Shiode on Dynamic Urban Visualization

Naru Shi­ode from the Uni­ver­sity at Buf­falo gave a spell­bind­ing present­a­tion on spatial-temporal ana­lysis at the Centre for Spa­tial Ana­lysis (CSpA) on Fri­day. Shi­ode is trained as archi­tect and urban plan­ner and finds him­self in the Geo­graphy depart­ment at Buf­falo. He has been asso­ci­ated with pro­jects such as Digital Egypt and the Vir­tual Ryoanji pro­jects explor­ing ancient his­tor­ical recon­struc­tion as well as time-based recre­morph­ing. His cur­rent pro­ject is the 3D Buf­falo pro­ject which allows a user to inter­act via a chro­no­slider that trig­gers time points for each build­ing within a multi-block area sur­round­ing down­town Buf­falo. This pro­ject is only in its early stages, but the poten­tial for his­tor­ical ana­lysis is tre­mend­ously prom­ising.

What Shi­ode and his co-PI are doing is explor­ing a sim­ilar spatial-temporal link­age that I have been doing my indi­vidual best to cre­ate cre­ate on a smal­ler scale for Guelph. Unlike my attempts to attach a 3D streets­cape from Guelph to census, tax and busi­ness dir­ect­or­ies and ulti­mately to the inhab­it­ants through their phys­ical sur­round­ings, Shi­ode is very much con­cerned with wed­ding CAD and GIS to focus on the aes­thet­ics of the built envir­on­ment. The res­ult of his work is most impress­ive. The inter­face employs a chro­no­lo­gic­ally struc­tured slider which ties to build­ings cat­egor­ized by their period of exist­ence so that as you slide, they are erec­ted in real­time. The 3d mass mod­els have had sur­faces mapped from his­tor­ical and con­tem­por­ary pho­to­graphs and are super­im­posed on aer­ial pho­tos to provide streets­cape.
Of note is that the use of aer­ial pho­to­graphy to estab­lish build­ings and to use as the under­ly­ing back­drop for the model itself. Shi­ode points out the chal­lenge this poses with street reori­ent­a­tion over their period of study.
Shi­ode asks three pres­ci­ent ques­tions of his own cur­rent work:

1. How do we choose to visu­al­ize uncer­tain data? While he offers some answer to this, I think that it prob­ably depends on the con­text of the ana­lysis that we are try­ing to do and the level of infer­ence that we feel com­fort­able to exercise;
2. How can we con­tinue to make the data and the tools com­pat­ible? They’ve done a great job har­mon­iz­ing GIS and CAD.
3. How do we har­ness the power of a dynamic 3D model?

Great ques­tions that any­one play­ing in this arena inev­it­ably faces.
Pro­jects such as Rome Reborn1.0 (which I blogged on earlier this year) have focussed on sim­ilar aes­thetic recre­ation of the visual. One of the future dir­ec­tions for Rome is to con­sider the aud­ible end of the equa­tion (I sup­pose smell might even be there someday). The absence of people in many of these mod­els seems to be the biggest gap. We are study­ing them through their mater­ial arte­fact, yet don’t rep­res­ent them as part of the model. The choice to include the human dimen­sion depends on what the model is being con­struc­ted to explore or accom­plish. Thus the third and most pres­ci­ent ques­tion above.
The chal­lenge in ask­ing this ques­tion is that in many cases, it is only through con­struc­tion that we dis­cover some of the ques­tions that can be asked or pat­terns that might be dis­covered. Ques­tions lead­ing to the devel­op­ment of the model often lead to beg­ging the big­ger ques­tions to ask of the model. Spatial-temporal mod­el­ing simply presents exist­ing data in a dif­fer­ent way and allows for the viewer/participant to see pat­terns that aren’t oth­er­wise appar­ent. 3D Buf­falo looks like it will have tre­mend­ous poten­tial for deeper under­stand­ing of early twen­ti­eth cen­tury urban devel­op­ment.