Three-Dimensional Modeling of Cities

This course explores the technologies and standards that are beginning to permit the development and distribution of three-dimensional representations of places that are vast in scope, visually detailed, and semantically rich. These models will eventually provide a public mirror-infrastructure for referencing information about places, past, present, and future, bringing unprecedented collaboration and communication in urban planning and design studies, and new ways of understanding impacts of urban planning scenarios on a metropolitan scale. Participants will gain an understanding of the underlying technologies behind this phenomenon, the means of wholesale capture of city models, the three-dimensional modeling techniques, institutional-grade information infrastructure, and the broad-scale visualization and analytical applications. We will also examine the social and economic aspects of broad-scale city modeling including broad-based web applications, and interoperability standards for CAD, GIS, Building Information Models and the Web.