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

这个项目的目标是开发工具来创建逼真的虚拟城市景观。城市是巨大的，极难手动建模，以前的努力没有捕捉到现实世界的历史和文化多样性。来自计算机科学、学习科学和建筑学科的研究人员正在四个互补的流程中工作：第一，用基于代理的模拟来模拟城市土地的开发和使用；第二，使用基于文法、优化和遗传学的技术来生成建筑来填充城市景观；第三，扩展研究人员现有的模拟工具包NetLogo，使模拟能够在所需的尺度上进行；第四，与建筑师和城市规划师密切合作，作为研究顾问和建筑课程和实践中工具的使用者。这些工具将满足自然科学和社会科学以及娱乐、模拟和军事行业对模拟和图形真实感日益增长的需求。根据国家研究委员会最近的一份报告，用于创建模拟环境的低成本、易于使用的硬件和软件工具是娱乐和国防应用程序的迫切需求。这些工具和结果也将引起建筑和城市规划界的极大兴趣，他们将利用这些工具和结果来研究当前建筑和设计理论的充分性。

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.