Say you’re a city planner and are deciding how to zone an area for development. Or perhaps you’re a transport planner and need to know the impact of a potential new tunnel on the buildings above. Or maybe you’re a civil engineer and need accurate information about the impact a hurricane or earthquake will have on the building you’re designing.
In any of these situations, can you imagine how useful a complete and up-to-the-minute virtual picture of your city would be? And not just for visualisation purposes, this virtual city also includes all the numerical analysis needed for engineering design.
For Professor Chongmin Song, Director in the Centre for Infrastructure Engineering and Safety, this is not just a nice idea, this is the mission he has set himself and the possibility his research has opened up.
“My vision is to provide the underpinning computational structural analysis needed to build a fully integrated virtual reality model of a city that includes all the physical and functional data,” he explains.
“This means it will include the structural information of all the buildings in the city as well as all the technical information from the ground below, such as the properties of the soil and rock.”
Song likens the potential impact of the virtual city to the impact of Google Maps. “Before Google Maps, if I wanted to go somewhere I needed a hard copy map and it might take a few minutes to work out the best route. Now, you can simply plug in point A and point B on your smartphone and it creates an instantaneous real-time, virtual, responsive route for you to follow,” he says.
“You’ve probably experienced how this has saved time and made your own life easier, but for industries like transportation, the cost savings run into millions of dollars in improved routing and fuel economies. With the virtual city, I am imagining similar time and cost savings for a wide variety of industries and government agencies.”
Virtual reality is increasingly being used in applications including entertainment, personnel training, architecture, design integration and construction to name a few and Song says it is so popular because it is visual and instructive. “You can see colour, layout and geo