Animation and visualization in design of a new transportation system in existing urban environment using GIS and Virtual Reality

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1 Animation and visualization in design of a new transportation system in existing urban environment using GIS and Virtual Reality Jan Bjurström and Jonas Tornberg ABSTRACT A virtual city was built to visualize how an aerial cableway may solve an increasing demand for public transportation in the city of Göteborg (Gothenburg). This model was made at Chalmers University of Technology, school of Architecture and was optimized for a 3D Cube environment. The 3D model was created using Arc/Info 7.2 including the Grid submodul, ArcView GIS 3.1 and TerraVista 2.1 from Terrex Inc. (an ESRI partner). The latter was used to generate the virtual reality model. The 3D Cube was used to present the scene in virtual reality, and makes it possible to take a tour with the virtual cableway. It is believed that the integration of GIS and VR technology will become an indispensable tool for planners in the near future. A 3D Cube makes it possible to test and experience various planning alternatives, especially in an urban environment but also in other planning situations. Keywords: GIS, Virtual Reality, VR, Aerial cableway, 3D-Cube, City 3D model 1. Introduction The transportation demand increases substantially in the city of Göteborg, the second city of Sweden having roughly 750,000 inhabitants. One reason is that the different Universities are expanding, and the University Departments is located in various parts of the town. There is also a demand for transportation between the University departments and the related knowledge-based industry and housing. This scattering

2 being intentional to transform Göteborg to a "City of Know-How". However, the traffic nodes have to be connected by a transportation system carrying students, teachers, and even goods. There are already today difficulties in connecting the faculties and related functions physically. The traffic demand here is calculated to reach the level of 10,000 persons per day in a couple of years. A good transport system will support efficient use of the big investments within the university sector. The map in Figure 1 shows the existing and planned locations of Universities in Göteborg. The Göta Älv River separates the town in two parts. One of the new big knowledge nodes has started to grow on the north shore while the bulk of the existing University nodes are located south of the river. The nationally important transports on the river must not be disturbed and it needs headroom of at least 45 meters. New "bridging" has to be constructed adding accessibility to the existing tunnel and two Figure 1. The university locations in the center of Göteborg result in a demand of a good transportation system in the future. 2. A transport system proposal Göteborg is asking for a transport system offering a complementary rapid and safe movement of people and goods between growing nodes in the town. An aerial cableway may be one kind of system that meets the requirements of the future urban infrastructure. The passenger capacity must exceed the level specified to other public transport

3 Figure 3. A Silicon Graphics Onyx II Computer, equipped with three separated graphic pipes run all five projectors. Each pipe has two graphic channels thus enabling the system to run six projectors. Each projector shows the image in stereo, so when wearing synchronized "Shutter Glasses" the viewer gets a completely immersive stereoscopic view of the world. An electromagnetic field in the 3D-CUBE corresponds with sensors on the person, to track his or her position. Certain "peripherals" such as gloves and pointers then make interaction with the environment possible. The separately running Lake sound system simulates distance, direction and character of the sound to give a complete illusion. Opposite to many urban VR projects, which are lacking 3D data, we had to generalize the roof objects of the buildings to reduce the amount of data to be able to get good performance in the 3D Cube. The city of Göteborg has been mapped in high resolution with photogrammetry giving x,y coordinates with z values. The study area is about 5x6 kilometers. The length of the cableway will be approximately 8 km. Originally objects in the building database was generalized to 7000 objects, which gave a fairly good city center model. Other datasets used in the project are: DTM, orthophoto, water (we are working in a seaport), streets, railways and the aerial cableway. The TerraVista software version 2.1 (November 1999) was not ready to create 3D buildings out of 2D polygons GIS data. The partnership with ESRI had however the intention to develop better treatment of 2D GIS data, even for the buildings data type. An extension, Automatic Culture Generator (ACG), was under development and for this project we had the opportunity to use an early beta version to be able to rise the buildings to the height above ground, which was stored as an attribute to these polygons. 4. Source data The following datasets were used to create the 3D scene: -Digital Terrain Model (DTM), from points in a 12 meter grid (ASCII file). -Roof lines having elevation value (AutoCad vector file). -Water polygons without elevation (Shape file).

4 -Streets and railways without elevation (Shape file). -Orthophotos, resolution: 0.25 meter (georeferenced TIFF image). -Aerial cableway, 3D linear features digitized in ArcView GIS (3D Shape file). In our situation we had to focus on a generalized scene that should cover a big part of the city. The reason for this was that the objective was to create a possibility to experience the aerial cableway from a virtual journey within the cablecar it self, as well as watch it from any optional location. The 3D model was built in a manner so that the buildings had flat roofs and random textures on the outside walls. The shapes of the buildings were limited to have flat roofs because their origin of 2D GIS data. That means that a roof as easy as a rectangle in shape is build as a box. The height of the box is determined from the roof's height value and calculated from it's lowest point in the terrain. The TerraVista software is very tolerant software regarding its treatment of input data and how it should appear in the terrain. There was however some modifications needed to be able to put the buildings on the terrain. The principle used is to drape features on the digital terrain model to produce 3D plots (just as was possible in early version of Arcplot). Some features such as buildings must have relative heights, which means height above ground level, while other features such as the cableway (3D linear data) must have absolute heights. Streetlines were widened to one width for all, because the real width was not in the database. These features were draped on the DTM without any special respect to horizontal appearance of the streets, which however is possible. The preparation of the datasets included: 1. In Arc/Info, the DTM is imported to a Grid and exported as an ASCII Grid file, which can be imported to TerraVista. 2. Buildings had to be built from roof polygons, and polygons had to be created from the rooflines. Arc/Info's CLEAN command produces the polygons very easy. Then the roof heights were estimated from one of the lines describing the roof. Buildings in Sweden sometimes have flat roofs, but (unfortunately in this case) this is not the prevailing type. There are also many smaller machine rooms for fans, elevators etc. on the roofs that must be removed. The roof heights were retrieved from the lowest line around the roof. This gave us the walls in real heights and most buildings have a very realistic size appearance. There are of course some buildings with large non-flat roofs that has to be modified in the 3D model, in order to recognized. These buildings are often churches. One particular building close to the cableway, the Fish Church ("Feskekörka" in the local dialect) which is a fish market in a well known building, needed to look real (Figure 4). Elevation values had to be recalculated from absolute heights to relative heights above ground. The relative heights were calculated from the absolute heights minus the lowest ground level, which was found in the DTM Grid. The roofs are cleaned from all features but tall chimneys. The tall buildings and chimneys are not common in our city, but is very important as landmarks when moving in the model or viewing a 2D perspective of the city. Adjacent roof polygons were dissolved if their height was approximately the same. This is an important step

5 to do, because when the 3D buildings are build, all linear features get a wall down to the ground and the number of such walls must be minimized to increase performance when traveling in the VR environment in the 3D Cube. All the roof preparations were done in Arc/Info. Then the roof polygons were converted to shape files. 3. A water polygon does not need any elevation values. TerraVista makes water surfaces from the lowest elevation found in the DTM in the area that are occupied by the water polygons. 4. Streets and railways are draped on the DTM. A uniform width was assigned to these features. In this operation, it would have been preferable if a width attribute had been available. 5. The aerial cableway was digitized in ArcView GIS as a 3D linear feature, having elevation values of absolute heights. When building the 3D scene, you work with a project in TerraVista. The datasets are imported to the project and can be used on all their extent, or in an area specified interactively. This is convenient when testing new data or when investigating new ways of interpreting the data. When the 3D scene is build, you can work with single objects in 3D-design software, such as Multigen Creator [Infoga Referens]. This was important here to be able to refine the model. Building the city in the way we did, gave us a huge model in very short production time, but there are no details like phototextures on the walls or modeled complex roofs. Figure 4. The well-known Fish Church is a fishmarket. More detail needs to be assigned to such special landmarks. Even if most buildings are generalized to boxes, the model will become much more realistic for a viewer if certain features look relatively "real". 5. Conclusions The combination of geographic information systems and virtual reality technology will become more natural in the near future. There will definitely be a high demand for versatile, integrated GIS/VR models. For instance, the public has a chance to experience the possible effects of the implementation of various construction plans and thereby give their opinion on the best alternative. At some stages in a planning

6 process, architects might prefer a generalized model, since a lot of detail can "disturb" the planner who may lose the focus from the building projects. In other projects, or for education, it might be better with a refined model with photo textures and better 3D design to get the virtual city look real. 7. Acknowledgements Our special thanks to Prof. Hans Bjur, Chalmers and Research manager Anders Hagson, Chalmers for encouraging support. Thanks also to Prof. Björn Klarqvist, Chalmers and Dr. Mats Söderström, Odal for helpful reading and Richard Clark, Terrex Inc. for special software support. References Published Reneland, M and Hagson, A (1996). PRT System in Swedish Towns - Conditions given by and consequences for town structure and townscape Terrex Terrain Experts Inc. (1999). TerraVista User's Manual V2.0 Internet Authors: Jan Bjurström Department of Urban traffic and Land use School of Architecture Chalmers University of Technology SE Göteborg, Sweden phone: (0) fax: (0) jan.bjurstrom@arch.chalmers.se Jonas Tornberg Department of Urban traffic and Land use School of Architecture Chalmers University of Technology SE Göteborg, Sweden phone: (0) fax: (0) jonas@arch.chalmers.se Presented by Jonas Tornberg, M.Sc.C.E at the 2000 ESRI User Conference Chalmers University of Technology SE Göteborg, Sweden Phone: (0) Fax: (0)