ITR: Collaborative Research: Procedural Modeling of Urban Activity and Form

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The goal of this project is to develop tools for the creation of realistic virtual cityscapes. Cities are immense and extremely difficult to model manually, and previous efforts have not captured the historical and cultural diversity of the real world. The investigators, from the disciplines of computer science, learning sciences and architecture, are working in four complementary streams: first, modeling urban land development and usage with agent-based simulation; second, generating buildings to populate the urban landscape using techniques based on grammars, optimization, and genetics; third, extending an investigator's existing simulation toolset, NetLogo, enabling simulation on the required scales; and fourth, collaborating closely with architects and urban planners, both as research advisors and as users of the tools in architectural curriculum and practice.These tools will meet an increasing demand for simulation and graphical realism in the natural and social sciences as well as in the entertainment, simulation, and military industries. According to a recent National Research Council report, low-cost, easy-to-use hardware and software tools for creating simulated environments [are] a critical need for entertainment and defense applications. The tools and results will also be of great interest to the architectural and urban planning communities, who will use them to study the adequacy of current architectural and design theory.