Location

Today, Keith Stuart at the Guardian, wrote an article on How the 3D engine is changing the world.  He points out that gaming engines and technologies are starting to make their way into other fields and describes the complexity of building games.  Planning is one of the fields that is beginning to benefit from the industry that brought us Doom and Quake.

SketchUp brought 3D to the masses and helped pave the way for user generated content that can be used in planning and visioning.  Now, with powerful gaming and city building engines like CityScape and CityEngine coming to architecture and planning, we can now imagine futures in highly rendered live environments.

PlaceMatters recently acquired a license to CityScape and will be evaluating it's use in planning and visioning.  We are extremely excited about the partnership with PixelActive 3D.  Our preliminary opinion of the simulation engine is that it provides a vital missing link for showing alternative futures in a rapid prototyping environment.  SketchUp allows you to do this on a building level fairly easily, but it's lacking on the site level.  CityScape fills this need.  It is also highly interoperable with other 3D packages, opening up the opportunity for extremely efficient workflows in a planning and visioning context.  I'll blog more about that over the next few weeks.

As gaming technology allows us to build cities in real time, we will be able to deliver increasingly higher quality visualizations at much lower cost.    Next month, PlaceMatters will be attending the Geodesign summit at ESRI headquarters. to talk about the emerging field of Geodesign, which is the pairing of GIS and design.   And over the next few months, I'll probably obsess about this topic as I explore ways to push this in our own work and develop best practices around visualization and public participation.