So Many Sessions, So Little Time…..

This morning, we wandered through the ESRI UC Exhibit Hall (which really makes you think, hey, Segway rentals for touring the exhibit space would be awesome). We did a couple of interviews this morning, and Jesse continued talking to exhibitors while I checked out a couple of sessions. One paper that was right in line with the research we do in our lab was “Kyoto Virtual Time-Space“, which dealt with a huge project to generate a 3D GIS for the city of Kyoto, Japan at different time periods, working towards a 4D or temporal GIS. Using MapCube, a 3D modelling package, the researchers created a great-looking photo realistic reconstruction of portions of Kyoto today, as well as digitizing and extruding over 400,000 building footprints. They have also generated 3D models for a type of merchant housing known as a “machiya” which were an important feature of the landscape before World War II, and recreated Kyoto during the Edo (1603-1867) and Heian (794 -1192) periods. The presentation looked great, and as Jesse and I know from working on smaller-scale 3D GIS projects, it takes a lot of work researching the geography and history of a place before you can even start thinking about a 3D historical landscape reconstruction.