Russell Lowe pointed me at the Digital Urban Blog, and in particular two (very different) mapping methods featured recently:
Google Building Maker
This is a functional hybrid of Google World, Google Sketchup, and photo-based 3D architectural reconstruction.
It’s brilliant to be able to tap into crowd-sourcing for models of city buildings. My concern is that
no iterative refinement has been mentioned that allow improvements to be made to existing models (outside of just changing and resubmitting I suppose, but there should definitely be some kind of collaborative editing and version control/tracking to keep people from stepping on each others toes)
Any model details beyond a certain level will not be easily reviewed. If someone does anything beyond what you can see from the map, you begin relying on honesty. (Possibly for further down the line. At the moment tools don’t seem sophisticated enough for this to be a problem)
MIT laser scanning robot helicopter
This is a brilliant robotic platform that seem to have some fairly meaty vision processing and navigation code running on it.
The movie below details the work led by Nick Roy at the Robust Robotics Group at CSAIL, MIT. It is extremely impressive, while a little scary at the same time, note the real-time mapping and 3D model production as the helicopter scans the environment.
Fig. 8 is an upcoming game by Intuition Games that involves cycling through a technical diagram of the suburbs. I really like this; it explores freeform navigation through space, at the same time as giving a feel for the normative conventions of Architecture.
It also gives some insight into how computer games and casual gaming can be an elegant medium for communicating ideas. I think the immediacy and “shareability” of YouTube videos offers a similar exposure to ideas. I’d really like to explore this.
I’ve recently installed this, and still stop occasionally while browsing to wonder why everything seems so much nicer to look at. Apart from the psychological benefits of an absence of material solicitation, pages are a lot easier to read without the flashing words.
Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) systems are supposed to combine the convenience and privacy of automobiles with the environmental benefits of mass transit. Automated electric vehicles, or pods, each designed to carry from four to six people, wait at stations throughout a city or development, like taxis waiting at taxi stands. A person or group gets in a pod and selects a destination and the vehicle drives there directly.
Two of these PRT systems are being installed this year, one at Heathrow International Airport, near London, and one in the United Arab Emirates, where it will be the primary source of transportation in Masdar City.
This is cool, but it’s not obvious to me why people can’t just walk a few steps between station and destination, and use the (already-proven, less complicated) light-rail model.
Blueful is an interactive fiction work written by Aaron Reed. You must follow “clues” and navigate through websites to read each part of the story. It works very well, and gives a sense of travelling and exploring which fits the story. All up it takes about 30 minutes to read. Worth a look!
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