digital urban

Colours: A Live London Weather Dashboard

Andy — Thu, 23 May 2013 06:05:51 +0000

Here at The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis we run a Davis Vantage Pro 2 unit with Solar and UV sensors from a rooftop on Tottenham Court Road. The current output is via our live ‘Weather Dials‘ page, which is all singing and dancing, complete with graphs and updates every 2 seconds. Sometimes however there is a need for something simpler, a dashboard style view that changes background colour to a variety of pantone shades according to temperature:

Colours – London Live Weather

Made with a tablet in mind and to hang on a wall, ‘Colours’ is designed to be a simple weather application for London at a glance, data updates every two seconds.

Backgrounds

Thanks go to Ollie from CASA for the background script and the NounProject (Adam Whitcroft) for the icons.

View it live at http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/weather/colours.html

500 Words a Day: Academic Writing

Andy — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:53:07 +0000

Its not something many academics admit – but writing is hard, not for all, there are some academics who simply flow words but for many its a challenge. There is nothing worse than the blank page of a Word/LaTeX document, knowing you have 10,000 words to go and only a title or abstract in place. It also depends on your stage in an academic career. Researchers generally have more time during the day to, as the job title suggests, to research and therefore write, lecturers less time (increasingly so) and so on. That said, the ability to do anything else than write the paper/masters thesis/PhD chapter is strong, many academics are excellent in justifying just one more bit of research before they start writing.

500 Words a Day…

If you go through a period of not writing, be it weeks or months, then the guilt as an academic starts to build up, we are meant to write papers as those around will often be only to keen to chip in during conversations. I see it across the board, from professors through to starting out researchers and students leaving the course essay until the last possible minute. There is a need to not only get over the fear of starting a new paper but to also form a pattern to take away the worry that can all too easily build up.

It turns out the answer is easy, who would of thought it, and thanks go to Sir Alan Wilson of CASA who i found sitting typing early one morning, turns out he always aims for:

Write 500 words a day

I am at the stage, as head of department, that my day is not one of research, it is one of almost constant meetings, as such it is rare to find quality time to write. However 500 words is achievable, it can be fitted in between meetings either in one go or in small chunks.

Writing 500 words a day gives you 2,500 a week - 10,000 a month which is easily a PhD chapter, two working papers, or one journal paper.

It may seem obvious, but it is all too easy to complete a long day without having any words on paper and the aim for 500 words a day is not a mountain. It is not the sometimes recommended 1000 words a day that can turn into a slog and all too easily lead to a writers block.

I’ve been doing it for a week – not long I’ll admit – but i have 1 journal article, 1 conference paper and a two book chapters all due soon and it has taken away the worry, and if I’m honest the guilt, of simply doing the day job. I go home knowing i have completed the goal and i therefore see the completion point, its not building up to the senario where I have to write 4000 words in a day.

I would add that if you dont reach 500 words, don’t try to write more the following day, unless it flows. The aim is to get into a pattern, a pattern that is long term.

This blog post is just over 500 words, of course academic writing takes longer but for anyone out there worrying about output/deadlines/work load then i would suggest giving writing 500 words a day a try.

Working Paper – Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World

Andy — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:37:17 +0000

We present our working paper entitled ‘Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World‘. The paper comes in at approximately 9000 words and explores visualisation in cities ranging from Twitter to Second Life and through to NeoGeography and The Paraverse. The abstract is below, we have added it as new post as the moment we are mid book chapter on ’Smart Cities, Social Networks and the Internet of Things’ and it seemed timely to republish a paper written in 2007 that is still quite useful (although we are obviously biased):

Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World

Digital cities are moving well beyond their original conceptions as entities representing the way computers and communications are hard wired into the fabric of the city itself or as being embodied in software so the real city might be manipulated in silico for professional purposes.

As cities have become more ‘computable’, capable of manipulation through their digital content, large areas of social life are migrating to the web, becoming online so-to speak.

Here we focus on the virtual city in software, presenting our speculations about how such cities are moving beyond the desktop to the point where they are rapidly becoming the desktop itself. But a desktop with a difference, a desktop that is part of the web, characterized by a new generation of interactivity between users located at any time in any place.

We first outline the state of the art in virtual city building drawing on the concept of mirror worlds and then comment on the emergence of Web 2.0 and the interactivity that it presumes. We characterize these developments in terms of virtual cities through the virtual world of Second Life, showing how such worlds are moving to the point where serious scientific content and dialogue is characterizing their use often through the metaphor of the city itself.

Download the full paper as a .pdf (1.8Mb).

15,000 Agents: A* Pathfinding

Andy — Tue, 14 May 2013 08:54:11 +0000

Games engines such as Unity are the perfect platform for agent based modelling, they allow a combination of 3D urban cityscapes and navmeshes/grid graphs/point graphs and local avoidance systems. The A* Pathfinding project features an array of techniques for rapid pathfinding or AI development using a low memory footprint.

Agents in Unity

We have only started exploring the possibilites but the results are intriguing, below features a clip of 15,000 agents using local avoidance, the number could be considerably increased using multiple machines:

A* Pathfinding is available in free and pro versions, it is well worth checking out, we have just upgraded to the pro….

Unity Traffic System – City Traffic

Andy — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:05:01 +0000

Creating a sandbox style traffic system in Unity is a challenge. As our previous posts have shown agents can use NavMesh and calculate shortest paths but the hit is high on processing which in turn limits the number of agents in a scene. Sander van der Vegte is a multidisciplinary game developer who for the past 12 years has fortunate enough to make a living creating games, part of his current development process is a city traffic game and thus finding ways for natural behaviour while maintaining a low processing requirment.

Unity City Traffic

The clip below is a recording of an autonomous traffic system. Cars drive around while aware of crossings and other vehicles. When something is blocking their path, they will stop. If it takes too long, they will back up and look for another path, the basic ruleset allows for humorous situations:

Traffic system from Sander van der Vegte on Vimeo.

Within the development the user is able to click on a car to take it over while falling off the edge triggers the random camera again.

It is well worth heading over to http://sandervandervegte.nl/ to view his other projects and to keep up to date on City Traffic.

Police Agent City Ball – Unity/NavMesh and CityEngine

Andy — Wed, 01 May 2013 12:54:17 +0000

The natural conclusion of our recent posts on Unity and CityEngine is of course a physics/navmesh police chase with the agent target being a drag and drop ball.

Police Car Agents in the City

We will release a version next week on the win/mac platforms for those interested – the aim was to explore shortest path modelling of agents in Unity within an urban scene:

The concept was developed as part of our Masters course here in CASA, to explore the development of 3D interactive urban scenes…

Urban Ball – CityEngine, Unity and Agent Based Modelling on the iPad

Andy — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:14:26 +0000

CityEngine combined with Unity and a tablet – iOS requires a developers account, Android simple needs the 30 days Unity trial – allows city wide models to run with a touch based interface.

Urban Ball – CityEngine and Unity on iOS

We have used our recent work on Unity and Agent Based modelling to create a simple app called ‘Urban Ball’. Development time so far is around a couple of days so the route from city modelling through to iOS app is remarkably short. Via some tweaked physics and a touch interface linked to a to a ball (the target) we have a simple agent based model on the iPad.

The movie below shows the app so far:

We have been impressed with the rapid development path using Unity and the ability of the iPad to run city wide models complete with agents. Arguably we have completed a proof of concept here, in the next few weeks we will explore how much further we can go – perhaps to release our first free iPad/Android app….

Augmented Reality City Table Top – Unity, CityEngine and Vufoira

Andy — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:00:24 +0000

The Vuforia AR Extension for Unity allows developers to build AR apps using the cross-platform game engine – Unity. Working with both the free and pro versions of Unity, Vuforia is not only free it is also one of the best out there in terms of tracking and image based tagging.

Table Top AR City

Running on either iOS/Android or direct via a webcam it allows the integration of other Unity assets into scenes. As such you can create a table top digital city complete with agents all linked to an image based marker and running as a native iOS app:

We will be exploring this further over coming weeks, it opens up a lot of possibilities for augmenting city models (and office desks) with urban data visualisations via custom made iOS/Android apps….

Trail Rending of Agents with NavMesh, Physics, Unity and CityEngine

Andy — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:05:27 +0000

Combining simple agent based models with physics objects and rendering techniques in a game engine has potential for city wide 3D urban modelling. Traditional techniques often use JAVA based solutions or custom written toolkits with researchers developing their own models. With recent advances in procedural modelling and game engine technology, with the move to real time data feeds and advanced physics engines, there is notable potential.

Trail Render in Unity

Yesterday’s post on ‘Shortest Path Modelling and NavMesh in Unity and CityEngine‘ explored a simple target/navmesh approach. If you add physics to the target and use the ‘trail rendering’ effects of Unity you can create a dynamic scene with the paths of the agents traced. It is of course exploratory, but the possibilities are intriguing:

The Trail Renderer is simply used to make trails behind objects in the scene as they move about – with the addition of physics the ball reacts to the mesh and the agents are continuously calculating a shortest path. This is computationally intensive so a question remains on the number of agents Unity can handle in a single simulation, we will be exploring this over the coming weeks.

Shortest Path Modelling and NavMesh in Unity and CityEngine

Andy — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:13:49 +0000

Shortest path network analysis, pedestrian modelling and moving agents around complex city scenes has always been a specialised domain. As regular readers will know we have always taken the view that game engines are arguably better suited to agent based modelling – especially in terms of pedestrian and transport than more traditional packages.

Agents in Unity

With a mix of Unity NavMesh and some simple Javascript it is possible to create a city wide navigation mesh. Below is out first example using agents to follow a target (viewable in 1080p):

We will be exploring this further over coming weeks…