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.

Having attended Autodesk University in Las Vegas this week, I’m immersed in the idea of model-based design. The concept is a paradigm shift for the AEC community as it breaks free of the drawing-oriented design process toward an intelligent model that informs all phases of a building’s life and is acted upon by all of the disciplines that are involved in the process. The idea that informs this is Building Information Modeling (BIM), which is basically a GIS for a building. BIM introduces a database to store all details and components of the building as well as the domain knowledge of a team of collaborators.

GIS has always been about the aggregation of policy-oriented details about our planet. The very first GIS, the Canadian Geographic Information System, was a necessary step to pull together nationwide-scale land use planning by the central government to inform social, economic and environmental decisions. As such, the GIS became the repository of details about agricultural suitability, the details about natural resources exploitation and management, and a means to gauge the demographics of the populace as well as the potential impacts of policy decisions on society.

In much the same way that BIM is about extending the collaboration process to make the best possible building as a holistic design exercise, GIS has the same process and outcome for crafting and managing policy for a better and more efficient society. The extension of this concept is that we can begin to build global best practice approaches for eradicating poverty, managing our resources, stewarding our environment in a way that preserves biodiversity, and adapting together to the climate and resource scarcity issues that face our finite planet.

The concept of GIS addresses all elements of living most efficiently on our planet. GIS informs policy, manages policy implementation, monitors policy effectiveness, and provides the means of communicating policy success. In much the same way that BIM will revolutionize the building design, construction and management industry, GIS has and will continue to transform the effective creation, administration and accountability issues related to public policy.

It was obvious coming into this year’s AU conference that the role and prominence of the word geospatial has changed within Autodesk as a result of recent reorganization. Certainly there’s good ongoing support for Map 3D and Autodesk Mapguide, but there were no tracks identified as geospatial.

Instead, Autodesk has expanded their infrastructure group to encapsulate their geospatial tools and domain expertise in specific markets. The idea that was articulated is that geospatial data and visualization serve to inform infrastructure projects, and Autodesk has identified opportunities around specific market segments rather than geospatial platform development.

Among the areas that Autodesk feels there are opportunities within the newly redefined infrastructure grouping are transportation (with beefed up capabilities in Civil3D), water/wastewater, electrical utilities and renovation and retrofit of buildings. The software tools that dominate the opportunities in this group are Revit and Navisworks, with an emphasis placed on analysis with Ecotect and Green Building Studio as well as increasing the capabilities of Revit to work as a better collaboration tool for larger distributed project teams.

Last year’s push for digital cities has been muted by the state of the economy, and particularly the overwhelming challenges that cities face due to reduced tax revenues. Autodesk’s acquisition of Land Explorer is still undergoing a transition from its German roots to become standardized for the North American market and the rest of the world. The tool’s ability to create detailed 3D models quickly has generated excitement within the group, particularly for scenarios where cities seek to manipulate their future design.

While the role of geospatial thinking within the product lines has been shifting for a while, it speaks most clearly to a convergence of technologies. While model-based design feeds nicely into the role of geospatial tools to form the base reality that everything is built upon, there still isn’t a strategy for sharing models between tools other than the FDO process. While this capability addresses many user needs, the vision of a detailed city model that ingests the building models and as-built drawings from multiple Autodesk tools seems a far way in the making.

The Utility Symposium at Autodesk University yesterday provided a good overview of multiple scales of utility operations and a global perspective, with representation from North America, Europe and Australia. The focus was on the user, with presentations from a wide variety of electric and water utilities. It all kicked off with a “speed-dating” format aimed at creating a strong feeling of community among Autodesk’s utility customers. The event provided a forum for discussion among peer groups, an overview of process issues and some creative approaches to common challenges.

The first panel discussion started with a question about the challenges due to the down economy. Surprisingly, there was little lamenting with more of an emphasis on opportunity. Among the benefits of the slowdown have been more time to train, a chance to look more closely at process to improve efficiencies, the ability to improve business by focusing on key differentiators, and the benefits of adding top talent because so many good people are out of work.

Presentations began with Southern California Edison’s ambitious and long-term goals of a more streamlined operation. The utility needed to revamp a siloed operation that used to have five different crews in the field using five different systems. The revamped system has SAP at it’s core along with Autodesk’s utility design services (AUD). The utility is undergoing incremental change that focuses more on process than technology.

The utility makes great use of Google Maps and Google Earth Pro to form the basis of their base map for design projects. They haven’t decided on a GIS component yet for this major revamp, but did state that Oracle Spatial will be a key component and that they would be GIS “front end agnostic,” meaning that there would no longer be a GIS system competing against another within different parts of the organization. There are still a number of challenges for the utility to address, including a year of mapping updates backlogged, but they’re committed to organizational change as well as technology change with this process.

The panel discussion provided some good insight into utility data quality issues that expanded on the year of backlogs, and Google Maps as base layer. While this low-quality level seemed appalling to some, there were several surprising comments about the more the data is used the worse that it gets. The issue that all users shared is that any large-scale changes to systems cause great disruptions that take time to recover, and that lapses in funding for field data maintenance (often the reaction in a down economy) take a great deal of time to recover from.

When the panel was asked where they are placing their development emphasis, there was varied reaction. Las Vegas Valley Water is placing a great emphasis on custom solutions with Web 2.0 technologies, saying that the paradigm shift of the Web is upon us and that there’s great opportunity for collaboration. Nashville is placing greater emphasis on automated design process to streamline design work and create rules-based design criteria. The canton of Basel, Switzerland is taking a service-oriented architecture approach for the development of better tools and work processes that are “independent from technique,” stating that there’s now much greater opportunity to organize solutions around work. Hazen-Sawyer is working to leverage their model-based designs so that the utility of the model can live on with the client for ongoing maintenance.

Model-based design was prominent throughout the session, with more of an emphasis on 3D data and streamlined design workflows. As Parsons put it in their presentation, the traditional linear approach to design doesn’t work when moving to a collaborative model-based approach. There is a disruptive change that replaces the “relay race” approach with a more collaborative and streamlined process.

In the end, the issue still revolves around quality data for quality decisions, and a focus on streamlined and more inclusive process.