Edited by Stefan Arisona, Gideon Aschwanden, Jan Halatsch, and Peter Wonka, 2012

About this Book

This book is thematically positioned at the intersections of Urban Design, Architecture, Civil Engineering and Computer Science, and it has the goal to provide specialists coming from respective fields a multi-angle overview of state-of-the-art work currently being carried out. It addresses both newcomers who wish to obtain more knowledge about this growing area of interest, as well as established researchers and practitioners who want to keep up to date. In terms of organization, the volume starts out with chapters looking at the domain at a wide-angle and then moves focus towards technical viewpoints and approaches. (Excerpt from preface by Stefan Arisona).

Contents

Part I: Introduction

1. A Planning Environment for the Design of Future Cities - Gerhard Schmitt

2. Calculating Cities - Bharat Dave

3. The City as a Socio-technical System: A Spatial Reformulation in the Light of the Levels Problem and the Parallel Problem - Bill Hillier

4. Technology-Augmented Changes in the Design and Delivery of the Built Environment - Martin Riese

Part II: Parametric Models and Information Modeling

5. City Induction: A Model for Formulating, Generating, and Evaluating Urban Designs - José P. Duarte, José N. Beirão, Nuno Montenegro, and Jorge Gil

6. Sortal Grammars for Urban Design: A Sortal Approach to Urban Data Modeling and Generation - Rudi Stouffs, José N. Beirão, and José P. Duarte

7. Sort Machines - Thomas Grasl and Athanassios Economou

8. Modeling Water Use for Sustainable Urban Design - Ramesh Krishnamurti, Tajin Biswas, and Tsung-Hsien Wang

Part III: Behavior Modeling and Simulation

9. Simulation Heuristics for Urban Design - Christian Derix, Åsmund Gamlesæter, Pablo Miranda, Lucy Helme, and Karl Kropf

10. Running Urban Microsimulations Consistently with Real-World Data - Gunnar Flötteröod and Michel Bierlaire

11. Urban Energy Flow Modelling: A Data-Aware Approach - Diane Perez and Darren Robinson

12. Interactive Large-Scale Crowd Simulation - Dinesh Manocha and Ming C. Lin

13. An Information Theoretical Approach to Crowd Simulation - Cagatay Turkay, Emre Koc, and Selim Balcisoy

14. Integrating Urban Simulation and Visualization - Daniel G. Aliaga

Part IV: Visualization, Collaboration and Interaction

15. Visualization and Decision Support Tools in Urban Planning - Antje Kunze, Remo Burkhard, Serge Gebhardt, and Bige Tuncer

16. Spatiotemporal Visualisation: A Survey and Outlook - Chen Zhong, Tao Wang, Wei Zeng, and Stefan Arisona

17. Multi-touch Wall Displays for Informational and Interactive Collaborative Space - Ian Vince McLoughlin, Li Ming Ang, and Wooi Boon Goh

18. Testing Guide Signs’ Visibility for Pedestrians in Motion by an Immersive Visual Simulation System - Ryuzo Ohno and Yohei Wada

Publication Information

Publisher: Springer, Berlin Heidelberg
Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science, Vol. 242
Editors: Arisona, S.; Aschwanden, G.; Halatsch, J.; Wonka, P.
Year: 2012
ISBN: 978-3-642-29757-1
Link: https://www.springeronline.com/978-3-642-29757-1

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

Pascal Müller, Stefan Arisona, Simon Schubiger, Matthias Specht, since 2001

Corebounce is a collective of artists and scientists with the common goal of mediating between arts, science, and technology. We maintain a number of new media projects and our own multimedia software research platform, Soundium. We are organised as a non-profit association and collaborate with a number of partners from education, in particular with ETH Zürich, and industry.

We regularly tour as the Scheinwerfer Live Visuals Collective, where we create the visual experience at various electronic music events since 2001. Our live-composited and sound-driven visuals are designed to emphasise the theme of the event as well as taking into account the architectural framework. Not coincidentally, we have been labelled as “Club Scientists”: As stated above, our performances are deeply influenced by the momentary state of the Soundium research software platform. At the same time research is typically induced by specfic artistic performance goals.

Scheinwerfer has performed at some of the coolest locations around the globe, supporting world-class DJs and musicians like Jeff Mills, Rush, Miss Kittin, Dave Clarke, Josh Wink, Mouse on Marks, Jimi Tenor and many more.

Steve Gibson and Stefan Arisona, since 2011

Virtual VJ takes the concept of Virtual DJ one step further and unites the role of the DJ and VJ into one interface: 3D space. The concept of Virtual VJ is to allow two or more users to control different aspects of the sound and video environment with their movements. One tracker is set to trigger sound and video and the other is set to manipulate the sound and video initiated by the first tracker. The focus of the media integration is on the development of observable connections between the audio and video mediums in order to assist the users with ease of interaction.

The key conceptual idea that is explored in Virtual VJ is the idea of cooperation and the sense of personal space in ephemeral, virtual systems. This is achieved by programming the trackers so that dramatic events happen when the two trackers are close together or far apart. For example the environment has been programmed so that the trackers apply distortion to the audio when they are proximate to each other. At the same time video effects are added when the same proximity of the two trackers is observed.

This can result in a game of cat and mouse where the users determine whether they will chose to closely follow the movements of the other participant or decide whether they wish to pursue a more individual experience. Audience members are allowed to interact in whatever manner they chose, but at the same time noticeable results will be produced as they inhabit similar spaces, encouraging them to cooperate with each in order to produce dramatic audio-visual results.

Documentation and videos at the VirtualVJ site: https://www.telebody.ws/VirtualDJ/virtualvj/virtualvj.html

3D tracking, sound, and programming: Steve Gibson
Visuals and programming: Stefan Arisona

History

• November 2011 - Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee, Scotland. Invited Exhibition
• August 2011 - Jade Valley Winery, Xi’an, China. Invited Exhibition
• July 2011 - The Interactive Experience, HCI 2011, Culture Lab, Newcastle University. Refereed exhibition
• May 2011 - Culture Lab CHI party, Intersections Digital Studio, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver. Refereed exhibition