landspeeder!

The Landspeeder Project Website

I. Welcome.

Welcome to the Landspeeder Project website. Landspeeder is a 3-D real-time visualization tool for the Land use Evolution and impact Assessement Model (LEAM).

The Land use Evolution and impact Assessement Model (LEAM; http://www.leam.uiuc.edu) simulates land-use change in 30 meter by 30 meter cells across time and across regions as large as 1350 square kilometers in extent. In LEAM, land-use change is driven by forces that act at the regional level (the economy, for instance) as well as at the level of an individual cell (proximity to employment centers, for instance). LEAM, which is typically run on supercomputers, produces for each time step a matrix that indicates the land-use designation in a particular cell at that time step. The challenge we address in Landspeeder is visualizing the content of these matrices as landscapes that people can navigate and experience.

(above: Early Landspeeder simulation in green, real land in b+w, LEAM output in numbers.)

II. Goals.

Accept a number of LEAM output matrices (one for each time step)
Display the data as a 3-D virtual world
Allow the user to control which time step is displayed, and their position in the matrix.

Essentially, the user should be able to easily navigate around the matrix in space and time.

III. More Explanation and Screen Shots. [click here]

IV. History of Landspeeder. [click here]

V. Problems To Solve:

How to deliver this visualization easily and stable over the internet?
How to implement a 3-D solution in a 6-walled Cave environment (the Beckman Cube)
How to navigate easily in a 3-D environment?
Develop an algorithm and language to determine cell usage (i.e., should this building take up more than 1 cell? What type of building should this be?)
How to show a differentiation between older and newer buildings
What are the differences in user perception between the "realistic" textured buildings and the more representational buildings?
New Research: Cinematic Techniques in Virtual Worlds

VI. Recent Challenges.

How to implement GIS road and stream data in OpenGL, to overlay the land/houses rendering? (Right now, our roads look blocky because they are taking up an entire data cell; how to convert to vector data?)
How to configure a tablet PC to control navigation through time (and space) in the Cube? What applications can write directly to a socket and will be easy to program? (Director, Flash, Java)
How could we model dynamic objects (specifically cars and trucks) in the landscape?

VII. People.

R. Varkki George Pallathucheril (Professor of Urban and Regional Planning)

Rose Marshack (Visiting Research Programmer, Dept of Urban and Regional Planning, Graduate Student in Narrative Media)

We could not have made progress on this project without assistance from the following individuals.

Hank Kaczmarski (Director, ISL Group at Beckman)

Benjamin Schaeffer (Research Scientist, ISL Group at Beckman)

Lewis D. Hopkins (Professor of Urban and Regional Planning)

Brian Deal (Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning)

(Landspeeder code "typo")