The Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability (SEC) in Singapore was established as a collaboration between the National Research Foundation of Singapore and ETH Zurich in 2010. It is an institution that frames a number of research programmes, the first of which is the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL). The SEC strengthens the capacity of Singapore and Switzerland to research, understand and actively respond to the challenges of global environmental sustainability. It is motivated by an aspiration to realise the highest potentials for present and future societies. SEC serves as an intellectual hub for research, scholarship, entrepreneurship, postgraduate and postdoctoral training. It actively collaborates with local universities and research institutes and engages researchers with industry to facilitate technology transfer for the benefit of the public.

https://www.futurecities.ethz.ch/

I have been involved in Future Cities Laboratory since my return from UCSB in October 2008, and was the second PI to move to Singapore in October 2010, at that time located at temporary offices at the NUS School of Design and Environment. Main tasks included general ramp up of the centre, establishing technical infrastructure, hiring and supervision of PhD students. In January 2012, SEC moved into its permanent offices at the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE). I was responsible for the design and implementation of the [[ValueLabAsia |Value Lab Asia]], which was built in only three months and has been in operation since March 2012.

The Simulation Platform Research Module (“Module IX”): Service and Research for Future Planning Environments

Informing design and decision-making processes with new techniques and approaches to data acquisition, information visualisation and simulation for urban sustainability.

In science, simulations have assumed a critical role in mediating between theory and practical experiment. In architecture, simulations increasingly function in a similar way to help integrate the design, construction, and lifecycle management of buildings. And in urban planning, simulations have become an indispensable method for generating and analysing design and planning scenarios. The growing importance of simulation for these fields has been stimulated by a rapid growth in the availability of urban-related data. Despite this, most current simulations are capable of capturing and activating only a small fraction of the available data. Addressing this lack is both a matter of generating appropriate computer power to process the vast bodies of data, and accessing the data itself that is often held in hard to access databases. To contemplate possible advanced urban planning techniques that activate live and dynamic data, demonstrates that existing tools, such as GIS, are ill equipped to exploit the analytical and communicative potentials of this growing volume of urban data.

The Simulation Platform examines how to effectively deal with the growing volume of urban-related data. It investigates new techniques and instruments for the acquisition, organisation, retrieval, interaction, and visualisation of such data. It will propose techniques for designers, decision-makers and stakeholders to access necessary data about the city in innovative and dynamic ways. It does in two ways. First, it supports other research modules in the Future Cities Laboratory by supplying services such as data acquisition methods and visualisation facilities. Second, building on these services it will conduct original research on advanced and dynamic modelling, visualisation and simulation techniques that aim to better understand and intervene in the complex processes that shape contemporary cities.

Module Leader & PI: Prof Dr Gerhard Schmitt
Module Coordinator & PI: Assoc Prof (Adj) Dr Stefan Arisona
PIs: Prof Dr Armin Grün, Prof Dr Ludger Hovestadt, Prof Dr Ian Smith
Affiliated Faculty: Assoc Prof Dr Tat Jen Cham (NTU), Assoc Prof Dr Chandra Sekhar (NUS), Assoc Prof Dr Ian McLoughlin (NTU), Asst Prof Dr Philip Chi-Wing Fu, Asst Prof Dr Benny Raphael (NUS), Prof Dr Luc Van Gool (ETH Zurich), Asst Prof Dr Jianxin Wu (NTU)
PostDocs: Dr Matthias Berger, Dr Xianfeng Huang, Dr Tao Wang
PhD Students: Gideon Aschwanden, Dengxin Dai, Eva Friedrich, Vahid Moosavi, Maria Papadopoulou, Rongjun Qin, Dongyoun Shin, Sing Kuang Tan, Didier Vernay, Wei Zeng, Chen Zhong
IT Engineers: Daniel Sin, Chan Lwin

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.

The Value Lab Asia was conceived in the second half of 2011, and built in only two months from January 2012 to March 2012. It has been in regular operation since then. We are currently working on a more extensive documentation. Below you find the basic technical specifications.

If you are interested in visiting and/or using the facility, please feel free to contact me at arisona@arch.ethz.ch

Brief Technical Specifications

• Video wall, 4.9 x 2.7m, running at native 7680 x 4320 resolution (roughly 33 megapixels), driven from a single machine. Therefore, most applications run out of the box.
• Display wall with three 82" multi-touch displays, also driven from a single machine.
• Several 40" mobile multi-touch units, including mini-PC, thus completely autonomous.
• Tandberg-based video conferencing with one fixed and one mobile camera. Can be flexibly configured to run on video wall as well as display wall.
• Integrated video recording and production.

Institution: ETH Zurich’s Future Cities Laboratory
Location: Singapore
Period: Since 2011
Project lead, concept, system specification: Stefan Arisona
Interior design: Stefan Arisona in collaboration with Plasmadesign
System integration: PAVE System Pte Ltd

Agent based simulation tools such as MATSim and MITSIM allow us to achieve efficient and accurate predictions of crowd behavior, thereby increasing our understanding of urban systems and assist in urban planning. However, output produced by such simulation platforms are difficult to communicate to stakeholders such as government agencies and the general public due to their technical nature.

In Project Metrobuzz we present a novel and visually striking method of displaying and interacting with large amounts of simulation data in a way that is both scientifically interesting as well as understandable for a broader audience. In order to achieve this, we generalised trip origin-destination information in terms of series of line segments in 3D space that allow spatiotemporal queries to quickly retrieve relevant data. In addition, we implemented interactive tools running on mobile devices (e.g. tablets) to define such queries in an intuitive manner.

W. Zeng, C. Zhong, A. Anwar, S. Arisona, and I. V. McLoughlin. 2012. MetroBuzz: Interactive 3D Visualization of Spatiotemporal Data. International Conference on Computer and Information Sciences (ICCIS), Kuala Lumpur, Turkey, June 12 – 14.

Project: Ongoing research, software prototype.
Institution: ETH Zurich’s Future Cities Laboratory
Location: Singapore
Period: Since 2011
Concept and programming: Stefan Arisona (ETH Zurich)
Programming: Zeng Wei (NTU), Afian Anwar (MIT), Christian Schneider (ETH Zurich)
Acknowledgments: Kay Axhausen and Alex Erath of the Future Cities Laboratory’s Mobility and Transportation group for providing the base data

I am co-founder and scientific director of ETH Zurich’s Digital Art Weeks. The Digital Art Weeks, an annually recurring festival, are concerned with the application of digital technology in the arts. Consisting of a symposium, workshops and performances, the program offers insight into current research and innovations in art and technology as well as illustrating resulting synergies in a series of performances, making artists aware of impulses in technology and scientists aware of the possibilities of the application of technology in the arts. In 2008 and 2010, a very successful version of Digital Art Weeks took place in Shanghai and Xi’an, China, and currently DAW'13 (early 2013) in Singapore is preparation…

https://www.digitalartweeks.ethz.ch/

One of my personal highlights of the series of past Digital Art Weeks was the special opening day and the keynote of Joseph Weizenbaum (1923-2008) in 2007, as I have always admired his ambivalent position towards computer and information technology. At DAW07, we also screened the documentary ‘Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work.’ by Peter Haas and Silvia Holzinger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_LCLjqCTXs

Festival History

• 2013 - Singapore
• 2011 - Victoria, BC, Canada
• 2010 - Xi’an, China
• 2008 - Shanghai, China
• 2007 - Zurich, Switzerland
• 2006 - Zurich, Switzerland
• 2005 - Zurich, Switzerland

This research project explored one approach to providing mobile phone users with a simple low cost real-time user interface allowing them to control highly interactive public space applications involving a single user or a large number of simultaneous users.

In order to sense accurately the real-time hand movement gestures of mobile phone users, the method uses miniature accelerometers that send the orientation signals over the network’s audio channel to a central computer for signal processing and application delivery. This affords that there is minimal delay, minimal connection protocol incompatibility and minimal mobile phone type or version discrimination. Without the need for mass user compliance, large numbers of users could begin to control public space cultural and entertainment applications using simple gesture movements.

D. Majoe, S. Schubiger-Banz, A. Clay, and S. Arisona. 2007. SQEAK: A Mobile Multi Platform Phone and Networks Gesture Sensor. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Applications (ICPCA07). Birmingham, UK, July 26 - 27.

Research: Project carried out at ETH Zurich
Location: ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Timeframe: 2006 - 2007
Realisation: Stefan Arisona, Simon Schubiger, Dennis Majoe, Art Clay
Collaborator: Swisscom Innovations