New versions of CityEngine and CityScape

Arguably the two best automatic 3D urban modelling tools have gained new versions in the last few weeks. Procedural Inc has released CityEngine 2009.3 and PixelActive CityScape 1.8. Both come with a variety of updates and new features. I've blogged about both of them in the past but it's always good to see new versions of the software coming in regural intervals.


For example, the CityEngine app now allos for global texture mapping and advanced roof types while CityScape tackles automated and advanced city traffic. Both of them also support GIS data as well (from the free repository of OpenStreetMap) so the possibilities of creating real-world locations other than fictitious ones is also there.

Check them out at http://www.procedural.com/cityengine and http://pixelactive3d.com.

Emotiv, a new brain-computer interface

I am about to pull the trigger on purchasing the EMOTIV headset, a brand new brain-computer interface that according to its creators, Emotiv Systems, will make it possible for games to be controlled and influenced by the player's mind, and facial expressions. It connects wirelessly with the PC, and may in the future work on other game platforms such as consoles.

There is a version available for researchers which includes a high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset and also a proprietary software toolkit that exposes APIs and detection libraries such as the Affectiv Suite, the Cognitive Suite and the Expressiv Suite. These allow for monitoring emotional states, conscious thoughts and intent and also facial expressions.

I am very much looking forward to using this for research, particularly into the non-photorealistic rendering realm as it could well form the next logical step to some of the research work carried out for my PhD. The cost alone makes it incredibly appealing, will post a follow-up when I receive the hardware and test it.

http://www.emotiv.com/

Pandora, an open-source handheld games console

The portable games market has a new competitor, the open-source Pandora. This device, developed by a company called OpenPandora, is a unique blend of a UMPC and a handheld game console. In processing terms the Pandora outperforms both the DS and PSP and boasts an impressive feature list.

Powered by an ARM 600Mhz CPU and Linux OS the device also houses a 4.3” 800x480 LCD screen, 802.11b/g wi-fi, Blutooth, high-speed USB, TV out, dual analogue controls and a full QWERTY keyboard. There have been some delays with it but it finally starts shipping in Jan 2010. It will be interesting to see whether it can compete with the Sony and Nintendo devices which are already established as it can certainly rival them in terms of computational power.

http://www.open-pandora.org/

Unity opens UK studio

Unity Technologies, one of the most up and coming game engine companies, has today announced the official opening of its UK studio. It's the third office for the firm behind the increasingly popular multi-platform game development tools for PC, Mac, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360 and iPhone. The other two are in Denmark (where the company originates from) and the States.

Unity UK is based in Crawley and headed by former EA/Criterion man Graham Dunnett. The company is also said to be hiring at the moment. It's very encouraging to see one of the most promising firms in the field opening an office domestically, so best of luck to them!

WebGL, the new standard for 3D graphics on web browsers?

3D graphics became ordinary first in games, then in operating systems, and then last week, it took a significant step toward being built into Web browsers as well. The Khronos Group, which oversees the OpenGL graphics interface (which is an open standard), announced that its work with Mozilla to bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web has now reached draft standard form. The standard is going to be called WebGL and allows programmers who use JavaScript language take advantage of the fact that video cards can handle 3D graphics.

The group now wants commentary from web developers and other experts who might be involved with WebGL so it can be finalized. Exciting news that bodes well for the future, I expect we'll see some interesting developments going live next year.

3D urban models in New Scientist

A great article on 3D mash-ups has appeared in the latest issue of New Scientist. The article includes quotes from the Ordnance Survey head of research, the people at the Digital Urban blog and people behind the Infoterra Skape project.

The article focuses on the potential of 3D mapping, with Bournemouth in southern England claimed to be the best mapped place on the planet since lasers were fired at the town from the ground and from the air to capture the height of buildings, trees and other features. This has resulted in a map accurate to 4 centimetres in x, y and z. By comparison 3D structures in Google Earth are accurate to about 15 metres...

A must-read for anyone into 3D urban modelling, the article can be found at; http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427366.400-3d-mashup-maps-let-you-edit-the-world.html

Image-based modelling web portal

For anyone interested in image-based modelling (a process allowing for the creation of 3D models from photographs of real scenes) a new portal has been set up to give support to researchers and to build documents for general public.

Dealing with either theoretical aspects, methodology or practical applications, the portal aims to gather contributions from researchers, teachers, students, about 2D and 3D buildings representations processing from simple images. Well worth investigating if you want to learn more about this approach which is becoming noticeably important in 3D urban modelling today.

http://www.map.archi.fr/aibm/Portal_of_Architectural_Image-Based-Modeling/Home.html

Vue 8 Personal Learning Edition available

A piece of news interesting to those into terrain modelling and editing, e-on Software has recently announced a free edition of its flagship terrain editor. Vue 8 PLE (Personal Learning Edition) is to offer the same toolset with the commercial version (which includes support for 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, LightWave 3D and Softimage).

The PLE is free download with no expiry date although all renders will have a logo watermark (and any scene files you create aren't compatible with the paid versions of Vue). Well worth checking out if you are interested in the creation of 3D natural environments.

http://vue8.com/ple

Siteseer 3D Gold for Real Estate and Tourism

A relatively unexplored application area for 3D urban modelling is real estate. GeoData Technologies (GDT) recently launched SiteSeer3D Gold, an application that allows real estate and tourism professionals to create custom 3D maps of their listings, business and amenities that can be then added to their website(s).

This includes the addition of branding, website links and drawings on the aerial imagery and label amenities to customize the 3D maps. There are many other features including Google Street view integration.

For more information visit http://www.siteseer3d.com/.

Infoterra's 3D London model

Courtesy of Digital Urban, here's one of the best, if not the best, 3D London urban model seen so far. Certainly the most detailed one, created by Infoterra and launched under their Skape initiative, the model will be available sometime in early 2010.



The level of geometrical complexity is certainly very high and it would be interesting to see a model like this on a navigational application one day for usability testing purposes. Take a look at http://www.skapeworld.com/ for more info.

Paris 3D Beta, a virtual center of the French capital

On a more urban modelling note, the companies Mappy and Visioglobe have recently created and launched a virtual center of Paris. This user experience of real-time 3D navigation relies on the complimentary expertise of both partners which is cartographic and LBS expertise for the former, which led to the developement of a specific software solution for modeling in 3D the maps of Paris and façade pictures and visualization proficiency for the latter, whose real-time 3D engine enables the user to move freely in this virtual world.

The Paris 3D Beta navigation system is of considerable interest (particularly for researchers like me) as it opts out of a perspective, bird's eye view for a pedestrian one. In the future Mappy and Visioglobe plan to add more functionalities using real-time proximity information like, for example, traffic or weather information and landmarks history.

You'll have to install a plugin to see this but it is well worth checking out at http://paris3d.mappy.com/

Atari original games available for free

A great piece of news tying in with some 'history of computer games' lectures I have been doing at Bournemouth University recently, Atari have just released some classic old games they created on their website. The notable thing about these is that they are not clones (there's quite a few of those already around) but 'loving interpretations', i.e. the originals remade by Atari themselves. This comes as part of a re-launch for the Atari website which includes an online store.

The list of games includes Asteroids and Lunar Lander, Yars' Revenge, Adventure, Crystal Castles and Battlezone all classic titles that defined era (and isn't Battlezone the first 3D game ever?). More titles are probably to follow. This is well worth checking out for anybody with interest in retro-gaming since the detail in which these old games have been recreated is beautiful, from the wood veneer to the font used in the games . The player can even plug his/her Atari Joystick into the computer via a USB adaption.

http://www.atari.com/arcade

OnLive will introduce cloud gaming for mobile devices

The experimental cloud game streaming service OnLive will eventually be available on smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone. It is now suggested (by official sources within the company) that the iPhone edition of OnLive would get “the full OnLive Game Service”, where users can play games, watch other playthroughs and communicate through game profiles. However, these insider sources reveal the cellphone versions of OnLive are still very much in the early production phase. They will need extensive development and have no release date.

It remains unknown how well OnLive performs on wireless cellphones, in fact the jury is still out on the performance of the ‘native’ edition of OnLive for TVs, PCs and Macs. OnLive is set for release in the US before the end of the year.

Rasterization using Larrabee

I've blogged before about the discussed shift of graphics rendering from dedicated GPUs, which has taken place from the mid to late 90s, to the main processor. An article at the excellent Gamasutra website discusses, for the first time, exactly how that process will be implemented, written by veteran graphics programmer Mike Abrash and based on the architecture of the new Intel Larrabee processor.

This article takes a close look at the Larrabee New Instructions to one of the major problem areas - rasterization - with the view of taking advantage of the strengths of Larrabee's CPU-based architecture. According to Mike, it is important to state that performance with the Larrabee New Instructions will vary greatly from one application to the next - there's not much to be done with purely scalar code - but diving into Larrabee rasterization in detail gives you a good sense of what it's like to apply the Larrabee New Instructions to at least one sort of non-obvious application.

The article goes in great depth for this and is an excellent read (and perhaps one the first few detailed prefaces of the extinction of graphics cards). Read it here.

3D modelling using a webcam

The construction of virtual 3D models usually requires heavy and expensive equipment, or takes lengthy amounts of time. A group of researchers at Cambridge University have created a program able to build 3D models of textured objects in real-time, using only a standard computer and webcam. This allows 3D modeling to become accessible to everybody.

The method proposed needs only a simple webcam. The object is moved about in front of the webcam and the software can reconstruct the object "on-line" while collecting live video. The system uses points detected on the object to estimate object structure from the motion of the camera or the object, and then computes the tetrahedralisation of the points. The points are recorded in a mesh of tetrahedra, within which is embedded the surface mesh of the object.

The software can then tidy up the final reconstruction by taking out the invalid tetrahedra to obtain the surface mesh based on a probabilistic carving algorithm and the object texture is applied to the 3D mesh in order to obtain a realistic effect See the vid above, the work has been presented at several conferences (including ISMAR 2009 where it won an award) and is cutting edge in this particular field.

First instructional Unity book, free chapter

Just a quick update to mention that the excellent Unity book (and first on the up-and-coming game engine) I mentioned at a previous post recently also comes with a free downloadable chapter which serves as a great sampler. Well worth checking out as it gives a great taste of the rest of the publication.

I will soon be receiving a copy of the whole book and I will post a longer review. Till then you can dowload the free chapter from the publisher here or purchase the full book (in paper or pdf format) here.

Update on Tyson Ibele's Building Generator script

This is the third post I am making on this in less than a couple of months but it truly is a fantastic little tool and, above all, completely free. Tyson Ibele has released yet another update of his 3D Studio Max script called Building Generator which this time focuses creation of textured details and windows on buildings.

See some examples above, I love the fact how updates are released every couple of weeks! Other great (and extremely useful!) additions include a new floor layer management system, the ability to do interiors and also use of custom materials. Check the little script out here, it is easily the best freely available urban modelling application I have stumbled across in the area in years!

Gamr7's Urban Pad version 2.0

French middleware developer Gamr7 has released version 2.0 of its procedural city creation software, Urban PAD (I've blogged on this before although it was quite awhile ago now). The new version features a revamped interface and wider format support for mesh conversion. Other new features in Urban PAD 2.0 include 20-fold time gains for some features, according to the company, and improved context generation control capacities.



Urban PAD includes four content editors and a city generation engine. The tool is aimed at offering editable procedural city creation through automatic content placement, real-time manual editing, and contextual adaptation. The video above is a great showcase for the application. I was lucky enough to have some people from Gamr7 demonstrate the application to me a few days ago and I was very impressed.

You can check out the trial version (or purchase the full product) at the official site of the company which can be found at http://www.gamr7.com.

First instructional Unity book out

The first book about Unity, the recent success story of the game engine world has been published, called Unity Game Development Essentials written by Will Goldstone and published by Packt Publishing. It’s a book geared towards the beginner end of the spectrum and an excellent start to the world of Unity.

The publication is designed to cover a set of easy to follow examples, which culminate in the production of a First Person 3D game, complete with an interactive island environment. By introducing common concepts of game and 3D production, you'll explore Unity to make a character interact with the game world and build puzzles for the player to solve, in order to complete the game.

At the end of the book, you will have a fully working 3D game and all the skills required to extend the game further, giving your end-user, the player, the best experience possible. Well worth investigating!

The book can be purchased from here.

3D urban visualization used for Oxford Circus planning

The redesigned Oxford Circus, which opened this morning after a two-year, £5m makeover, contains two big innovations. As well as crossing the intersection laterally, pedestrians now have a 30-second window when all traffic stops and they can go at a diagonal along a giant X marked into the junction with metal studs. Known to road engineers, slightly alarmingly, as a "pedestrian scramble", it is modelled on the famously frantic junction adjoining Shibuya station in central Tokyo.

The redesign also removes roadside barriers and much of the pavement clutter. This boosts available space for pedestrians by around two-thirds, as well as – the designers hope – encouraging all road users towards a more thoughtful, responsible attitude. A team from Atkins, the engineering and design group which managed the project, used software of the type which created vast battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings films to create 3D animations showing how the throngs might interact. This appeared to prove that an X-shaped junction allowed the crowds, which can peak at around 40,000 people an hour, to cross far more efficiently.

This is a great example of how urban modelling can be used for city planning. See the vid and also read the full Guardian story here.