Tag Archives: Collaborative Environment

Enabling DEMO:POLIS

“Enabling DEMO:POLIS” is a participatory urban planning installation, presented as part of the DEMO:POLIS exhibition at the Berlin Akademie der Künste (http://www.adk.de/demopolis – 11.3.2016 – 29.5.2016). The installation engages the public in the design of open space and consists of six terminals that run a custom, interactive software application.

The software leads the user through a number of typical urban design tools (space allocation, streets, buildings, landscape, etc.) and concludes with a fly-through through the generated 3D scenario, in this case, the Rathausforum / Alexanderplatz area in Berlin.

The following video demonstrates a full cycle of a possible design.

Contact

Stefan Arisona – https://robotized.arisona.ch

Open Source

Source code, data and a binary build are available at: http://github.com/arisona

Credits

Concept: Stefan Arisona, Ruth Conroy Dalton, Christoph Hölscher, Wilfried Wang

Data & Coding: Stefan Arisona, Simon Schubiger, Zeng Wei

Support: Akademie der Künste Berlin, FHNW Switzerland (Institute of 4D Technologies), ETH Zürich (Future Cities Laboratory and Chair of Cognitive Science), Northumbria University (Architecture and Built Environment).

Data & Software Workflow

Enabling DEMO:POLIS builds on Open Data, in particular the publicly available 3D models of central Berlin provided by the Staatssenat für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt (http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/stadtmodelle/)

The original 3D models were initially imported into Autodesk AutoCAD for layer selection and coordinate system adjustments, then imported into Autodesk Maya for data cleaning and corrections. In a final step the data was imported into Esri CityEngine for final data adjustments & cleaning, merging, labelling, etc. The data was then exported as OBJs. The software application is written in Java, based on the 3D graphics library/engine ether. As indicated above, all source code and data is available as open source.

The Value Lab Asia

The Value Lab Asia is a collaborative, digitally augmented environment for a wide range of applications, such as participatory urban planning and design, stakeholder communication, information visualisation and discovery, remote teaching and conferencing. It includes a 33 megapixel video wall, three large displays with touch overlays, a number of smaller, mobile multi-touch enabled displays, and extensive video conferencing capabilities. The Value Lab Asia is the younger sibling of the Value Lab Zurich, built at ETH Zurich’s ScienceCity by Gerhard Schmitt, Remo Burkhard, Jan Halatsch and Antje Kunze of the Chair of Information Architecture in 2007/08. It therefore borrows many of the concepts of the Value Lab Zurich, such as being set in a friendly environment that operates in daylight conditions, however comes with updated state-of-the-art hardware and a different look. Continue reading