Virtual Worlds for teaching GIS

Following on from our previous posts on Second Life (SL), I just came across a post on the ArcUser Online website which talks about how SL can be used for GIS education. The article is by Michael DeMers of New Mexico State University. The paper is entitled "Inside the Metaverse" and has three nice podcasts accompanying it.

The YouTube movie below gives an idea about the potential for teaching GIS within virtual worlds (Thanks to Digital Urban for the link).

New Paper: Agent Street: An Environment for Exploring Agent-Based Models in Second Life

Our work with agent-based modeling in Second Life has just been published in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). The full title of the paper is "Agent Street: An Environment for Exploring Agent-Based Models in Second Life" and the abstract reads as follows:

"Urban models can be seen on a continuum between iconic and symbolic. Generally speaking, iconic models are physical versions of the real world at some scaled down representation, while symbolic models represent the system in terms of the way they function replacing the physical or material system by some logical and/or mathematical formulae. Traditionally iconic and symbolic models were distinct classes of model but due to the rise of digital computing the distinction between the two is becoming blurred, with symbolic models being embedded into iconic models. However, such models tend to be single user. This paper demonstrates how 3D symbolic models in the form of agent-based simulations can be embedded into iconic models using the multi-user virtual world of Second Life. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates Second Life's potential for social science simulation. To demonstrate this, we first introduce Second Life and provide two exemplar models; Conway's Game of Life, and Schelling's Segregation Model which highlight how symbolic models can be viewed in an iconic environment. We then present a simple pedestrian evacuation model which merges the iconic and symbolic together and extends the model to directly incorporate avatars and agents in the same environment illustrating how 'real' participants can influence simulation outcomes. Such examples demonstrate the potential for creating highly visual, immersive, interactive agent-based models for social scientists in multi-user real time virtual worlds. The paper concludes with some final comments on problems with representing models in current virtual worlds and future avenues of research."

Agents reacting to Avatars

Accompanying the paper we have created a dedicated website giving more details about the work including the model source code which can be found here.

Our next steps are to start exploring how such models can be created and extended in OpenSim and carrying out user testing along with online model creation.

The full reference to the paper is:

Crooks, A, Hudson-Smith, A and Dearden, J (2009). 'Agent Street: An Environment for Exploring Agent-Based Models in Second Life'. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 12(4)10: http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/12/4/10.html.

Visualisation in support of management decisions

Following on from the previous post about SYMAP, its amazing to think that in a short period of time how technologies have developed. For example, take the the 18th World IMACS Congress and MODSIM09 International Congress on Modelling and Simulation. There are a wealth of talks in the visualisation in support of management decisions session, such as the paper presented by Phil Greenwood entitled "Using game engine technology to create real-time interactive environments to assist in planning and visual assessment for infrastructure" part of which I show below:



Further information about this session can be found here. Also for those interested in visualization and game engines, the excellent Digital Urban blog at CASA is worth a look.

SYMAP movie

I recently been exploring visualization techniques for agent-based modeling and GIS and came across this old movie produced by Allan Schmidt showing urban expansion of Lansing, Michigan between 1850 to 1965.

Whats interesting is its based on the synergraphic mapping system (SYMAP) developed by Howard Fisher in the mid 1960s which was one of the first general-purpose mapping packages. The second movie below gives some background on SYMAP:

How cities drive plants extinct

Readers of the blog might know that I have an interest in cities, actually I just wrote about this for a guest blog post on the Krasnow Institute blog. However, I often focus on how human population increase will effect cities in terms of sprawl, congestion or segregation in its many different forms etc. But the BBC has an interesting article entitled " How cities drive plants extinct." The article explores how urban growth impacts on the global biodiversity of plant species. What I found interesting is the question on how plants and people could coexist in urban areas. But for this to happen we would have to see plants as an "investment rather than as a disposable asset."

The full article can be found here.