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Beyond Blueprints
William Jepson’s Urban Simulator project is helping
architects, designers
and urban planners overcome the limits of space and time
With far greater
breadth — to say nothing of depth — than any two dimensional blueprint,
UCLA’s Urban Simulator project allows users to experience the ramifications
of proposed city development by “driving” through or “flying” over an animated
landscape in real time. William Jepson, director of computing in
the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, headed the team that created
the system, a marriage of military flight simulation and virtual reality
technologies. Jepson combined three dimensional CAD (computer aided design)
models with aerial photographs and videos shot at street level to create
a realistic (down to the flora, street signs and graffiti), real time simulation
of more than a dozen sections of Los Angeles. Maneuvering the computer
mouse as in a video game, urban designers, students and interested citizens
can “drive” through an area as it now looks and — by exercising certain
menu choices — view it as it would appear after implementing various planning
alternatives.
The simulator, which runs on a Silicon Graphics Onyx workstation that
enables extensive use of real time texture mapping, was originally conceived
to assist in the rebuilding efforts following the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
The L.A. City Council and L.A. Housing Preservation and Production Department
provided funding for a UCLA team, working with Councilman Mike Hernandez,
to develop a pilot program demonstrating, with virtual reality, the effects
of various planning alternatives for the Pico Union district of Los Angeles,
which sustained heavy damage from arsonists. In another project, at the
request of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Jepson’s
group employed the same methodology to model an existing neighborhood around
the Wilshire Vermont subway station. The model was then used to provide
the context for evaluating development alternatives. More recently, Jepson
worked with developer Maguire Thomas on plans for a mixed use, master planned
community in Playa Vista, which is now under consideration. City planners
are currently using the technology to ponder initiatives in Hollywood and
Westwood.
 For students, the
Urban Simulator provides the opportunity to create urban plans and easily
observe and understand their impacts on the surrounding cityscape. “This
system gives individuals the potential to interact with each other in planning
their own communities,” explains Jepson, who in 1994 became the first UCLA
based winner of the prestigious Computerworld Smithsonian Award in Education
and Academia. “The methodology we developed for the Urban Simulator scales
over a wide variety of applications. Any three dimensional form can be
viewed using this system.”
 A team consisting
of Jepson, the Department of Physics’ Walter Gekelman and the Department
of Computer Science’s Richard Muntz and Walter Karplus, is adapting the
system for use in medicine and science. “The interface is no different,”
Jepson explains. “You don’t have to fly only over cities with this technology.
You can fly through human bodies -- or atoms, or magnetic fields -- in
order to get a richer appreciation for what’s happening there.”
Jepson’s group, in collaboration with Tom Harmon from UCLA’s Department
of Civil and Environmental Engineering, already has plans to facilitate
student exploration of hazardous waste sites and explore issues of toxic
remediation.
Once Jepson and his team had succeeded in developing a system for the
quick and efficient creation of modern cities, the next challenge was adapting
their methods to generating historic reconstructions. The process requires
substantial input from historians and archaeologists, who assist the modelers
in such crucial tasks as defining what actually existed during the periods
being studied, developing a palette of materials as they existed at various
times and reconstructing entire buildings from bits and pieces.
For his master’s thesis, UCLA student Dean Abernathy adapted Urban Simulator
methodology to develop a small model of the Roman Forum. Because Jepson’s
system understands time, the historic site can be seen not only as it once
existed, but as it changed over a 2,000 year period. Moreover, the system
enables users to visit the site at a given time, where they can be joined
by others on the network. Jepson is presently finding ways of incorporating
“avatars” into the system so that two individuals “walking” around the
same area in the same time period can see each other represented on screen
and speak to each other with the aid of computer microphones. In a project
for the Getty Trust, on which Jepson is collaborating with Architecture/History
Professor Diane Favro and Classics Professor Bernard Frischer, a virtual
reality model of the Forum of the Roman emperor Trajan has been developed
from the plans and drawings of Jim Packer, a Getty scholar and professor
at Northwestern University. The model allows users to walk through and
experience the forum as Trajan might have in the year 114 A.D.
Favro would ultimately like to hold her office hours “in” the Roman
Forum. “She’ll ask students to join her on a particular date, and they’ll
walk through and discuss what they see,” Jepson explains. Jepson is also
introducing virtual actors, enabling students to watch Augustus, say, emerge
from the steps of the Roman Forum to deliver a speech.
“This is a dynamic, experiential, interactive form of learning,” says
Jepson. “The user is in control, deciding where to go, what to look at
and what to learn at any particular point in time.”
Recharging the Electronic Classroom...
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