Internet Virtual Reality GIS

Google Earth is a breaktrough, following with other excelent 'for free' data bundled up to give people more information to know their environment. This phenomenon of Google Earth was predicted a decade ago. This short paper is to show the emerging ideas coming to more realize the 'true' virtuality.

Internet Virtual Reality GIS:
as an innovation approach in Urban Planning and Design
A Short Paper by Rez.Nurt

Introduction

Traditional planning and design techniques are time consuming, focusing on experts judgement and often addressing superficial rather than fundamental issues due to lack of resources and the poor methods used in conveying the relevant information. Rendered images and more recently photomontages and even computer animations of proposed schemes, formed by Virtual Reality, are bound to the views submitted by the designers (Hall, 1996). Such communication deficiencies can subsequently lead to unsatisfactory designs and will make post construction debates. The other classic problem in traditional planning and urban process is the contribution of decision making to the community. There is much time and ways needed to implement the ideas to reality.
The emergence of Virtual Reality and the migration of GIS to the web is recently the most fascinating innovation providing the key infrastructure to begin building virtual cities which can provide an interactive simulation and analysis environment for planning and designing cities or urban places. The virtual city on the internet supported by GIS technologies will provide urban planners and designers with a computer environment to interface with complex physical and social data which are needed to plan, design and manage cities, along with necessary tools to explore and analyze that data in meaningful and intuitive ways (Dodge, Smith & Doyle 1997). Virtual Reality, GIS, and the internet, the three key components, are gradually approaching the surface in which large scale multi-user virtual environments will be possible. These will lead to the development of large scale spaces for the on-line community to meet, socialize, and then might carry out the business.
This paper draws on literature from the disciplines of the GIS and Virtual Reality, especially in their issues in urban design and planning. The objective of this paper is to discuss in general the innovation of GIS technologies on the net to support the virtual city which is revolutionizing urban design and planning process.


Virtual City, Internet, and Urban Planning and Design

Development of computer network has brought a new concept called cyberspace, or in specific term in urban planning and design it is called virtual city, digital city or cybertown. The definition of cyberspace remains some uncertainties, but in general it means as follow: any types of virtual space generated from a collection of electronic data that exists within internet (Shiode, 1997). The general definition of cyberspace as “an infinite artificial world where humans navigate in information-based space” (Benedikt, 1991) describes its physical existence as a world of computer linked by telecommunication lines. Although its history is practically less than a decade, cyberspace has been growing rapidly through internet and bring a new paradigm of network society for the next century.
Virtual city as a new form of living space generated virtually in the internet relates to urban planning and design in two aspects (Shiode, 1997). The first is the presentation of actual town plans using Virtual Reality. The WWW is exploited as a new means of presenting town plans. Using the internet for providing city planning and design information encourages citizen and public debate, provided that the majority of citizen access to the network. The important point here is the virtual reality is a computer-generated world involving one or more human senses and generated in real-time by the participation’s actions. The real-time responsiveness of the computer to the participant’s action distinguishes virtual reality from other kinds of computer-generated simulations. The participant in a virtual reality is perceiver and creator at the same time, in a world where the object of perception is created by actions.
The second is the definition of cyberspace as a new form of urban space and the contribution to its planning and construction from urban-planner and designer’s viewpoint. On this point the unique spatial characteristics and the present status of cyberspace are being explored.


The city is a powerful metaphor in which most people inhabit are familiar with. The Web, is primarily a visual interface to information resources or that metaphor of the city, with buildings and other infrastructure, is being employed by a number of content providers as a user interface to a range of information, services, and facilities. There are three important distinctions need to be made in the type of virtual city that are currently on the web (Dodge, Smith & Doyle 1997).
a. Web Listing Virtual Cities. This kind of web site is described as a virtual city, but in reality it only contains on-line guides, menus and listings.
b. Flat Virtual Cities. This web site uses image maps of buildings and street as an static interface. Familiar landmarks and buildings are represented as graphical icons to give further online information.
c. Three-dimensional Virtual Cities. This web site uses web-based Virtual Reality technologies to model the built form of cities, to varying degrees of accuracy and realism. These virtual cities are usually navigable in the sense that user can walk around and fly through the scene. Buildings are represented as 3d polygons with textures to add realism. The cities are built usually with Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML).

There are several approaches representing cities on the web which attached the virtual tag within their title. Yet the virtual cities which has effective digital simulation of real-cities that give users a genuine sense of inhabiting an urban place do not yet exist on the web. Research in the field of internet GIS and 3d modeling using VR are creating the foundations for the virtual cities with realistic built-form interface, a richness of geo-referenced information content, and crucially, the ability to support social interaction with other people.


GIS and the Internet

GIS is categorized as the third generation of computer development, followed by the Internet as the next generation. The internet and the World Wide Web have been considered as revolutionary media of communication for the future era. The Web is opening up new forms of computer-mediated communications which allow for new forms of information dissemination, social interaction and collaborative working. Many activities can be undertaken through the Web and the Web is a great possibility to reach customers, clients and citizens respectively.
The rapid development of the Internet, as a place of information dissemination provides researchers and policy-makers with considerable challenges on how best to realize the potential in the pursuit of worthwhile goals. This is particularly so for the planning community with the intense drive to develop GIS further in terms of widening and deepening access to spatial information along with appropriate analytical functionality within the network paradigm of the Web and the browser interface. Most GIS vendors and some commercial spatial data providers have realized that the WWW will be the next-generation GIS platform (superseding the conventional PC and desktop paradigms), providing a powerful medium for geographic information distribution, as well as a particularly lucrative new market to exploit (Toon, 1997). Plewe provides a timely review of the range of proprietary Internet mapping and GIS that serves as an indicator to the degree of academic and commercial interest in the area to date (Plewe, 1997).


GIS and Virtual Reality

In the last few years, research projects that merge Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with Virtual Reality (VR) systems have gained more and more popularity. Several recent developments in computing can be seen as the base for this trend: the widespread use of powerful desktop computers, the re-evaluation of VR as a simulation of reality and the rise of the VRML standard coupled with a wide range of tools that accompany it. By now, it’s possible to locate and classify the research areas that focus on VRGIS (virtual Reality Geographical Information System) applications and to envisage the future direction of this field. Though it must be stated that this term incorporates a wide range of applications - ranging from semi-immersive, low end computing implementations to supercomputer based, highly immersive applications. Nevertheless, it is possible to find common properties and attributes to all those VRGIS systems.
Although the roots of both GIS and VR can be easily traced back into the 70s, the first documented successful fusion of GIS and VR was achieved in the early 90s with a system that depict the Georgia Tech campus area. Since then, the number of application and research projects that involve VR and GIS have increased dramatically. The first wave of VRGIS application was based on high end workstations and even supercomputers due to the intensive computation nature of both fields - e.g. the geometrical computation in GIS and heavy rendering computation in VR (Faust, 1995).
From the mid 1990s, a re-evaluation of VR lead to a major change in the research agenda. The result was that VR is not seen as a method for imitate reality but rather to simulate aspects of it as a sensual form of communication (Gillings & Goodrick, 1996). This change paved the way to the next major development - VRML. VRML emerged from 1995 onwards (Bell et al., 1996) and opened a new direction for the development of VRGIS. By using VRML, the economics of deploying a VRGIS dropped enormously. This development happened in coincidence with the emergence of low cost, yet powerful GIS packages (e.g. ArcView or Mapinfo), thus, enabling researchers who seek a low cost solution to experiment with VRGIS. According to the survey, many new VRGIS research initiatives use VRML (more then 50% of the total number of projects).
In short, VRGIS can be defined as a “traditional” GIS - with its data storage and handling capabilities, and query and analysis capabilities, but with Virtual Reality as the main interface and interaction method. We can think about VRGIS as taking the best of both worlds - VR has evolved as mainly an interface technology and research about it focuses on user interaction issues. GIS is essentially a data storage and manipulation technology - with a somewhat problematic user interface. The problems of balancing between user interface and spatial data functionality constantly appear in many research projects and books on GIS.
But it should be noted, that while VR is inherently 3 dimensional, most existing GIS implementations - both software and databases - are 2 dimensional. As result, current GIS is mainly 2D and therefore the transition to VRGIS is not transparent. Faust described the ideal VRGIS as having the next features:
1. Very realistic representation of real geographic areas.
2. Free movement of the user within and outside the selected geographic terrain.
3. Standard GIS capabilities (query, select, spatial analysis etc.) in a 3D database.
4. The visibility function should be a natural and integral part of the user interface.

In the light of this view it is clear that such systems do not exist yet. Nowadays, the connection between the GIS and VR is a modular, in which the GIS is used to create and process the geographical data, and by using a transferable file format (most notably VRML), the information is passed to the VR package for representation (Berger, 1996). VRGIS solutions are based on coupled systems, with a distinctive GIS module and a distinctive VR module. Currently, the main properties of VRGIS are:
1. The system database is a traditional GIS.
2. The VR functionality is used to augment the cartographic capabilities of the GIS.
3. More and more solutions use the VRML standard, albeit its limitation. As a result, the VRGIS comes with an Internet functionality “out of the box”.
4. There is a trend toward PC based systems, relying on desktop GIS.
5. Loosely coupled VR and GIS software. The graphic data is usually transferred through a common file format, and the synchronization between the systems is based on communication protocol - such as RCP.


VRGIS Projects

It has been in recent years that many research projects in building virtual reality in the field of urban planning and design have been carried out and developed. Models were constructed in order to assist in making the planning and development control process more flexible by providing a means by which planning proposals could be visualized and alternative schemes for a site compared. Developments in the domains of Virtual Reality (VR) and the Internet triggered a series of research projects tackling the issues of interactivity, structuring and management of large urban databases. Over the last few years, designers started utilizing some of the potential of VR as a communication tool both within the design team as well as with clients.
The need for realistic 3d models of urban built form is vital to true virtual cities. There are a small number of research groups around the world who are experimenting methodologies and computing tools for constructing realistic 3d models of large areas of urban built form at the city scale. The Urban Simulation Team at the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, lead by Professor William Jepson, are creating an interactive city model of greater Los Angeles covering over 4,000 square miles. Their simulation system provides interactive navigation and manipulation tools for end-users, allowing the exploration of alternative planning scenarios over both space and time. The real power of their emerging virtual city is that it "...allows the Urban Simulation Team to include virtually everyone in the planning process, expert and layman alike. We have found that designers, architects, developers and consultants are able to identify real problems and remedy those problems long before the first hole on a new development is dug" (Jepson, 1996).
Another team at the University of Bath, lead by Professor Alan Day have developed a great deal of competence in creating large, realistic city models. Their most developed model being of the city of Bath. The model covers several square kilometers of the historic center of Bath and is accurate to the sub-meter level. A considerable amount of realism has been modeled using both geometry and texture mapping. Bourdakis, one of the model's creators, comments that the "...computer models were constructed in order to assist in making the planning and development control process more flexible by providing a means by which planning proposals could be visualized and alternative schemes for a site compared; allowing non-experts to comprehend the implications of proposed changes” (Bourdakis, 1997).
Stephen Kirby and colleagues in the National Key Center for Social Applications of GIS at the University of Adelaide are developing a 3d GIS model of large area of the city of Adelaide. There are several European research teams working on large urban models. For example the ART+COM organization has been working on the Virtual Berlin project using virtual reality technologies to model the city. Also in Germany a joint research project between the Universities of Rostock and Stuttgart is developing 3d GIS for urban planning and design, modeling parts of Rostock. While in Austria, an innovative company called GRINTEC is working on 3d city models, they claim that "For decades urban planning was done by drawing plans and building elaborate models from wood and pasteboard. The Austrian cities of Graz and Vienna are demonstrating that this is a thing of the past - its three-dimensional computer simulations derived from information of the digital city map are revolutionizing the planning process" (Ranzinger & Gleixner, 1997).


Virtual Reality GIS and Urban Planning and Design

Urban planning and design are complex processes encompassing aspects of social, economic, physical and spatial significance. These aspects are not independent, interacting with each other within the urban system, therefore the decision-making process depends on a dialectic relation between them all. The communication among these various aspects is central to urban planning and design. There is clearly a series of communication problems in this field and it has been advocated that computers can offer satisfactory solutions (Hall, 1996). An important issue for facilitating this communication process is to promote data presentation that is informative, accessible and able to successfully present complex interactions, phenomena and underlying expert analyses to professionals as well as lay people through the characteristic of the innovation of VRGIS on the net.
There are some specific purposes to Virtual Reality GIS (VRGIS) related to the field of urban planning and design. The main one is to (re)construct landscape and urban settings that don’t exist - either "no more" or "not yet". The case of "not yet" plays an important role in urban and environmental planning - especially for visual impact of planned buildings and other construction projects (e.g. road, or a bridge).
The other purpose is the visualization of abstract variables, and by that reducing the level of abstraction. This theme is gaining an overall popularity in recent VR applications. However, in VRGIS those applications tend to create a hybrid representation of the "virtual variable" on a background of "real variable". The abstract variable is usually an environmental variable (such as air pollution level) though there are sparse examples for socio-demographic or socio-economic variables.
Another purpose is to improve communication of ideas and concepts in a collaborative process like architectural planning. In this type of process, the VRGIS acts as a mediator, connector and distributor of ideas between the participants. In the GIS realm, the goal is to support users that are "overwhelmingly map illiterate" (Jacobson, 1995). This leads to the next purpose which is the search for an intuitive interface for spatial technology.
Finally, though provocative, one of the identified implicit purpose that led to VRGIS is the "Hammer looking for a nail" (A solution looking for a problem). GIS captures and stores spatial data, and since many developers of VR applications are looking for applications that will be used as a case study, it’s not surprising that GIS is used as a test case. Examples for this type of application appear in scientific visualization, or the CAVE GIS project. Those projects tackle a real problem, but the projects serve as an example of future implementations of a certain technology rather then confronting the problem itself.
Employing VRGIS on the net, the process of decision making in urban planning and design changes. In the future the system of virtual reality will change the society network and change the conservative ways that usually planners and designers think. Generally, internet VRGIS activity for planners and designers of the built environment is facilitating innovative development into three aspects: the first is the dissemination, distribution of information and participation level, secondly, visualization, and the last is analysis tools.



References

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