Digital 3D visualizations and simulations of urban areas have been possible for a long time. The shelf life of one of these creations however hasn’t been impressive. I’m sure that most large cities have various moth-balled models that may have been effective for their purpose when created, but now don’t have much utility because they are just like snapshots in time that become dusty and outdated.

The thing that most of the moth-balled models have in common is that they’re simply a different means of rendering rather than really modeling in the full sense of that word. To fully model reality means that the model contains details and intelligence about construction, materials, and various network connectivity so that it can be used for all means of analysis.

The business case for creating a dumb 3D model has always been suspect. It’s received ho-hum reactions from many professional quarters when its realized that it doesn’t have much utility beyond an individual project. Thankfully that old dumb model is slowly going away, and with it goes the ho-hum attitude about models. When users realize that they can access and analyze the model specific to their own interests, then the questions of utility fade away and the business case for their creation manifests itself. The business return on an intelligent model is frankly limitless, because the more intelligence that the model has the more efficient a municipality becomes — saving time and dollars and creating a more livable community.

The model itself is uninteresting. It’s the ongoing use and ever-increasing fidelity and intelligence that will power wider adoption. The rise of intelligent models for more intelligent infrastructure will power a myriad number of careers and business opportunities in the years to come.

The fusion of both LIDAR and hyperspectral imagery for the creation of realistic urban models for simulation purposes was the focus of a presentation this morning at ILMF by Raul Campos-Marquetti, senior hyperspectral scientist at Merrick & Company. The ultimate purpose of this model was a simulation for military training purposes by the U.S. Army’s RDECOM.

Hyperspectal provided the means to classify features and to create a spectral library of road surface types, roof types, vegetation classifications, and an understanding of different building types. The hyperspectral classifications were then used to do a pixel by pixel, point to point fusion to create an informed 3D model with real world features and land cover/land use classifications.

The “physical morphology” model informed the synthetic creation of building exteriors and interiors based on real observation of different material types. The resulting large-scale city model was more of a true modeled reality than what can be accomplished with simply point clouds, because the classifications informed more realistic simulation that could take into account the physics of the different material types.

The algorithms behind the functionality of Microsoft’s Photosynth offering began as Noah Snavely’s Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington. Snavely is now a computer scientist at Cornell University, and he’s working to push the scale of montaging 2D photos to create 3D realities beyond current limitations of dozens or hundreds of photos toward tens of thousands and even millions of photos.

The project dubbed PhotoCity is discussed in detail in a feature in today’s New York Times. A novel approach to this new effort to create large 3D models is that the capability is being built around a social game scenario that will spur competing teams to add and improve images where there is little coverage. Users will be able to use their iPhones to upload collections of digital images.

This harnessing of collaborative approaches seems to be the next map paradigm shift, witnessed recently in the swift OpenStreetMap mapping of Haiti. This next move toward the creation of richly detailed 3D realities as crowd-sourced efforts cuts out the data provider role, and the simpler collection methods that are accessible to all have some serious repercussions for commercial data collectors.

View the gameplay tutorial via YouTube in the video below.

Earthmine was one of the more interesting exhibitors at last year’s SPAR Conference in Denver. I visited with the company last year and ran into the company founder Anthony Fassero at this year’s event. They didn’t have a visible presence this year because Fassero indicated that they’re just too busy.

They have 10 vehicles now in rotation collecting data worldwide, and Fassero said that they’re busy on a major data collection project in France. The big push is for pixel-based collection of urban environments, with each pixel having an accuracy of less than one meter.

I ran into a Twitter post by Tim O’Reilly that pointed me to this blog post with the following embedded video that shows a very exciting view of future pedestrian navigation (including x-ray vision) that uses Earthmine data for visual search along with mobile video as the sensor. This amazing augmented reality application uses Earthmine’s photo point clouds to solve the major problem of data collection.

Earthmine has expanded their business model to include hosting their own data in the cloud, and providing developer tools so that other companies can create interesting applications. The above example was developed by a company named Occipital using Earthmine data and their development tools.

It’s great to see this exciting use of Earthmine data, and to speculate about future applications that this quality data enables. The utility of the photo point cloud starts to make great sense, particularly in the mobile environment, because there are far fewer points than LIDAR for a more compressed data set. The full 3D view is captured with good textures and realism to neatly represent the world around you.

I can’t wait to hear more about what the company has been up to. Fassero indicated that they’re staying rather quiet right now, but that we’ll hear more from them in the June time frame with a France-oriented announcement.

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.

Just a few years ago there was a flurry of activity to create virtual digital worlds such as Linden Labs’ Second Life for interaction in spaces some call the metaverse. At that point in time, the prediction was that these worlds would far surpass Facebook and MySpace as the places that we’d want to gather and interact. The thinking was that the almost real-life interpersonal connections in these virtual worlds would cause us to congregate. The flurry of early adoption hasn’t sustained, and if anything we’re far less virtual but more constantly connected today.

The virtual reality of a metaverse requires a great deal of programming, data creation and design in order to approximate reality and become a compelling experience. The time and resources needed for such an effort is a hard thing to justify without a clear understanding of rewards, but that barrier has yet to stop almost all other Internet fads. Perhaps it’s the complexity of the user experience to date, and the chaos of the commons that’s holding the idea back. The metaverse is not an ‘if’ scenario, it’s a ‘when’ scenario and it’s interesting to think about how it will come about.

Digital Earth Momentum

All of the metaverse activity has direct ties to the geospatial concept of a Digital Earth where we will model our world more closely, incorporating science in order to continue to expand our knowledge about Earth systems, and share insights along with interactions in virtual space. The interactive 3D environments that use avatars for interaction seem to be on the wane, but that sort of interface has always been part of the Digital Earth vision.

The concept of stepping into a digital reality to interact with data and others provides a means for collaborative knowledge building. Gathering to learn and share knowledge such as a in a digital classroom or online event goes beyond the social interactions to achieve the “collaboratory” vision.

This Digital Earth dream remains relevant today, but is a long way from being realized. Geographic information explorers such as Google Earth, Microsoft Bing Maps for Enterprise, and ArcGIS Explorer explore what’s possible to extend beyond a 2D map representation, but they’re far from the realism of the vision and they lack interactive elements .

More than 140 Characters

By far the most popular social media tool right now for online interaction is Twitter. While Twitter offers quick connections to like-minded individuals, and the ability to create community links, it’s far from the rich social interaction that’s envisioned in the metaverse. The limit to 140 characters creates terse back and forth exchanges with links to outside content, but no real dialogue.

The idea of collaboratory spaces with interactions to solve problems requires a much richer user experience and exchange of materials than is available through current online tools. One recent new technology that starts to come close on interaction and idea sharing is HP’s “visual collaboration” SkyRoom. The new site allows for multiple people to work together using 3D visualization software.

The idea of sharing complex 3D models across the Internet with colleagues across the globe is a very compelling first step toward the richer idea of the metaverse. HP starts to reveal the benefits of rich, high-definition interactions that include audio, video and a design space for manipulation of 3D models between collaborators.

The kinds of complex problems that we face today require an interactive multimedia space like this. Imagine sharing rich 3D models of scientific data or models of better buildings or better infrastructure. There are barriers today for allowing even real-time model sharing within the same office. Imagine the possibilities when these barriers come down for interaction across the entire globe.

My sincere hope is that the next online collaboration and social media fad will take us in the direction of much richer interaction. Rather than constantly monitoring a stream of distracting information, it would be great to move toward more seldom but richer interaction. I’d love to experience the metaverse in my lifetime, and our planet desperately needs a collective knowledge base with rich problem-solving interactions.

Instead of viewing 3D data on a flat screen, imagine being able to manipulate it in a full 3D environment that doesn’t require special glasses or other devices. Zebra Imaging is working on holographic display technology that will open up new possibilities on how we navigate and collaborate with spatial data.

I recently spoke with Michael Klug, CTO and co-founder of Zebra Imaging, about their film holograms that reveal rich 3D environments when illuminated by a light source and also their work toward the 3D holographic display.

“In the future you should be able to interact with the model directly so that you are designing on the display itself in 3D through 3D. Instead of using a mouse to draw a shape or a cube that gets represented on a 2D screen like we do today, you might actually use some other kind of device to trace out a cube in a spatial volume over one of our displays and have it appear there.

Hopefully that will allow the design process to move more smoothly and efficiently. As kids we all grow up playing with blocks and our whole world is 3D in front of us, and I think you never lose that paradigm in your mind. I think people have to learn how to deal with these other tools that we create, but for intrinsically 3D tasks like building or landscape design or city planning, designing in 3D is definitely the preference.”

Read the full interview here.

Two professors and planners recently won a MacArthur Foundation grant for harnessing the virtual world Second Life for community planning. The online magazine Metropolis has an interview with these two that discusses the impact of a 3D environment to make planning decisions much more accessible to the layperson.

The process that the these two describe for interactive group decisions sounds like an ideal approach, and the use of Second Life means that it’s accessible without a huge investment in software. Their assertion that communicating complex and abstract spatial ideas only becomes intuitive with a 3D immersive view makes great sense. Why are planners still doing this in any other way?

Microsoft’s “controller-free’ project Natal was announced at the E3 Conference this Monday. The motion sensing technology, without the need for handheld controller, is an exciting development for the immersive exploration of virtual worlds. There’s been some criticism in the gaming world about a lack of a tactile controller for such games as wielding a gun or sword or driving a vehicle. I tend to agree that there’s an inherent limitation here with such applications, without a device for tactile response. But, for walking around and exploring, this hands-free and unencumbered interface is natural and an improvement over current controllers. I’m anxious to see what applications crop up for digital earth exploration.

Satellier-Screampoint has just launched a three-dimensional digital city solution for the construction industry in India. The solution aims at modeling projects in 3D on a real-time basis.

The corporate website for the company promotes a 4d/5D digital city management solution, but my attempts to access the site today met with broken links.

Read more here in this story in Financial Express.