CityHeat

Abstract

The advent of new interactive game engine tools such as Unity3D, Unreal or Crysis and their usage in wider research, urban and architectural visualisations as well as their ability to observe and visualise selected urban dynamics and energy distribution within the built environment yields new insight into various urban processes which are hardly possible to explore by traditional and conventional CAD or analytical software platforms. By means of computed physical simulation together with the interactive visualisation the observer is enabled to unveil characteristics of the environment which have been hidden up to now and obtain more precise information about various properties of the outdoor environmental quality in a visually understandable way. One of the investigated issues within the contemporary cities is the problem of traffic's heat propagation with direct influence onto the quality and comfort of the liveability in the built environment. In order to visualise, explore and analyse the traffic heat propagation in a local scale within the selected urban environment, we established a custom-made visualisation and interactive tool called CityHeat, currently focused on the city of Singapore based on Unity3D game engine platform. As such, it is possible to better understand the spatial impact of the traffic's heat. Therefore, the CityHeat visualisation system can serve as an interactive decision-making tool during the urban planning or policy making processes for interdisciplinary stakeholder groups.

Visualization of Urban Mobility Data from Intelligent Transportation Systems

“…Urban traffic conversations extracted from geo-referenced social media data can be further exploited, as in [91], to generate insights on the conditions of a transportation network and people’s commuting habits. Further studies could assess the potential of interactive 3D visualization of urban mobility data, as it has been addressed by a few studies [31,54,74,75]. Finally, all surveyed studies summarized in Table 1 are directed at domain experts and their analytical tasks.…”

“…Visualization of air pollution uses data from vehicle sensors [53] and model-based estimations of emissions, dispersions or heat [17,53,54], model-based traffic flow data [17], bus AVL data and GPS trajectories [55], and video streams [56].…”

“…Cristie et al proposed an interactive visualization tool, CityHeat, for cellular automata based simulation and analysis of traffic heat in microscopic scale [54]. The tool, as shown in Figure 12 provides interaction tasks such as pan and zoom, filtering, and temporal querying.…”

“…CityHeat visualization tool for microscopic simulation and analysis of traffic heat on a three-dimensional virtual city environment [54] (extracted from [57]).…”