I recently spoke to Fred Limp, the past director of the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies and a gifted geospatial educator and practitioner at the University of Arkansas. I’ve always been fascinated by the types of projects that Fred works on, and I conducted an interview to delve into the evolution that’s taking place in the 3D space.

Fred and his team have been working on LIDAR applications and digital city modeling among other cutting-edge applications. An area that Fred is tackling is the analysis of 3D data at multiple scales, which offers some unique challenges:

“What happens when scale changes is not just a simple case of there’s more and bigger data sets.One of the real challenges that I see to the whole geospatial community is that when you “zoom in,” you do a whole lot more than just zoom in. You have to change paradigms of analysis and sometimes the data structure. One of the things that I find particularly exciting that is helping us begin to think about this is that the work being done on CityGML and the use of the concept of levels of detail.

Our community has a bunch of verticals, there’s the remote sensing vertical, and the LIDAR vertical, and the terrestrial laser scanning vertical. But we also have all these horizontal applications that we have to decide what tools and what methods and what analysis to do at different scales. The level of detail concept in CityGML begins to give us a paradigm for moving seamlessly from scales of 1 to 50 or 1 to 100,000. We need to develop analysis and display systems where we know how to begin thinking about that.

I think that’s a really important idea and I don’t know if people have really addressed it. It’s about how you think about data as you move between different scales, and what analytical operations makes sense. To me, that whole scale issue is something that we really have to think about a lot because so much changes as you move through different scales.”

Read the full interview online here.

The Open Geospatial Consortium and the buildingSMART alliance have just completed a report regarding the software interoperability issues that are faced in the architecture, engineering, construction, and owner operator community. The AECOO Testbed looked at methods to increase efficiency and provide cost savings by more streamlined project processes. Sponsors for the testbed included the architectural firms of HOK, Burt Hill, and Ellerbe Becket; general contractors Webcor and Gilbane; the U.S. General Services Administration and the American Institute of Architects.

The testbed aimed to address the productivity loss and fragmentation in the facilities development industries, and the need for software interoperability to not hold back efforts to improve the process. The testbed looked specifically at three areas of the process: Building Performance and Energy Analysis; Quantity Takeoffs for Cost Estimation and Communications Project Delivery and Decision Support.

Among the interesting findings of the report:

“We found that design-software-to-design-software was the least useful information sharing case to address. In the course of a design project, there is little need to share all aspects of the design between project participants. What is more important is to exchange relevant elements of the design between the lead architecture firm or lead general contractor and subcontractors with specific expertise in areas such as lighting, energy usage, building cost, HVAC, circulation, etc.”

The process began with agreements to standardize business practices, before tackling the need to standardize information sharing between software practices. The use of the methods and processes developed in AECOO-1 were shown to reduce timeframes from weeks to hours.

Download and read the full report here.

At last year’s SPAR Conference, ClearEdge3D’s automated extraction of CAD models from point clouds stood out from the crowd as a much needed tool to aid productivity. A telling story of the progression of the productivity shift that has happened with the advent of LIDAR tools is that in the past a large project may have needed five surveyors in the field with just one CAD operator. When tripod-mounted LIDAR arrived that shifted to one or two field workers, and five CAD jockeys back in the office. That further shifts with mobile LIDAR to one or two operators in the field and twenty back in the office. With this change to heavier data processing burdens, and the increasing volumes of data that accompany the more advanced collection tools and methods, there’s an obvious and glaring need for quicker and more automated processes.

The ClearEdge product fits neatly into this area, because it ingests point cloud data and automatically extracts 3D Cad models, which is often the primary workflow of a LIDAR project. Instead of gee-whiz technology this year, the emphasis of the company was on real-world applications and case studies. While the technology was being highlighted in the 3D Technologies track, users of the technology were discussing their use of the tools in their data capture workflows in the Scan to BIM conference track. The users repeatedly emphasized the time savings that they gained by adopting this automated data extraction tool.

Among the case studies that the company touted was an application by Stantec Engineering on a road and rail crossing project in one of the busiest intersections in Calgary. The constant flow of traffic meant that laser scanning was the only real option for data collection from both a safety and least amount of disruption perspective. The firm estimates that the ClearEdge tool pared down the time it tool to create the model from one week down to just four hours.

Another cased study was in the capture of a large federal building in Chicago by Ghafari Associated. There the adoption of the technology meant the elimination of redundant modeling steps to provide access to the data much more quickly. In this case, the time from scan to model was critical as the time to deliver the model was compressed. The scale and scope of this project was massive, with 500 scans of the building, and the delivery of a Revit model of the exterior and interior of the building complex.

In one year’s time, there were many more project examples across the board at this event. The company fought through the eastern snowstorms to make a delayed appearance at the event, and I’m sure they’re glad that they did. With their emphasis on productivity gains, with cost and time reductions on data processing, their product was very well received.

The worldwide architectural design firm HKS has been doing some impressive large-scale scan to BIM projects. The subject of a presentation at the SPAR Conference was 50 United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, a 360,000 s.f. federal building that was scanned and modeled in three weeks for retrofit preparation for a large federal client.

This detailed scan of a building on the historic register required some interesting feature manipulations in order to capture a suitable level of detail in a building with many detailed historical architectural elements. The size and detail of the building didn’t allow for full scan and representation of each element give file size limitations, so the model made use of some “jedi mind tricks” of visualization in order to aptly represent the building for the desired purpose of the model.

In all of the Scan to BIM sessions at the event, there’s a great degree of discussion about format and software manipulations. In a similar GSA project in Chicago, the team used no fewer than 14 different software packages and discussed a format workflow that includes COBIE, gbXML, IFC, DGN, DWG, etc.

HKS assigns one person as a controller of this complex process to facilitate and manage the manipulations of files and formats to develop a central integrated file. This person aptly holds the title of Data Wrangler.

Given the complexity of the tasks and the limitations of the software to capture and quickly render the level of details in such large models, it’s only a matter of time before more interoperability and performance are brought to bear on the problem. Until these issues are ironed out, any firm conducting such work should be prepared for data wrangling pains.

Alice Labs is a young company that began last year as a spin-off from university research in The Netherlands at the Technical University of Delft. They are focused on developing a toolset to enable users to get reality into the virtual world in high quality.

Studio Clouds is their product with a streaming engine that is designed to integrate with various software platforms, currently ported into 3DS Max and Maya with plug-ins. The tool allows the import of a wide variety of LIDAR data files. Below is a YouTube video that illustrates the capability.

PhotoStruct is a new product that they’re set to release that incorporates photogrammetry to create high density point clouds from just two images. After the calibration of the camera, the process just requires two images and the push of a button to render a high-definition color point cloud with texture and color in 15 minutes or so. The product will release next week, and will be available from the Alice Labs website.

Another product that will be released next week is Studio Clouds Registration, which allows you to register your clouds together, with cloud to cloud or target registration.

The company is focused on visual effects with the movie industry and gaming. They are also involved with forensics, archeologists with heritage sites, and with architects to render and visualize buildings.

In a New York Times blog post today, design and architecture columnist Allison Arieff writes about the continued issue of empty space and inefficiency in our built world, pointing to GIS as an answer to solve these issues.

“G.I.S. allows us to literally view our place both globally and in a hyperlocal context. That level of specificity, both at the micro and macro level, is helping revolutionize the way we think about, plan for and design the space we inhabit (or abandon). A visual map can show us patterns of overbuilding, abandonment, mis- (or lack of) use; it can teach us something about our current tendency to overbuild.”

This article reinforces the gaining prominence of GIS within the design community as a means to understand the whole, and to pull together patterns and discrepancies in the larger urban fabric. There appears to be a groundswell of interest in better planning and design as our cities become more and more important to how we live. This article concludes that the coming age of data-driven design will usher in more dynamic and flexible planning.

It’s always good fun to talk to Don Murray and Dale Lutz of Safe Software. Their company continues to improve their spatial extract, transform and load software, and they’ve further extended the functionality into 3D with their latest FME 2010 release. I interviewed the two recently, and we touched on a large number of improvements and expansion of their toolset.

Their move into 3D continues to fascinate me, both for the added functionality and the ease of many workflows. Don and Dale have been working closely together for the past 16 years. The following back and forth is a typical animated conversation as they both have great enthusiasm for the topic and apply their different perspectives.

DON: If you use 3D in 2009 and now use 2010, it’s like you’re using 3D for the first time. In some cases it’s as much as 100 times faster.

DALE: The other huge thing is that we’ve decided that it does matter what things look like and we bring over the textures. In FME 2009 we were kind of in denial that textures weren’t important and one of our senior staff members overruled Don and I, and surprised us by adding textures. Of course once we saw it, we said that we must have it. It wasn’t something that we defined as a priority, but I’m really glad that it got added.

With these new capabilities, we can synthesize very compelling 3D city models out of 2D ingredients. (see the City of Gavle example on fmepedia)

DON: We have another example where you have a CAD drawing with building footprints and the building heights known, as well as the location of lamp posts and other street furniture, but the orientation of the lamp posts isn’t known. Using FME 2010 in a simple workspace, you can orient the light standards so they’re hanging over the road. With the building heights, we can place them on the terrain so that the model looks like a real neighborhood.

All the ingredients are in the form of vector, raster (both imagery and digital elevation models) and textures, and 3D SketchUp models, and we integrate all of that and put it all out to KML, GeoPDF, Geodatabase, and any one of the formats that are appropriate for a whole cityscape scene.

We think that this is going to take FME into a whole new market –the modeling and simulation market.

Read the entire interview here.

Jack Dangermond answered some questions that I’ve been wondering about since the GeoDesign Summit a few weeks ago. The concept of GeoDesign is an exciting development whose time has come thanks to technology advancement, but the fit with other vendors in the design space was puzzling me. Following is his response to a question about where GeoDesign fits with BIM.

“I believe strongly in the concepts of GeoDesign as an extension to GIS for designing the future. And yes, 3D aspects of this will be very important. This is one of the main areas of research that will be coming out in our upcoming software release this spring.

ArcGIS 10 will  emphasize five things: a rich and scalable GIS data model that supports intelligent and large “virtual city” size data bases, full interoperability with standards-based and proprietary BIM models, very fast visualization, 3D object editing (i.e. building placement), and full 3D analysis. This system will allow users and developers to build workflows that test alternative design scenarios and evaluate the results using both statistical and visual analysis tools.

Today, GIS can scale to very large data sets (virtual cities) and can be fully interoperable with other BIM technologies. It is also nearly as fast as the VIS/SIM environments but offers the rich analytic and multi-user capabilities familiar to GIS users. On the other hand it is not a 3D building design and editing tool and needs to be integrated with other BIM technologies at the workflow level.”

The full text of my Q&A session with Dangermond appears here.

I’m working to synthesize all the ideas that were shared this past week in Redlands, Calif. at the first GeoDesign Summit. One pervading feeling that I have is that this new term, and definition of practice, provides an opportunity to be more inclusive. Currently, the term GIS is largely owned by one company, and the term of geospatial that was coined to be a broader take on the market in the mid-2000’s, is being abandoned. GeoDesign provides a new term that is inclusive of all aligned technologies and practitioners with the emphasis on actively shaping our planet to be a more livable and sustainable place.

The technology of CAD,BIM and GIS is converging, and there are battles going on about how to define and shape the convergence. With the concept of GeoDesign taking shape, it’s important now to engage all communities and technologists to have them define their stake and understanding. With barriers to different technologies coming down, there’s a huge amount of revenue at stake that will necessitate marketing skirmishes. It’s important for practitioners to work now to define and mold the concept so that technology can enable innovative collaborative workflows rather than erect new barriers for interoperability.

In the planning and design community GIS technology has only a shallow toe-hold in the work that’s being done. The idea of GeoDesign provides an opportunity for a whole new approach to assisting these practitioners for a more informed and participatory planning processes. The concept involves the evolution of the community plan or design into the nexus and repository for all ideas about the future of a location. The plan becomes a more organic place for interaction and collaboration that is enabled by technology.

GeoDesign acknowledges our current state of technological evolution. We’re at a crossroads now with geotechnology where greater visualization, interoperation, intuitive analysis and easier interfaces are needed. The different technological gaps that exist have been widely discussed and defined, leaving ample room for technologists to create new technologies and build new businesses and market segments to fill the gaps.

In order for practitioners to own this convergence, the time is now to participate in the definition in order to shape it.

The GeoDesign Summit is taking place this week in Redlands in ESRI’s new building. There are roughly 250 movers and shakers in academia, industry and non profits that represent landscape architecture, architecture, engineering, planning and geospatial training. This is a “who’s who” of important people that have all contributed to the current state of geospatial technology, and that are all pushing this technology to new heights.

It feels like a turning point where some of the ideas of what GIS could become at its inception  are resurfacing. The momentum of technological development are now enabling a whole new paradigm of geospatial application, but also back to the “design with nature” concept that was first thrust by Ian McHarg.

I’ll be sharing ideas from this event throughout this week, both looking back and looking forward.