Virtual Sculpture Within our Virtual Cities

Outdoor art is accessible to so many. Our virtual cities can push that accessibility out beyond the community through virtual representation of our urban works of sculpture. Seattle's new Olympic Sculpture Park is a source of great debate in the Pacific Northwest. And yet, it provides an opportunity for a community to come together in one of the most beautiful natural settings intermixed with an urban environment anywhere on Earth. How do we capture the design to inspire others to support urban art?

Historical Walks Worth Visualizing

Consider the story of the Smith Hill neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island. The neighborhood grew up along a major road heading from downtown to the northwest corner of the city. Since it grew up over decades, the architecture follows time in documenting phases in American architecture. Different immigration waves came at different times adding to the diversity of designs reflected in residential housing.

Although various ethnic churches were torn down as the populace changed texture and economics and changing values meant the spiritual neighborhood centers were no longer sustainable, the historical society was able to preserve representative homes of each major architectural era. The Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission captured the imagination of the historical significance in its History of Smith Hill series of on-line publications.

The significance is another example of man's interrelationship to nature. Many such neighborhood grew up along the flow of waterways that powered the mills that brought jobs to those who decided to settle there. Virtual cities are not just about the physical structures man has created. The ability of man to manipulate his environment, for better or worse, is also demonstrated through interactive visualization.

Example of Virtual City Values

When urban design project competitions have a significant physical, spiritual, economic, and emotional impact on a community's sense of itself, an existing virtual city model can help the public visualize the goals of competing submissions. The Providence Waterfont Park project that recently was awarded to its design submitters makes a major improvement to a desolate section of land along the west bank of the Providence River. As part of a slew of upcoming opportunities to improve the livability of downtown, the changes to the physical city can be a source of community pride. Before and after visualizations through a interactive temporal virtual city model show great promise in building and emphasizing that pride in anticipation of change.

Next for Providence comes the I-195 interstate relocation and update project which will open up 40 acres of downtown property for creative and beneficial reuse. What are Providence's options for use? How do decision-makers and residents decide which options to support? Maps are OK, fixed-perspective
movies are even better, but why not let an interactive 3-D virtual city provide unencumbered exploration?

Virtual City Content Continues Falling Off the Web

What's going on with all the Virtual City content on the Web? Yesterday I realized that even Planet 9 Studios had taken down their virtual San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas models. I did not see that coming. I had spent hours cleaning up their VRML files and keeping a version locally. I felt more comfortable linking to their textures than downloading them. Now the textures are gone and my local versions are nothing but white blurs.

Perhaps they'll comment to my blog here, please? Or, if anyone who has taken off virtual content could let me know the reasons for it, I'd appreciate it. Were you afraid someone would quickly convert your models to contribute them to an open source virtual city project? I would not have done that without permission. Isn't it worth you doing it yourself to get the credit you deserve? Is Google denying your participation? That's not how they are pitching their community contribution model.

I'll keep contending that we need to teach school kids how to build virtual city content and have our schools and governments support the effort with publicly available back-end databases. Everyone who enjoys the process should get credit and see the fruits of their labors be associated with a master virtual city plan. The process can mimic the Wikipedia community participation model, with tagged versioning and an intelligent review process.

Community in Virtual Building

Building a virtual city together brings back memories of our childhood. We played with blocks and even tinker toys, lincoln logs, legos, heath kits, train sets, and race car tracks as we got older. These were physical models we had natural enjoyment creating. We gladly knocked them down or took them apart in order to start anew. If we spent a lot of time one day, we brought family and friends in to see our results.

Digital content lets us version to our hearts content without ever having to take things apart. We don't have to call our friends over to share our results. We can post to the Web and send a link reference. And then we realize we might as well build together since we don't have to travel to do so. We can work side by side if we want to. In fact, let's set up a room at our community center or town hall to do so.

If you are disappointed by the idea that you won't be able to touch and smell and pick up your models of your city, consider the potential of the 3-D printers that are quickly becoming competent and cost-effective. We can iterate on our virtual designs for now knowing some day they will be printable. Our lives, in regards to building models, will come full circle when they do.

A Powerful Example

The Parallel Graphics site provides a great example of the power of virtual place to give you a sense of the real. Take a look at this picture of Stanford and compare to this one. With a virtual city, you are free to walk anywhere you want within these hallowed grounds and get a sense of the place. Perhaps I am biased by having been there, but this example really catches the benefit of the virtual model perfectly.

Google Earth has not gotten around to including these structures at Stanford yet. Why wait? Let the community do it. How do you get Parallel Graphics to play in the community spirit with Google? Will it happen sooner, later, or never?

Why Support Your Virtual City?

There are many reasons to support a community effort to build a virtual city:

• Let's face it, the most visited urban centers know how to milk perception to attract masses to come and drop some bills. But what about community pride in sharing the unique history associated with a place where thousands gave their lives to participating (whether they cared about it or not). Virtual Tourism is a concept we all can take advantage of to tell our favorite stories about the place we live.
  
• A 3-D representative model of place with links, stories, and freedom to explore online is a natural way to help others do their Travel Planning and have it carry over to when they actually make it to visit in person.
  
• We shouldn't fool ourselves. Our town and city planners could use our opinions regarding the future use of our shared geography. What easier way to provide feedback than in the forum of a virtual city demonstrating potential changes we can respond to? Land Planning, Usage, and Urban Structures can all be facilitated through a well-publicized virtual city.
  
• It is not just the open spaces, commercial structures and residential structures that can benefit from shared visualization and exploration. Civil engineering projects, telecommunications, utilities, and other infrastructure takes up physical space, disrupts our daily activities, and makes itself visible for the long-run.
  
• Visualization of Weather and other environmental attributes help a community understand their relationship to nature as well as plan for spending time outdoors (something we are doing less and less to the degradation of our sense of community).
  

The Best Cure for Gravity

I don't know about you, but these days gravity seems to be pulling on me harder than ever. It's not that I've added any weight to my frame - quite the contrary. To make a true contribution in the open source coding realm seems harder and harder as people more qualified than myself take up the opportunities. That's probably one emotional burden that only seems to add to my sense of being pulled down to one spot. There are others. One way to overcome that feeling is to give into the successes of others and root on anyone who is making a contribution. Perhaps they are not aware of their journey as significant. Let them know it is (without adding undue pressure to their timelines).

Our virtual earth visualizations systems free us from gravity whenever we want to take advantage. Yesterday, I was going back and forth between a site in Boston and a site in Washington, DC and some pattern recognition component of my perceptive process came alive to tell me 'you've flown that route before'. Yes, indeed, it looked so familiar to flights I made often in 1985, looking for that first job opportunity. The only difference is I was flying at a higher altitude than where commercial airlines find stable air and a manageable oxygen supply. There are an enormous number of possible navigation strategies for us to enable in exploring our virtual cities. We can choose our perspective on gravity and lighten up our emotional stance towards a rather intense phenomenon that seems to give the birds their self-esteem. Gravity as the weakest force indeed.

consider a paper on 3-d navigation

GPS Enables Us All

I still haven't purchased my first Global Positioning System (GPS) unit. I imagine so many of my close calls hiking out in nature would have been avoided with either a compass or GPS unit. I remember fondly Dad and I emerging from the woods at 10:30pm under a full moon after losing track of where we were and hiking ten miles longer than we expected. Or, hiking south of the equator where I got confused, finally saw the sun setting on the wrong side of the sky, and extended an already ambitious 30 kilometer hike into a 46 kilometer hike (without seeing another human all day).

We get older and supposedly we get wiser. And, the devices keep getting cheaper and more reliable. Better yet, the devices enable this whole virtual earth, bottom up contribution process that is behind half the reasons we should build our community-managed virtual cities now. I haven't thought this through enough yet to eloquently convince you of my position, but as Bonnie DeVarco states in her article Earth as A Lens: Global Collaboration, GeoCommunication, and The Birth of EcoSentience:

Looking closer at current trends around the globe, it is becoming clear that the changing face of cell phones and the E-911 mandate will converge with this new experience of location-awareness, something that is already infusing our youth with a zeal for the experience of continuous geolocation. Due to the popularity of portable GPS units for travelers, bike riders, backpackers, and adventurers to chart their planetary journeys, new organizations and tools are arising. GPS devices are converging with software and game technology to create a new genre of GPS-enabled communication.

Thanks Bonnie - that's a good place to start. Let's make virtual cities the focus of some of these new emergent organizations.