Reconstructing Real Cities in Google Earth

An anonymous reader writes "NewScientistTech has an article up on the way 3D models of real cities are being uploaded into Google Earth to help town planners and architects envisage their designs. Researchers at the University of Arkansas have developed a method for rapidly mapping building, which they are using to reconstruct the rapidly-expanding town of Fayetteville. The researchers say tools like Google Earth and Sketchup could eventually help ordinary citizens get more involved in urban development."

ordinary citizens get more involved in urban dev?!

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

The researchers say tools like Google Earth and Sketchup could eventually help ordinary citizens get more involved in urban development.

Trained urban planners often don't get a seat at the development table; what makes you think local governments would care about what ordinary laypeople think?

Re:cool

[$RANDOMLUSER]

You're being a smartass, but I wouldn't mind plugging this into FlightGear [flightgear.org]

Re:ordinary citizens get more involved in urban de

[thoughtlover]

"Trained urban planners often don't get a seat at the development table; what makes you think local governments would care about what ordinary laypeople think?"

Most urban planners do get their wishes through the city planners/council, wether through political favors or just plain bribes. However, in our city, I do know of one person who is using SketchUp to design a massive upgrade to a main corridor _in_ our city. He was using this feature before it has received the press it's been getting as of late. All of his models were being seriously considered and using an ArchiCad plugin, they can take the SketchUp models and estimate how much the material cost will be.

What it really takes are open minds to commit to a better future. If pre-visualization from anyone with a good idea can give that good idea to another, politics aside, people can see improvements faster than ever.

Time travel?

[timelorde]

I've been hoping for awhile that Google Earth would add a scroll-wheel doohickey that would allow the user to scroll backwards and forwards in time, and that Google would stitch in old/new image data as needed.

Kinda like watching SimCity, but with real roads and buildings...

Wishful thinking

[Hahnsoo]

Now if there was only a way to import this information into my SimCity game. Or any other Sim franchise game. Hell, any game, for that matter.

Contributing to planning schemes...

[PHAEDRU5]

I liked this bit

Williamson says free programs like these could eventually let ordinary citizens explore their city and contribute to planning schemes.

but I really don't believe it.

We just had a developer come in and build an apartment complex next to a mature neighborhood. Imagine that one day you have trees outside your house, and the next day you have a five-storey building.

We photoshopped a representation of what the apartment complex would do to the trees, and presented it to the DeKalb County (GA) commissioners, but it made no difference. I think they could see the added tax revenue to the county, and gave not a damn about the existing houses.

I wasn't personally affected - it was a number of my neighbors at the other end of the neighborhood, but I did learn that tools and the ability to predict impact don't really matter. What really matters is money to the local taxing authority.

Just sayin'.

It's true, and it's great.

[Onan]

I started using sketchup a while back for the geekiest of all possible reasons: creating and displaying models of places for a roleplaying game I was running.

(This is actually a surprisingly hard problem, which no other tools solve well. You need do deal with there being a complex model that already exists, but of which only a dynamic section is actually visible to players. Navigating an actual 3d model gives you the ability to convey great detail quickly, without ever having to worry about giving away too much. The players see exactly what they characters see, and you can get on with the actual game.)

So I started to place the locations that I'd modeled into Seattle (yes, Shadowrun), and was pleased to find that a lot of Seattle was already modeled in Earth, with yet more available in the google "3D Warehouse" [google.com]. It's basically the classic free software development model: everyone in the community works on something they find interesting, and we all benefit from one another's products.

Re:You misspelled "urban planners"...

[lthornto]

Your not far off the mark. I have spent most of the last three years doing environmental analysis on a large project in downtown Ft. Worth called the "Trinity River Vision". http://www.trinityrivervision.org/ [trinityrivervision.org]

The people of Fort Worth were some of the last to know about this. Radio Shack, Pier One and Tarrant County College (among others) all had purchased land along a proposed waterfront before the study ever began.

All the planning for this took place behind closed doors in congressional offices and board rooms. This project is being funded mainly by federal funds in the name of flood protection. In actuallity more people will be at risk to flooding after this project than now.

The projects federal interest is $500 million, I bet it will be over a billion by the time it is done.

Interestingly enough congresswoman Kay Grangers son was hired by the Tarrant Regional Water District to oversee the construction of this project.

We used Google Earth and won!

[Fiver-]

At the architectural firm I used to work for, I had shown Google Earth to the principals and told them to keep it in mind for future proposals. A couple months later I was asked to composite some renderings into Google Earth for a proposal for a new facility at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was cool...I was able to drop the site plans directly onto the existing site. The renderings also had arrows indicating traffic flow, so I made the site plans into .PNGs and Google Earth recognized the transparency channel so the arrows were floating over the existing roads instead of over a white backgroud. I'm probably not describing this well, but the end result looked great and we won the project.