Today, Keith Stuart at the Guardian, wrote an article on How the 3D engine is changing the world.  He points out that gaming engines and technologies are starting to make their way into other fields and describes the complexity of building games.  Planning is one of the fields that is beginning to benefit from the industry that brought us Doom and Quake.

SketchUp brought 3D to the masses and helped pave the way for user generated content that can be used in planning and visioning.  Now, with powerful gaming and city building engines like CityScape and CityEngine coming to architecture and planning, we can now imagine futures in highly rendered live environments.

PlaceMatters recently acquired a license to CityScape and will be evaluating it's use in planning and visioning.  We are extremely excited about the partnership with PixelActive 3D.  Our preliminary opinion of the simulation engine is that it provides a vital missing link for showing alternative futures in a rapid prototyping environment.  SketchUp allows you to do this on a building level fairly easily, but it's lacking on the site level.  CityScape fills this need.  It is also highly interoperable with other 3D packages, opening up the opportunity for extremely efficient workflows in a planning and visioning context.  I'll blog more about that over the next few weeks.

As gaming technology allows us to build cities in real time, we will be able to deliver increasingly higher quality visualizations at much lower cost.    Next month, PlaceMatters will be attending the Geodesign summit at ESRI headquarters. to talk about the emerging field of Geodesign, which is the pairing of GIS and design.   And over the next few months, I'll probably obsess about this topic as I explore ways to push this in our own work and develop best practices around visualization and public participation.

Expectations for quick answers, intuitive usability, and gee wiz imagery have increased dramatically as a result of technologies ranging from Google Earth to the iPhone to gaming systems like the Wii. PlaceMattters, at several events across the country, has given demonstrations of motion/touch sensitive, and location aware tools that can be used to enhance public participation in community planning and explores the challenges of integrating these tools with professional planning.   Presentations utilize iPhones, keypads, cell phones, and touch sensitive to demonstrate a range of applications and techniques including:

building asset maps with a team of GPS enabled iPhones and/or touch sensitive tablets;

• building asset maps with a team of GPS enabled iPhones and/or touch sensitive tablets;
• using wiki-style sites to collect ideas and collaboratively author documents while in a town meeting or dispersed around town;
• utilizing drag and drop functionality to rapidly prioritize a list of next steps;
• collecting photos/comments and using enterprise technology to have everything show up instantly in a common space for others to see;
• using push technology to keep people constantly but unobtrusively aware of new posts and therefore remain more engaged in discussions;
• demonstrating fly-through 3D visualizations of a mainstreet development with the iPhone sensing movement just like a steering wheel;
• crowdstorming with AnyWare Planning in a town meeting setting as well as linking people virtually from multiple locations; and
• setting up polling questions on the fly via mPolls.org and AnyWarePolling.org and using mobile phones (including session participants) to vote as a group and see results despite having no additional hardware or WiFi.

Contact us if would like PlaceMatters to present some of these innovative technologies to your community or at some event you’re planning.

Yogi Berra said that. I also recall someone saying at some conference on smart growth or new urbanism: the more cars sharing the road, the more people get frustrated (hence all the car ads of people driving with no other cars in sight), while the more people on a well designed sidewalk, the more we tend to like it.

One of my frequent complaints about 3D simulations depicting a new smart growth development or showing off a new transit technology is that they do a horrible job at including LOTS of people in the simulation.

The reason is obvious, it takes a lot of time and skill to add realistic looking moving people around the sidewalks and crosswalks of a streetscape. Futuristic transportation videos often show the highspeed train or Personal Rapid Transit void of people. It feels like your traveling through a ghost town, and the unintended side-affect is that you end up feeling alone. Slowly but surely animators are including people walking around simulations.

Check out this crowd simulation: It's a real time crowd model based on continuum dynamics created by designhive. The motion of crowds is controlled by a dynamic potential field, which allows moving obstacles to begin avoiding each other well in advance without the need of explicit collision avoidance. You can also set up different degrees of discomfort zones (i.e. J walking in front of a car much higher than J walking behind a car, much higher than sticking to the sidewalks and crosswalks). In this example, the pedestrian and traffic simulation models are combined with a 3D Studio Max model of an Oxford Circus proposal, making a very realistic finished product. There is a paper and video by Treuille, A. Cooper, S., and Popović, Z, on using continuum dynamics for crowd simulation.

Another technique that works incredibly well (if you're good at it), is to combine video of real street scenes with 3D animation using green screen technology -- a technique now ubiquitous in the movie industry. Jonathan Arnold with Arnold Imaging in Kansas City Missouri has put together a number of development simulations using this technique. Check out the one he did for Kansas City. Cool stuff.

Yogi Berra said that.  I also recall someone saying at some conference on smart growth or new urbanism: the more cars sharing the road, the more people get frustrated (hence all the car ads of people driving with no other cars in sight), while the more people on a well designed sidewalk, the more we tend to like it. 

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Arthur C. Clarke once said that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." PlaceMatters has recently been using and demonstrating some innovative and low-cost touch-tables and electronic whiteboards.  Our audiences and partners are excited to use this intuitive interface. Inspired in part by Johnnie Chung Lee's TED.com talk, we have been using these tools to help brainstorm, create comments on maps, and use our new anyWare Planning™ tools. 

These tools are useful in synthesizing information on maps, something that is time consuming if you have multiple tables with paper maps that have to be digitized. They also allow more innovative presentations that go beyond Powerpoint, a relief for any regular conference attendee.

As much as the tools are smart and appealing, we want to use them strategically, rather than as just as a shiny new technology (see Fred Armisen's hilarious use on Saturday Night Live below). We are constantly asking for feedback on the use of the tools, and are careful to make sure their use fits the situation. 

PlaceMatters is also continuing to look for new technologies that would help us to reach more people, and to more effectively engage them.  Who knows, maybe holograms, as CNN demo-ed during the 2008 elections, are next--they certainly approach magic if you ask me.

­For the past two weeks, I've been traveling a lot for business and pleasure and I realized that I've utilized a healthy mix of transportation options: light rail in Minneapolis, planes between Denver and Minneapolis and Philadelphia, commuter rail in Philadelphia, automobiles in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and good old fashioned walking. What has been great about this trip, is that I've used each of these methods as part of a transportation system--a network of options. This seems like an obvious observation, but what troubles me is that too many discussions on transportation seem to separate out the various modes (cars, trains, planes and bike/ped) into warring camps.

Many people understand implicitly that different transportation options operate as a system. For example, I may drive my car to the airport, get on a plane to fly to some distant city, and then get off and catch a train to my hotel. Each transportation choice is made based on a mix of economics, convenience, and efficiency. Driving a car during off peak hours when roads are less congested may make more sense than waiting an hour for a train, but catching a frequent train during rush hour may save the unnecessary stress of congestion.

While it is very easy to see how each transportation mode can operate as part of an integrated system, we often do not address transportation solutions systemically. Instead, the debates fall into unnecessary camps that create a false notion of either-or decisions. This has part to do with the way in which we finance transportation as well as the limited pool of funds available (especially in these times). However, we need some bold leadership and clear communication that all options need real consideration. Now is the time to build a global competitive advantage by strengthening our major regions with integrated systems.

Integrated transporation systems not only gives expanded choice to American citizens, but can be an important economic development tool. Imagine a 36 minute commute from downtown New York to downtown Philadelphia on a truly high speed system. If the high speed rail was then linked into strong local transportation options, mobility would increase for the region allowing the efficient movement of goods, services, and ideas. This would link the two city economies, enabling better global competitiveness. By now, the high speed rail corridor map has spread around the blogoshpere, but you can see a very specific strategic approach to funding priority corridors.

Richard Florida has much more to say about this specifically as it relates to mega-regions. He also mentions Patrick Adler's (of the Martin Prosperity Institute) high speed rail time table, which compares average drive times between major cities and the hypothetical high speed rail time based on average French TGV speeds of about 155 mph. The table is show below courtesy of Richard Florida's blog and the Transportation Quarterly.

Before I get too far off track (no pun intended) talking about just high speed rail, I wanted to bring this post back to its initial motivation. High speed is just one piece of an infrastructure framework we can build in this country to reinvent and reinvigorate regions. Too often we break it down into its component parts and lose the forest for the trees. If I were to zoom into the map above, you ideally would see local systems that integrate into these regional links. The challenge for planners and policy makers is to help people visualize and understand these connections and how each piece - local, regional, and national - fits together. This was best done recently by NC3D to help pitch high speed rail to Californians, which I'll leave you with to enjoy.

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Once again, US Air (a.k.a. US-SCARE) has made my life difficult. I was hoping to fly back from Myrtle Beach, SC to Denver yesterday and they cancelled my flight (Myrtle Beach is where the GeoTools conference was and a meeting of the Ecosystem Based Management Tools Network).  

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­Once again, US Air (a.k.a. US-SCARE) has made my life difficult. I was hoping to fly back from Myrtle Beach, SC to Denver yesterday and they canceled my flight (Myrtle Beach is where the GeoTools conference was and a meeting of the Ecosystem Based Management Tools Network).  

While sitting in my hotel, I decided to do something I have not done for a long time – random surfing. I thought, what if I googled “go to tinyurl.com” to see what people had posted? Tinyurl.com/ht-harlem2, caught my eye because I thought you could only create tinyurl’s with the arbitrary 6 letter codes tinyurl.com generated for you and yet they some how made one with their own customized code (a new feature now available on tinyurl).

What I found was amazing -- an extremely sophisticated stitched together panorama of Harlem. A month ago, I had seen a similar high resolution images of Inauguration day where you could zoom in to see everyone on stage with the President as well as people’s faces a good 1/2 mile down the DC mall. But the resolution of this site is even more incredible – you can zoom in to a building several miles away and still see detail down to the individual bricks of the building.

­Because they created this zoomable panorama with stitched together images, you get some interesting images in places where there is movement -- ghost images of cars going through each other and semi-transparent people walking down the sidew­alk.

What does this mean for planners?  You tell me.  One thing is for certain – Harlem is a much more interesting place than this pit of a hotel plopped in the middle a maze of concrete ugliness at 1 AM in the morning.

Here are two sets of screen captures I took showing how far you can zoom in.  The first set, I zoomed into a building way off in the horizon.  The second, probably a mile away, you can see a dad holding his son's hand while walking on the street.

It took some sleep and a shower to ponder the significance of this technology to planning. I remembered a review I read in Outside about the latest line of ultra-high resolution video cameras from the Red Digital Cinema Camera company.  To quote them:

"If you're used to shopping for digital still cameras by megapixels—a good one now gets 10 to 20—consider that the Epic shoots up to 260. That's not an incremental shift; it's like releasing the iPhone in 1980."

The Epic sells for $50K, the Scarlet for $3K.  And we're talking about video, not just still shots, so imagine being able to take 65 megapixel shots at 50 frames a second. So:

1. Say good-bye to privacy in public spaces!  Unless you have 4 walls around you or you're in a thick fog, don't be surprised to see a recognizable photo of yourself someday  in a picture taken miles away.

Over the last weeks I finally found the time to put together a video outlining our eMeetings using  the video footage we collected during our community workshops for the Routt County 2030 project. 

Today I was invited to host a webinar for the EBM Tools Network  talking about our civic engagement work. I boiled down the longer presentation I usually give to leave room for a very interesting Q&A session afterwards.

Play audio file to listen to a recording of the presentation >>