CASA: MRes Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation

Below we provide full details for 2012 entry on the new MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation (ASAV). The course reflects the current state of play in geographic, urban and architectural information systems with an emphasis on visualisation, analysis and modelling. Taught at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, home of digital urban, it is an innovative and exciting opputunity to study at UCL with a MRes acting as a pathway to a PhD or further career in ASAV.

Learn the science of cities and the art of visualisation at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis from September 2012   Cities have never been more important. More than a half of the world's population is now urban, presenting new social and environmental questions unique to the 21st Century.  As a student at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, you will learn to lead the way in collecting, analyzing and visualizing the datasets required to answer the big questions of the next century. At CASA, we have access to data relating to anything from the locations of London's buses in near real time through to passenger flows on the London Underground network and people's tweets about urban issues. In addition to our work with this so-called "Big Data", CASA is also renowned for communicating complex information and ideas to a wide audience of researchers, policy makers and non-specialists alike. The centre comprises a rich mix of researchers ranging from computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians through to geographers, architects and planners. This creates a vibrant and truly interdisciplinary research and teaching environment. The CASA MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation trains students in key techniques in Geographical Information Science, programming visualisations, 3D modeling and mathematical methods of spatial analysis, and with core modules on research methods and academic communication, builds towards a student-led dissertation, incorporating skills from the taught modules. The degree includes a group project which acts as a portfolio for the student's developing visualisation expertise within a piece of a collaborative coursework. The course contains technical and mathematical content, but there is no prerequisite for students to have programming experience - students can take an optional course introducing them to programming methods in term one if they choose, or learn these skills independently and at their own pace. More important is the desire to challenge yourself - we are looking for applicants from geographical, planning and related social science and humanities backgrounds as well as graduates of more mathematical or computational subjects who are keen to develop their existing skills in a new substantive field. To discover more about the course content and how to apply, click here: http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/casa/programmes/postgraduate/mres-advanced-spatial-analysis-visualisation Or download our course leaflet here: http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/downloads/MResASAV-2013.pdf Full-time study applications close 3rd August 2012. Modular flexible (part-time) study applications close 7thSeptember 2012. Term begins 24th September 2012.

City in a Book: Augmenting the CityEngine

Over the past few days we have been working on a series of techniques to visualise and augment procedural cities.

If you add in a model of a BenQ projector, the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation Handbook, a city within the CASA logo and a webcam you get the following augmented reality:




We are exploring this as part of our digital visualisation module on the MRes here in CASA, aiming to build in the latest research into the lectures. The combination of Lumion, 3DMax, Illustrator, CityEngine and AR is intriguing...

Augmenting a Roman Fort: A Paper Model, IPad and Unity

Stuart Eve here at The Bartlett's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis has posted an update on his PhD research looking at augmenting archaeological sites. Before moving onto the real world he has built a proof of concept based on a Roman Fort made out of paper, the results on the iPad are extremely promising:


Augmenting a Roman Fort from Dead Men's Eyes on Vimeo.
Stuart has a full write up on the tools used over on his blog..

Augmented Reality for 3D Max and SketchUp

Augmented Reality can be very impressive within office, museum and gallery based environments. It provides a hands on way to visualise cityscapes, architecture and urban animations displayed directly onto a physical desktop.

With the plugin for 3D from AR-Media it is also extremely easy to create:



We like the way all the animations are held with the file and move beyond the tag.



If you have not tried out tag based Augmented Reality yet then now is your chance as AR-Media also have a plugin for SketchUp:



Head over to http://www.inglobetechnologies.com/ to download the plugins. We have been working with AR for a while now and it really does offer a lot of 'bang for the buck'.

Museum Plaza - Louisville, Kentucky

The video below was produced for an exhibition featuring the proposed Museum Plaza building for Louisville, Kentucky.

Museum Plaza from Brooklyn Digital Foundry on Vimeo.

We like the integration of the digital into the model footage, especially with the traffic. That said, the pixelated faces of the workers in the background is perhaps slightly concerning, especially for a clip to be used in an exhibition.

Building design by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture; video direction and production by Brooklyn Digital. Music by Mouse on Mars (via O.M.A.).

GIS and Augmented Reality in 2015

The last 12 months has seen a turning point in terms of bringing geographically aware augmented reality to mobile devices. Significant developments in locational technology such as the inclusion of a built-in digital compass, GPS (Global Positioning System) and accelerometers into mobile phones have allowed not only location but also heading, and pitch to be detected and therefore incorporated into data display systems. These built-in technologies have brought augmented reality to the hands of the masses, and the phones themselves have sparked a market driven boom in fusing augmented reality with location-based services (LBS).Currently applications are in their infancy and mainly focused on specific topics such as ‘show me where the closest x is’. This however represents the tip of the iceberg with the addition of a GIS into the mix there is notable potential for the industry.

The short paper below was written by Sung-Hyun Jang of the GIS and AR blog and us here at digital urban as part of a larger wide ranging technical report for the Association of Geographic Information which is coming out soon. You can read the short below via Issuu:





To keep up to date with all things GIS and AR, head over to Sung's GIS and AR blog.

Augmented (hyper)Reality

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it:

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

The clip above was produced by Keiichi Matsuda a final year Masters in Architecture over at The Bartlett, here at University College London, as part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

Sketch Shapes in Augmented Reality - iPhone App (Hacked)

The excellent ReadWriteWeb site has a neat article on 'Devs Hack iPhone API for True Augmented Reality '

In short - take a look at the movie below and note the ability to draw shapes and then render via AR, complete with attached physics:



It has notable potential for designing buildings - see http://www.readwriteweb.com/ for more.

Augmented Reality: Urban Tagging via Messages and 3D Models

Augmented Reality on mobiles is currently without question one of the hottest research fields. A new application from Metaio is taking the concept a step forward allowing users to leave tweets, messages, web pages and 3D models in a real space for other users to view or pick up when there are in the vicinity.



This opens up a whole number of new development routes from augmented graffiti to leaving a virtual message outside someones apartment if they are out through to tagging locations, restaurants and services with virtual comments for users to view by simply pointing the mobile device at the location.

The application is currently under development for iPhone, Google Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 platforms.

Picked up via VentureBeat.

EyePet PS3 & AR Toolkit for Flash

While not 'urban' this is caught our eye as a neat augmented reality application running on the PS3 via the PlayStation Eye. With the addition of a "magic card," players will be able to play with a virtual monkey that lives in augmented reality.

In many ways this could be done with ARTAG - see our Tutorial - Quick and Easy Augmented Reality from SketchUp/3DMax etc - but on a PS3 it takes it to the next level. Note the use of the trampoline towards the end of the clip and the nice use of shadows:


EyePet is due for a global release around the end of the year. It would be interesting to know if its possible to do something similar with ARTAG and Flash using the newly released AR flash library (see Hack A Day):



It is almost tempting to fire up our webcam and take a look, sadly we are interviewing for the rest of the day....

Augmented Reality with the Sauerbraten Game Engine

In the clip above the Sauerbraten game engine is used to render a game map in real time onto a video feed. The game is run in multiplayer mode and one of the characters can be seen walking around.

We especially like the concept of holding a multi-player game map in your hand, to such an extent that we have suddenly got an urge to hold all of those little people from Populous in our hands via AR...

Take a look at the AliveTeam channel on YouTube for more movies.

TwitARound: Augmented Reality Tweets in the City

TwittARound is an augmented reality Twitter viewer on the iPhone 3GS. It shows live tweets around your location on the horizon with the video see-through effect allowing you to see where the tweet comes from and how far it is away:



Download Squad, where we picked it up from, didn't seem to see the point, we think its an incredably intriguing view of the cityscape - to be able to pan around a area and see the live tweets is perhaps a glimpse into the 'X-Ray Datascape' city of the future?

See TwittARound for more info.

Parallel Tracking and Mapping on the iPhone: Augmented Reality App Development

The porting of Augmented Reality to mobile devices has notable implications for data distribution and navigation in the city. Georg Klein, a post-doctoral research assistant in the Active Vision Group of the Oxford University Engineering Department, has posted his results developing 3D Augmented Reality (AR) on the iPhone. The clip details an adaptation of the parallel tracking and mapping system to an iPhone:




Georg notes that it still needs a lot of work - the camera's narrow field-of-view is problematic - but they can already make and track small maps. Of note is the use of the iPhone 3G rather than the 3GS with the built in compass see
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk for full details and past projects.

Thanks go to Greg Downing for the link, anyone interested in panoramas and 3d modelling techniques should take a look at his work via http://www.gregdowning.com/

See also Augmented Reality for Android: GIS in the City and Location Based Augmented Reality for Android: Enkin

Worlds First Mobile Augmented Reality for Android: GIS in the City

Combine GIS with mobile devices equipped with a digital compass and GPS and what do you get? Datascapes that can be mapped and layered on top of any object in the city, the potential for moving GIS and locational based services direct into the field is to be honest huge and now the first service has launched in the Netherlands via SPRXmobile. Known as Layar, it is the worlds first mobile Augmented Reality browser, which displays real time digital information on top of reality (of) in the camera screen of the mobile phone.

While looking through the phone’s camera lens, a user can see houses for sale, popular bars and shops, jobs, healthcare providers and ATMs. The first country to launch Layar is The Netherlands. Launching partners are local market leaders ING (bank), funda (realty website), Hyves (social network), Tempo-team (temp agency) and Zekur.nl (healthcare provider).

How it works

Layar is derived from location based services and works on mobile phones that include a camera, GPS and a compass. Layar is first avaliable for handsets with the Android operating system (the G1 and HTC Magic). It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers. This makes Layar a new type of browser which combines digital and reality, which offers an augmented view of the world.

ARhrrrr! Augmented Reality Mobile Phone Gaming

ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones from the Augmented Environments Lab. The phone provides a window into a 3d town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. Watch out though as the zombies will fight back, throwing bloody organs to bring down your copter. Move the phone quickly to dodge them. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion:

By merging graphics with props in the physical world, handheld Augmented Reality games pull the player through the small screen and into a larger merged play-space. Take a look at the project page for more info...

If you want to start experimenting yourself see our Quick and Easy Augmented Reality Tutorial.

Thanks go to Marek for sending us the link via Engadget.

Augmented Reality for SketchUp: Now on the Mac

We ran a post on ARMedia a while ago and now the Augmented Reality plugin for SketchUp is available for the Mac. The movie below sums up the possibilities:



If you are in the business of communicating designs to clients or setting up an exhibition space and need something that little bit different then augmented reality carries a large wow factor for very little effort.

You can download a free trial from http://www.inglobetechnologies.com/en/products/arplugin_su/info.php

ARSights: Augmented Reality for Google Earth

Augmented Reality is one of those technologies that is very impressive yet simple to implement. Thanks to the Development Lab of Inglobe Technologies its just got easiy via their Web-Based Tool that allows users to visualize Google Earth 3D models using Augmented Reality.

Take a look at the movie below:



While ARSights is not Augmented Reality directly inside of Google Earth, it acts a browser for models that in turn can be visualized directly on users’ desktop, by connecting a simple webcam and by printing a suitable code.

Take a look at http://www.arsights.com/ for more info.

Augmented Reality in (outside) of Second Life

As we have pondered in various posts Augmented Reality is a quick win in terms of visualisation, it is realtivly easy to implement and has a high 'wow' factor. The concept is simple, a webcam is linked up via a toolkit that is able to identify printed tags, the system then superimposes and 3D model over the scene - thus augmenting reality.

Of course the printed tags dont have to be 'physical' they can be embedded into Virtual Worlds such as Second Life, creating a really unqiue concept of importing/moving and visualisation objects in a virtual environment.

Take a look at the video below from cristiancontini for a really interesting proof of concept:


Augmented Mixed Reality: Second Life pops out from the Screen from cristiancontini on Vimeo.

See http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/ for download and working examples.

See also our recent posts on Papervision Augmented Reality and Augmented Reality for Architecture using SketchUp.

Augmented Reality and Google SketchUP: ARplug-in

We have always been big fans of augmented reality here at digital urban, simply because it is so easy to set up yet a very impressive and powerful visualisation technique. As such the ability to export direct from Google SketchUp via the new plugin ARplug-in from the Development Lab of Inglobe Technologies, into a physical space has huge potential - see the movie below:



All you need to make ARplug-in work is a personal computer, a webcam and a printed code attached to the software.

For optimal functionality, a Dual-core PC with a standard graphic card for 3D videogames are recommended, see AR-media for full details and download.

A free demo version is available with the full version coming in at 99 euros.

Papervision Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is possibly one of most impressive techniques to implement compared to time and level of technology required. Sadly the recent uncertainty surrounding ArTag has left a hole in the community with the tool kit waiting for a decision on licensing.

As such its exciting to see an example of augmented reality running in Flash via Papervision, the movie below provides an insight:


Papervision - Augmented Reality (extended) from dpinteractive on Vimeo.

Keep an eye on http://interactive.digitalpictures.com.au/ for more updates..