Many visualizations of the output of computer simulations use geometry relationships. These are currently created manually using 3D modeling software or by direct programming. This project uses new methods to model a visualization and specify how large sets of objects can be aggregated when the scale of the visualization changes. This will also allow for real-time visualization of urban simulations on PCs and large immersive virtual reality installation. As world populations and urbanization grow explosively, urban planning has become increasingly important: in Phoenix, the average low temperature in the summer has increased by almost 14 degrees due to the urban development and resulting urban heat island; long and slow freeway commutes in cities like Los Angeles or traffic gridlock in Delhi or Mexico City are examples of the urgency and necessity of urban planning. Large urban areas need sustainable planning to ensure the availability of sufficient resources for future years. Smaller cities growing into large urban areas need effective planning to become habitable and provide reasonable quality of life. This project develops modeling and visualization tools that will contribute to planning a better future for urban environments and make our cities more livable. The team addresses two major problems: developing a systematic effort to develop methodologies to specify a visualization of simulation data of geometric and semantic urban data and developing algorithms to compute visual representations for multiple scales based on ideas from cartographic simplification. In addition to training of students, the work will be the basis of both graduate and undergraduate course being developed.
