Even Better than the Real Thing?
Forget blueprints and hard-to-understand charts. The Urban Simulation Team at UCLA combines relatively simple 3-D models with aerial photographs and street-level video to create realistic models of neighborhoods. Maneuvering a computer mouse as in a video game, users can “drive” through or “fly” over animated landscapes. The team’s models have already:
Take a virtual tour of the new CNSI building.
• Helped refine the design of the new Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center
• Tested post-earthquake redevelopment plans in an L.A. neighborhood
• Explored how combining models with sensors can help in real-time emergency response
• Digitally rebuilt ancient Rome in the largest, most complete simulation of a historic city to date
Virtual Guidebooks
Imagine walking down L.A.’s Temple Street with a hand-held GPS device. As you cross Beaudry Avenue, a flag pops up on the device’s on-screen map. Turns out an earlier user of an online interactive guidebook has “attached” a digital image or a snippet of information to these GPS coordinates. Interested in L.A. history? The on-screen alert could take you to an archival photo of your location and a biography of former L.A. Mayor Prudent Beaudry, the street’s namesake. REMAP is making it happen, but interactive guidebooks are only the tip of the iceberg. <more>
Urban utopia or nightmarish sprawl? Dream city or hell town? What kind of world do you envision? UCLA researchers are creating new ways to explore, research and understand cities – and sharing their visions of the perfect place.
Interactive Cities
Team UCLA engineering and art students with Disney Imagineers, then charge them with bringing together art, education, history, culture, community and technology in a very traditional venue – a state park. See what happened when Remapping L.A. gave it a shot. <more>
When Security Experts Dream
Glass that doesn’t reduce to shards. Inclined tops on vending machines. A clear line of sight down the platform. When security experts get to do the planning, their “environmental design” upgrades make subway cars, trains and stations less tempting targets for terrorists. <more>
Busy Green Metropolis
Pouria Abbassi ’89, general manager of the Los Angeles Convention Center, dreams of enormous eco-friendly buildings in a vibrant urban environment. Can his ideas transform the city of the future? <more>
What is a City?
New Orleans after Katrina. The economic decline of Buffalo, NY. UCLA’s Nicholas Entrikin studies how external factors can force us to re-imagine cities – and what that reveals about the importance of “place.” <more>
