Archinect - News

Barcelona is developing a digital twin within a 19th-century chapel

2022-05-20T11:47:00-04:00

Barcelona has become the latest city to begin construction on a digital twin of itself. Currently in a test phase, the data-driven replica of the city is expected to be operational by 2027, at which point it will be used as an urban planning tool to shape the city’s future development.

The digital twin will be housed within the MareNostrum supercomputer, one of the world’s most powerful data processors, located within the city’s Torre Girona chapel. Originally constructed in the 19th century, the chapel was rebuilt in the 1940s following the Spanish Civil War, and now sits on the campus of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. The chapel has housed the supercomputer since 2005.

The MareNostrum supercomputer. Image courtesy of Barcelona Supercomputing Center

For city officials, the digital twin will offer urbanists, architects, and planners a means of testing urban theories and projects before implementation in order to understand their effects, without physically disrupting th...

Digital twin of downtown Las Vegas unveiled in effort to cut emissions

2022-01-20T13:39:00-05:00

Las Vegas has become the latest city to embark on constructing a digital twin, following the unveiling of a digital model at the city’s Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. Developed by Chicago-based Cityzenith and Las Vegas-based Terbine, the model encompasses a 2.7-square-mile portion of downtown Las Vegas and is intended to “help Las Vegas building owners transition to net-zero carbon emissions.”

As we noted in October 2021, the digital replica of the physical landscape was built using local city data. In the future, the developers see the model as an opportunity to accurately measure and design for the impacts of future plans on the city’s air quality, mobility, water management, and building emissions.

With the base model now completed, the next phase will involve input from stakeholders including real estate owners, government agencies, university researchers, data partners, architects, and casino operators, overlaying further detail on how the city is operated and u...

Las Vegas is adopting digital twin technology to mitigate emissions

2021-10-20T14:22:00-04:00

Las Vegas is implementing digital twin technology to tackle its urban emissions. An area of downtown Las Vegas will use advanced 5G networking and IoT along with the digital twin technology to improve air quality, water management and carbon emissions produced from major buildings in the city.

Technology startup Cityzenith will provide its Digital Twin platform, SmartWorldPro2, for the project as part of its Clean Cities, Clean Future initiative. Las Vegas-based data management and curation platform Terbine will use IoT data from government agencies, building operators, transportation systems, and others to provide sensor information needed for the digital twin.

“Now in Las Vegas, we will have a city-scale digital twin that is driven by the physical environment, and ultimately letting us control key systems through it,” said Las Vegas Chief Innovation Officer Michael Sherwood. “This will give us new levels of insights and control to benefit city planners, residents, and businesses.”

Las Vegas is the second city to participate in Cityzenith’s initiative behind New York City. According to the company, Phoenix and several other major cities are expected to follow.

Ultra-thin materials are poised to transform technology

2020-01-22T12:21:00-05:00

two-dimensional materials will be the linchpin of the internet of everything. They will be “painted” on bridges and form the sensors to watch for strain and cracks. They will cover windows with transparent layers that become visible only when information is displayed. And if his team’s radio wave-absorber succeeds, it will power those ever-present electronics. Increasingly, the future looks flat.

Amos Zeeberg of The New York Times takes a look at the wide world of super-thin materials, a growing class of substances that have the potential to reshape humanity's technological capabilities.

The materials include graphene, an incredibly strong and conductive "2-D form of carbon" that can be used to create electronics, including fast-charging batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. Other materials, like molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), can be embedded within concrete to create stress sensors or "painted" on to surfaces to, for example, convert table tops into battery charging membranes.

"Increasingly," as Zeeberg puts it, "the future looks flat."

IKEA ramps up smart home product development plan

2019-08-23T14:00:00-04:00

IKEA Home smart was initiated as a project in 2012 with the ambition to enrich life at home by incorporating digital elements and technologies into products and solutions. Several launches within the smart home has followed since then and now IKEA has taken the strategic decision to invest even more in the home smart area by establishing IKEA Home smart as its own business unit within IKEA of Sweden.

Björn Block, the Head of the new Ikea Home smart Business Unit said, in a recent press release: "At IKEA we want to continue to offer products for a better life at home for the many people going forward. In order to do so we need to explore products and solutions beyond conventional home furnishing."

IKEA is quickly establishing itself as a contender in the smart home space, challenging contenders such as Amazon and Google. They have chosen to pursue heavier investment in product development and collaboration with their digital partners. The company hopes to intensify this "digital transformation" in the coming years.

How the data collected by dockless bikes can be useful for cities (and hackers)

2018-10-05T14:37:00-04:00

In the 18 months or so since dockless bike-share arrived in the US, the service has spread to at least 88 American cities. (On the provider side, at least 10 companies have jumped into the business; Lime is one of the largest.) Some of those cities now have more than a year of data related to the programs, and they’ve started gleaning insights and catering to the increased number of cyclists on their streets.

Technology Review writer Elizabeth Woyke looks at ways how city planners in Seattle, WA and South Bend, IN use the immense stream of user-generated location data from dockless-bike-sharing programs to improve urban mobility — and how hackers could potentially access and abuse this (supposedly anonymous) information. "In theory, the fact that people can park dockless bikes outside their exact destinations could make it easier for someone who hacked into the data to decode the anonymous identities that companies assign their users," Woyke writes.

Amazon buys into the (Alexa-powered) prefab housing market

2018-09-26T13:32:00-04:00

Amazon has made clear that it wants to own the smart home space. Now the company's going a step further, taking a stake in a start-up that's building actual homes. On Tuesday, Amazon said its Alexa Fund invested in Plant Prefab, a Southern California company that says it uses sustainable construction processes and materials to build prefabricated custom single- and multifamily houses. The start-up is aiming to use automation to build homes faster and bring down costs.

With this recent investment in eco-friendly prefabricated home factory Plant Prefab, Amazon uses its mighty financial leverage and dominance in the market for voice-controlled connected devices to make the brand just as synonymous with smart homes as it already is with online retail.

Plant Prefab, headquartered in Rialto, California, offers standard and custom prefab homes in collaboration with established design partners, including Ray Kappe, KieranTimberlake, and LivingHomes.

Why 'smart homes' aren't really that smart yet

2018-09-14T15:38:00-04:00

Today you can have a fully connected home complete with sensors to monitor temperature, humidity, air quality, energy usage, and more, and check in on almost any appliance from anywhere in the world with just a smartphone. But even with all of the various connected appliances, virtual assistants, and copious sensors that can be installed in a modern smart home, the “smart” side of things is still rather lacking.

The Verge senior editor Dan Seifert asks: Wouldn't it be cool if my home could figure everything out on its own?

Considering the downsides of Smart Home technologies

2017-08-17T14:52:00-04:00

Essey is an engineer at Uber and an early adopter of the Internet of things. He can control his lights with his Amazon Echo or an array of touchpad sensors he has installed throughout the home. Sensors tell him when there's water in the basement or a leak under the sink. While Essey's setup might sound a little like science fiction, it's a prototype of the future. Some critics are worried these devices won't be secure and that companies will use them to spy on us to make money.

As the Internet of things becomes more ingrained in our daily lives, some people are turning ordinary homes into smart homes. One way of doing that is by integrating smart appliances (dishwasher, fridges, microwaves, toasters, etc). That strategy, however, can be expensive and not very efficient, since most of the devices are costly and often are not smart enough to communicate with each other, especially if produced by different manufacturers.

The other way is to get sensors, and put them on everything you want to monitor. "But then those get really unwieldy and you've got all these things sticking around and they look ugly and socially obtrusive," Gierad Laput, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University says. Laput and his team, in fact, built such a sensor. When plugged into the wall, the 2-inch-square circuit board senses about a dozen different facets of its environment: vibrations, sounds, light color and so on. The sensor communicates wirelessly with a computer, which inte...

Mark Zuckerberg unveils a home operating AI app called "Jarvis"

2016-12-20T14:05:00-05:00

At last, somebody understands Mark Zuckerberg, and it's an artificial intelligence app that speaks with the wisdom and patience of Morgan Freeman. Partially an internet of things melded with a changeable, celebrity-cameo Siri (Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a brief aural appearance), Zuckerberg's home-running app Jarvis is demonstrated by the inventor himself in the video below.

Facebook in the news:

University of Miami School of Architecture helps to create a new Smart City in the Yucatan Peninsula

2016-09-02T16:07:00-04:00

The project, which is being designed by UM SoA’s Responsive Architecture and Design Lab (RAD-UM Lab), will be built next to the Yucatán Science and Technology Park (YSTP), established by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. RAD-UM Lab specializes in technology-based designing and the “internet of things,” everyday objects that can collect data and connect to modern tech.

The University of Miami School of Architecture continues to experiment in the realm of responsive architecture, this time at an urban scale. Zenciti is a proposed "smart city" to be located in the Yucatan Peninsula where the gathering of data will play a prominent role. Information technology will be embedded into the inner workings and infrastructure of the project allowing for potential opportunities to monitor urban issues such as traffic patterns, transportation, pollution levels, and energy consumption. Smart City models are curently in use in Europe with examples such as Amsterdam and Barcelona. Zenciti has the potential to be one the first examples in Latin America.

This initative is a collaboration between the University of Miami's School of Architecture, Center for Computational Science, and College of Engineering, as well as the Yucatan State Government’s Information Technologies Innovation Cente. The UMSoA has aggressively been expanding research into responsive arch...

What problems are really being solved by today's tech innovations?

2016-08-03T12:43:00-04:00

We are overloaded daily with new discoveries, patents and inventions all promising a better life, but that better life has not been forthcoming for most. In fact, the bulk of the above list targets a very specific (and tiny!) slice of the population. As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do.

Last year Allison Arieff served as a juror on our competition, Dry Futures. Revisit some of the winners of the competition:

And check out an interview with Arieff here:

Meet the jury of Archinect's "Dry Futures" competition: Allison Arieff of SPUR

Are we losing the cyberwar?

2016-06-16T18:09:00-04:00

There are simply too many ways for an attacker to get into your computer now. If you log on to the office network with a smartphone, or if you carry a laptop between work and home..you make it very easy for intruders to enter the office network [..] With Wi-Fi hot spots, which can be easy to tap into, popping up everywhere, and with ever more network-enabled devices entering both the office and the home—smart TVs, smart front-door locks—intruders have a panoply of ways to break into your life.

"Looming darkly over this almost Mordorian cyber threatscape is the prospect of cyber war—a future conflict fought with weaponized code that can do physical damage to infrastructure, and potentially kill people."

According to this New Yorker article, cybersecurity experts look back fondly on the days of computer viruses. The real problem now is cybercrime – and it's increasingly becoming an IRL threat as well, as we make "smart" everything from our houses to our cars to our lightbulbs.

This month, Archinect's coverage includes a special thematic focus on Privacy. For more on the ways that technology is changing our notions of privacy and security, check out some recent articles:

Do you have projects that grapple with cha...

NSA exploring data collection from Internet of Things, including biomedical devices

2016-06-14T18:29:00-04:00

The National Security Agency is researching opportunities to collect foreign intelligence — including the possibility of exploiting internet-connected biomedical devices like pacemakers, according to a senior official. [...] When asked if the entire scope of the Internet of Things — billions of interconnected devices — would be “a security nightmare or a signals intelligence bonanza,” [Richard Ledgett, the NSA’s deputy director] replied, “Both.”

For more on the world of the Internet of Things, check out these links:

This month, Archinect's coverage includes a special thematic focus, Privacy. Have projects that grapple with how city data and other new modes of urbanism have changed our notion of privacy? Submit to our open call by Sunday, June 19.

Don't get smart with me: reassessing the "Internet of Things" in the home

2015-08-13T19:30:00-04:00

By the end of this year, some 20 million households in the U.S. will have some form of smart-home device, double the number in 2012 [...] But some homeowners find themselves frustrated by the proliferation of smart-home technology. They complain of complex systems for once-simple tasks like turning on the light, “learning algorithms” that get their preferences wrong and systems that simply go on the fritz too often.

Enlisting the Internet of Things against California's historic drought

2015-07-02T20:58:00-04:00

[...] the drought is a gusher for a growing number of tech startups in the emerging world of the Internet of Things, the buzzy term for the trend of connecting devices and data in the physical realm to the Internet. Getting more sensors into the environment will help thousands of farms, businesses and cities figure out where water is going and how it can be diverted for the most efficient use. Agriculture is the area most ripe for collecting more and higher-quality data.

Map Plots the World's Internet Devices

2014-09-02T17:17:00-04:00

A map showing the location of every single device connected to the Internet. The image was created by John Matherly, founder of Shodan, a search engine for connected devices. He pinged every device online, then mapped the location of the ones that responded [...]

Traffic Lights are Easy to Hack

2014-08-20T18:26:00-04:00

In a paper published this month, the researchers describe how they very simply and very quickly seized control of an entire system of almost 100 intersections in an unnamed Michigan city from a single ingress point. The exercise was conducted on actual stoplights deployed at live intersections [...] As is typical in large urban areas, the traffic lights in the subject city are networked ... allowing them to pass information to and receive instruction from a central management point.

Hackers Present Threat to Internet of Things

2014-08-08T13:16:00-04:00

A hacker with a smartphone can unlock your front door [...] Criminals and intelligence agencies grab data from your home thermostat to plan robberies or track your movements. According to computer-security researchers, this is the troubling future of the Internet of Things, the term for an all-connected world where appliances like thermostats, health-tracking wristbands, smart cars and medical devices communicate with people and each other through the Internet.

Engineers Develop No-power WiFi Connections

2014-08-04T19:35:00-04:00

...University of Washington engineers have designed a new communication system that uses radio frequency signals as a power source and reuses existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to provide Internet connectivity to these devices. Called Wi-Fi backscatter, this technology is the first that can connect battery-free devices to Wi-Fi infrastructure.

Google announces new forays into smart homes at I/O

2014-06-25T20:36:00-04:00

Opening the Nest platform to outside developers will allow Google to move into the emerging market for connected, smart home devices. Experts expect that this so-called "Internet of Things" phenomenon will change the way people use technology in much the same way that smartphones have changed life since the introduction of Apple's iPhone seven years ago.

When 'Smart Homes' Get Hacked: I Haunted A Complete Stranger's House Via The Internet

2013-07-30T13:04:00-04:00

“I can see all of the devices in your home and I think I can control them,” I said to Thomas Hatley, a complete stranger in Oregon who I had rudely awoken with an early phone call on a Thursday morning. He and his wife were still in bed. Expressing surprise, he asked me to try to turn the master bedroom lights on and off. Sitting in my living room in San Francisco, I flipped the light switch with a click, and resisted the Poltergeist-like temptation to turn the television on as well.