why we visualize and this goal is the driver for visualizing rural landscapes, as well as suburban landscapes or cityscapes. I think that we will benefit if we are looking at concepts from landscape and city visualization/modelling at the same time and relate the visualization concepts to the underlying planning tasks.

Another reason to include digital cities from my point of view is that I am currently working on a project which deals with virtual 3d city models and visualization of the cityscape. The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany and deals with the usability to support communication and information in urban land management by using virtual 3d city models as integration media for heterogeneous data. For more information hava a look at www.refina3d.de. (only in German)