Archinect - News

Abu Dhabi unveils emirate-wide digital twin project

2022-10-19T09:00:00-04:00

Abu Dhabi’s Department of Municipalities and Transport (DMT) has announced the launch of a digital twin project, a first-of-its-kind initiative for the emirate capital.

The undertaking was unveiled during GITEX Technology Week, a tech and startup event held in the Dubai World Trade Center, which ended last week. The project will integrate a range of advanced technology, including aerial photography, LiDAR scanning, and game engines to create an accurate digital copy of Abu Dhabi, supporting the work of planners, engineers, and specialists from the public and private sectors. The aim is to simulate changes to the city’s built environment in 3D and evaluate vast amounts of data. For example, spatial analysis tools will assist in analyzing the impacts of various urban planning scenarios.

The emirate’s buildings, infrastructure, and even interior spaces will be made virtual to improve planning a...

Ancient settlements discovered in the Amazon using LIDAR technology

2022-05-27T16:49:00-04:00

Mysterious mounds in the southwest corner of the Amazon Basin were once the site of ancient urban settlements, scientists have discovered. Using a remote-sensing technology to map the terrain from the air, they found that, starting about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centres, featuring 22-metre-tall earthen pyramids, that were encircled by kilometres of elevated roadways.

According to archaeologists, this is the first clear evidence that urban societies existed in this part of the Amazon Basin, a region that was long believed to have only been wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. Researchers had previously thought that all Amazonians lived in small, nomadic tribes that had little impact on their surrounding environment due to the lack of nutrient-rich soil required to support large-scale agriculture. However, more recent findings suggested the presence of man-made patches of domesticated plants and adequate soil. And, in 2018, archaeologists discovered hundreds of large, geometric mounds, uncovered due to deforestation, that hinted at potential organized societies.

To investigate further, a research team employed LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), in which they flew a helicopter equipped with the technology over six areas previously occupied by the Casarabe people, who first appeared around A.D. 500. The undertaking revealed the size and sh...

Forensic Architecture has been named a 2022 Peabody Award winner

2022-03-30T18:30:00-04:00

The activist community can rejoice today on the news that groundbreaking London-based collective Forensic Architecture (FA) has been given an Institutional Peabody Award for its continued public service and contributions to electronic media.

The group was cited for their work documenting the use of Israeli spyware called Pegasus, the ongoing exhibition Cloud Studies, and myriad investigations into police brutality, war crimes, surveillance culture, environmental racism, and the illegal occupation of Palestine.

FA’s use of various forms of data, 3D visualization technology, photogrammetry, lidar, and citizen videos was likewise commended for its innovation and incorporation into what the awards jury deemed “sophisticated architectural techniques.”

The twelve-year-old group founded by Israeli academic Eyal Weizman is coming off of another banner year in which its pursu...

MIT develops interactive digital environment to understand Brazil’s favelas

2021-04-26T18:47:00-04:00

The MIT Senseable City Lab has unveiled their “Favelas 4D” project, dedicated to mapping the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using 3D laser scanning technology to analyze the urban landscape of Rocinha, the project seeks to understand and quantify the architectural logic of one of Brazil’s famous informal settlements.

Brazil’s favelas consist of dense, multilayered, informal settlements that dot the hills of large cities such as Rio de Janeiro; their urban chaos contrasting starkly with the planned neighborhoods surrounding them. This spatial complexity makes the favelas a difficult terrain for typical open-source mapping tools such as satellite imagery and Google Street View, leaving much of their labyrinthine cityscapes unmapped and misunderstood.

Favelas 4D. Image: MIT Senseable City Lab

On the importance of mapping these informal settlements, the MIT team explains; “The global trend of urbanization is not limited to shining downtown districts and masterplanned developm...

New Google Arts & Culture initiative documents the threat of climate change to Unesco World Heritage sites

2020-02-06T16:14:00-05:00

Google Arts & Culture has launched a new online initiative calling attention to five Unesco World Heritage sites under threat from climate change. The Heritage on the Edge series reveals how rising sea levels, coastal erosion and extreme weather patterns are endangering landmarks across the world [...].

The five threatened Unesco World Heritage sites featured in the online Heritage on the Edge exhibit are Easter Island's iconic moai statues of Rapa Nui; the Old and New Towns of Scotland's capital Edinburgh; the flood-prone mosque city of Bagerhat in Bangladesh; Tanzania's port city of Kilwa Kisiwani endangered by coastal erosion; and the pre-Columbian adobe metropolis of Chan Chan, Peruvian at risk of drought and storms.

Image via Heritage on the Edge

"Above all, the project is a call to action," writes Professor Dr. Toshiyuki Kono, President of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, in a recent Google blog post. "Heritage on the Edge collects stories of loss, but also of hope and resilience. They remind us that all our cultural heritage, including these iconic World Heritage Sites, are more than just tourist destinations. They are places of great national, spiritual and cultural significance."

Heritage on the Edge. Video via Google Arts & Culture on YouTube.

"The realit...

Artificial Intelligence helps mapping urban trees (all of them)

2019-01-07T14:19:00-05:00

To train the model, he identified known locations of tree canopy using lidar data and NAIP imagery over California. Using that as ground truth, the model was trained to classify which pixels contain trees in the corresponding satellite images. The result is a machine-learning model that has learned to identify trees just using four-band high-resolution (~1 meter) satellite or aerial imagery—no lidar required!

Former New York Times cartographer Tim Wallace describes how his current firm, Santa Fe-based Descartes Labs, has built a machine learning model to identify tree canopy from satellite imagery thus making accurate mapping of trees and urban forests far more accessible to cities worldwide.

San Francisco Open Forest Map tree inventory (point data) in comparison with the Descartes Labs tree canopy layer (image data). Image: Tim Wallace/Descartes Labs

"The ability to map tree canopy at a such a high resolution in areas that can’t be easily reached on foot would be helpful for utility companies to pinpoint encroachment issues—or for municipalities to find possible trouble spots beyond their official tree census (if they even have one)," writes Wallace. "But by zooming out to a city level, patterns in the tree canopy show off urban greenspace quirks. For example, unexpected tree deserts can be identified and neighborhoods that would most benefit from a surge of saplings revealed."

New York...

This AI-powered & LiDAR-equipped robot could soon help detect construction errors early

2018-02-23T15:39:00-05:00

Using lidar-equipped robots, Doxel scans construction sites every day to monitor how things are progressing, tracking what gets installed and whether it’s the right thing at the right time in the right place. You’d think that construction sites would be doing this by themselves anyway, but it turns out that they really don’t, and in a recent pilot study on a medical office building, Doxel says it managed to increase labor productivity on the project by a staggering 38 percent.

"You could send in some humans with lidar backpacks, but that would be more expensive," IEEE Spectrum explains. "The company is also using drones in a limited capacity right now, since they require human supervision, but it’s easy to imagine how much more efficient this process could get as robotic autonomy improves."

Laser scans uncover thousands of ancient Mayan structures

2018-02-05T14:06:00-05:00

In what’s being hailed as a “major breakthrough” in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala. Using a revolutionary technology known as LiDAR (short for “Light Detection And Ranging”), scholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the now-unpopulated landscape [...]

Discovering a lost civilization with cutting-edge technology

2017-01-02T13:57:00-05:00

Entering the ruins was a disappointment. If the Mosquitia jungle were superimposed on Times Square, the foliage would be so thick that you would have no inkling you were in the midst of a city. Even standing at the base of an earthen pyramid in the central plaza of T1, surrounded by earthworks, terracing, and mounds, I had not the slightest idea that this was the main public space of what had once been a thriving city of thousands. Only through technology did we know our location in the ruins.

Douglas Preston discusses exploring an ancient city left untouched in the jungles of Honduras and rediscovered with LIDAR technology. The city was abandoned around 1500, devastated not by direct contact with Europeans but rather with the diseases they carried:

This inferno of contagion destroyed thousands of societies and millions of people, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, from California to New England, from the Amazon rain forest to the tundra of Hudson Bay. It was the greatest catastrophe ever to befall the human species. The death of T1 was but one tile in this vast mosaic of annihilation.

Archaeologists discover hidden ancient cities in Cambodia, some as big as Phnom Penh

2016-06-13T16:07:00-04:00

Archaeologists in Cambodia have found multiple, previously undocumented medieval cities not far from the ancient temple city of Angkor Wat...Some experts believe that the recently analysed data – captured in 2015 during the most extensive airborne study ever undertaken by an archaeological project, covering 734 sq miles (1,901 sq km) – shows that the colossal, densely populated cities would have constituted the largest empire on earth at the time of its peak in the 12th century.

“That survey uncovered an array of discoveries, including elaborate water systems that were built hundreds of years before historians believed the technology existed. The findings are expected to challenge theories on how the Khmer empire developed, dominated the region, and declined around the 15th century, and the role of climate change and water management in that process.”

"In LiDAR We Trust" – Poking the subconscious of autonomous vehicles with special guest Geoff Manaugh, on Archinect Sessions #43

2015-11-19T17:34:00-05:00

Long-time Archinector and BLDGBLOG-runner Geoff Manaugh joins us on the podcast this week to discuss his piece on "The Dream Life of Driverless Cars" for the New York Times Magazine. Referencing work like that of London-based design studio, ScanLAB Projects, who use LiDAR (light + radar) technology to map how autonomous vehicles see and understand the built environment, Manaugh spoke with us about how these vehicles could potentially change the structures and sensations of our cities – and all the unknowns that accompany such speculation.

We also briefly touch on the recent news of Philadelphia becoming an UNESCO World Heritage site; the first city in the U.S. to receive such status. This episode is sponsored by BQE's ArchiOffice.

Listen to episode 43 of Archinect Sessions, "In LiDAR We Trust":

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