A Synergistic Approach for Recovering Occlusion-Free Textured 3D Maps of Urban Facades from Heterogeneous Cartographic Data

In this paper we present a practical approach for generating an occlusion-free textured 3D map of urban facades by the synergistic use of terrestrial images, 3D point clouds and area-based information. Particularly in dense urban environments, the high presence of urban objects in front of the facades causes significant difficulties for several stages in computational building modeling. Major challenges lie on the one hand in extracting complete 3D facade quadrilateral delimitations and on the other hand in generating occlusion-free facade textures. For these reasons, we describe a straightforward approach for completing and recovering facade geometry and textures by exploiting the data complementarity of terrestrial multi-source imagery and area-based information

New Era, New Criteria for City Imaging

Despite many dramatic changes in last fifty years, urban designers still try to measure "city imaging" with same criteria as was described by Kevin Lynch in his landmark volumes. However, city imaging increasingly is supplemented by exposure to recent progresses in communication infrastructures. It seems that once again we need to re-ontologize concepts of city imaging for twenty-first century as his ideas were theoretically created when digital evolution was not such widely affected our world. This paper aims to identify effects of these new digital actors on city imaging. Consequently, we propose that with emergence of Softerial Era and infospherization of almost everything, another kind of landmarks have been evolved (linkmarks) which are highly referenced to a self and relative to his destination and necessities in real-time. We believe they can improve not only our “sense of place” but also “sense of time” as an inevitable necessity in our current life.Kevin Lynch, City Imaging, Infospherization, Landmark, Sense of time.

When Windmills Turn Into Giants: The Conundrum of Virtual Places

While many papers may claim that virtual environments have much to gain from architectural and urban planning theory, few seem to specify in any verifiable or falsifiable way, how notions of place and interaction are best combined and developed for specific needs. The following is an attempt to summarize a theory of place for virtual environments and explain both the shortcomings and the advantages of this theory

ARCHITECTURAL HYPER-MODEL: CHANGING ARCHITECTURAL CONSTRUCTION DOCUMENTATION

More architects and spatial designers are producing complex 3D computer models as part of their everyday design process and documentation than ever before. Parallel to this shift, there has been a rapid rise in consumer computer processing power that has made hyper realistic digital environments a part of our home entertainment. Together, the 3D CAD models and the Computer Gaming Engine could become an architectural hyper-model that renders a digital environment in real time. Such a model would enable users to navigate freely, effectively establishing a new mode of reading space that hovers between 2D drawings and a real space.(Nitsche & Roudavski). This paper will examine how these worlds can merge to form an architectural hyper-model as a valuable supplement to the more conventional scaled 2D construction drawing documentation found on construction sites. While easily misconstrued as speculative, the ideas presented in this paper outline an on-going body of innovative research currently at the prototype stage. These prototypical hyper-models explore the possibilities of providing construction workers and project mangers access to an architect’s 3D computer models on site. These models originate from within conventional building construction drawings such as detailed sections and exploded axonometrics. A process of reinterpretation occurs to locate these drawings and their information within an interactive 3D space. Such operations take advantage of the best of both paradigms. This gives users access to, and control of, the 3D information required for communicating necessary information about the building process. It also provides nodes or hyper-links in the 3D representation that connect to additional information, such as specifications, that are perhaps less formal/spatial. The paper will show how architectural hyper-models can be used on the construction site - both in the site office and on site using laptop computers and more compact hand-held devices - to decrease on site confusion and enable a faster and more complete understanding of the architect’s vision. The paper concludes with speculation on the types of additional information construction workers, architects and designers might want to access in the future and proposes additional technologies that could be provided

Embodiment in 3D virtual retail environments: exploring perceptions of the virtual shopping experience

The customer can now easily create, and customize, their own personal three dimensional (3D) virtual bodies in a variety of virtual environments; could you, by becoming a virtual body, actually enhance your online shopping and buying experiences or, would this potentially inhibit the pure visceral pleasure of retail therapy? "Second Life allows you to be a celebrity in your own lunchtime, .…you can design the body you've always wanted, and indulge your fashionista fetish for very little money. You can be the most attractive, best-dressed version of yourself you can imagine." This paper investigates online shopping in Second Life, through the experience of being avatars. We will discuss the possibilities of using avatars as brand new consumer identities for personalised and customised fashion shopping within the 3D multi user virtual environment, and question the influences and effects of these developments on the traditional high street shopping trip. The hyper un-realistic and non-sensory interface of online shopping for clothes has been hotly debated over the last decade; through the media, the industry and most importantly by the buying public. The customer’s inability to try on and experience the product has been the main inhibitor to shopping on-line, and the high levels of product returns in home shopping dramatically reflect this reality. Faster broadband connections and improved 2D web sites are making clothes shopping on the web more accessible, and for important customer groups, such as young professional females, and plus-size teenagers, virtual 3D technologies offer freedom of choice in any location. Retailers are now confidently providing different shopping experiences by combining 2D and 3D interactive visualisation technologies with advanced marketing techniques, to create virtual retail environments that attempt to actualise the true essence of shopping; by browsing, socialising, trying-on before buying and, in a new twist, leaving the store proudly wearing the item just purchased. American Apparel, Bershka, L’Oreal, Calvin Klein, Reebok, Sears, Nike and Adidas are pioneering virtual mega stores, and all offer newly innovative, and alternative shopping experiences inside 3D multi user virtual environments. An experiential and exploratory approach will be used to investigate fashion brands, and their virtual 3D stores in Second Life. As 3D avatars, we will record a range of customer perceptions and attempt to map their shopping patterns in this massively popular virtual world. The qualitative data gathered will inform discussions about the value of the virtual shopping experience for the customer and the retailer. Conclusions will also question the possibility of using avatars in a virtual shopping environment to acquire accurate body specifications for better fit and the collection of personal details for use in the future development of alternative shopping experiences

Natural User Interface for Education in Virtual Environments

Education and self-improvement are key features of human behavior. However, learning in the physical world is not always desirable or achievable. That is how simulators came to be. There are domains where purely virtual simulators can be created in contrast to physical ones. In this research we present a novel environment for learning, using a natural user interface. We, humans, are not designed to operate and manipulate objects via keyboard, mouse or a controller. The natural way of interaction and communication is achieved through our actuators (hands and feet) and our sensors (hearing, vision, touch, smell and taste). That is the reason why it makes more sense to use sensors that can track our skeletal movements, are able to estimate our pose, and interpret our gestures. After acquiring and processing the desired – natural input, a system can analyze and translate those gestures into movement signals

Seeing the smart city on Twitter: Colour and the affective territories of becoming smart

This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming ‘smart’. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using the data visualisation software ImagePlot to create a visualisation of 9030 tweeted images related to smart cities; and secondly, by responding to the affective pushes of the image files thus visualised. It identifies two colours and three ways of affectively becoming smart: participating in smart, learning about smart, and anticipating smart, which are enacted with different distributions of mostly orange and blue images. The paper thus argues that debates about the power relations embedded in the smart city should consider the particular affective enactment of being smart that happens via social media. More generally, the paper concludes that geographers must pay more attention to the diverse and productive vitalities of social media platforms in urban life and that this will require experiment with methods that are responsive to specific digital qualities

inSIGHT

inSIGHT began as an exploration of the future relationsip between virtual world and physical archiecture. It ended up being a proposal of an augmented reality platfrom for digital manipulation of physical transparency. Augmented reality (AR) is a fairly recent development in technology and not everyone is very well aquainted with it. Therefore research of the evolution of parralel realities as well as AR hardware is an important part of the project and its foundation. From the research, an idea of digitally manipulating physical visibility with the help of augmented reality emerged. Still, visibility is a broad term and could cover a lot of spatial definitions and variations. A number of them are being explored. Eventually, transparency is chosen as a focal inSIGHT transformation and is further explored and simulated. inSIGHT has the potential of being revolutionary because of its adaptability (space that is visible can be adjusted and changed instantly), personalization (visible space can be easily adjusted according to each user's needs) and multi-functionality (several users can be in the same physical space, yet see the space they choose to). The digital platform does not aim to replace physical world and would be unable to if it tried. It rather suggests new ways of interacting with the built environment with the help of the digital world