ViziCities: Bringing cities to life using the power of open data and the Web by Robin Hawkes and Peter Smart.
From the webpage:
ViziCities is a 3D city and data visualisation platform, powered by WebGL. Its purpose is to change the way you look at cities and the data contained within them. It is the brainchild of Robin Hawkes and Peter Smart — get in touch if you’d like to discuss the project with them in more detail.
Demonstration
Here’s a demo of ViziCities so you can have a play without having to build it for yourself. Cool, ey?
What does it do?
ViziCities aims to combine data visualisation with a 3D representation of a city to provide a better understanding what’s going on. It’s a powerful new way of looking at and understanding urban areas.
Aside from seeing a city in 3D, here are some of the others things you’ll have the power to do:
- View public transport (eg. buses, trains, planes) flowing around a city in realtime
- Use vehicles powered by artificial intelligence to perform realistic traffic simulation
- Visualise social data in realtime
- Overlay historic and static data (eg. census data) using traditional techniques (eg. heatmaps)
- And much more…
This is wickedly cool! (Even though in pre-alpha state.)
Governments, industry, etc. have had these capabilities for quite some time.
Now, you too can do line of sight, routing, and integration of other data onto a representation of a cityscape.
Could be quite important in Bangkok, Caracas, Kiev, and other locations with non-responsive governments.
Used carefully, information can become an equalizer.
Other resources:
Videos of ViziCities experiments
“ViziCities” as a search term shows a little over 1,500 “hits” today. Expect that to expand rapidly.