Our Relations with the Urban Environment May Soon Change

People who have had at least marginal contact with Google Maps, or Yahoo Maps, among other similar applications, will have an easy time getting accustomed to seeing their cities from above, but this time in 3D. The technology is not new, but plans are to transform it considerably, in the sense that users will soon be able to interact with their own cities at levels never thought possible before. The goal is to construct accurate 3D representations of human settlement, which would enable experts to better manage the cities, and their traits, NewScientist reports.

Three-dimensional maps could turn out to be a great tool that city planners could use to better manage existing spaces in the city. The relationships we have with our urban environment could therefore see a significant paradigm shift, experts say. “Everyone is now familiar with 3D maps, we're trying to take them beyond simple visualization,” explains the effort Glen Hart. The expert is head of research at the Ordnance Survey (OS), which is the Southampton-based mapping agency of the UK government.

In an attempt to make the technology more popular, the scientist says, the city of Bournemouth, a coastal resort in the United Kingdom, has probably become the best mapped place on the entire planet. Using a laser-based method known as Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR), experts assessed the height, width and depth of all buildings, trees and other structures in the town, both from the ground and from the air, producing accurate 3D maps of the entire city. According to OS, more than 700 million points are included in the representations, which also incorporate data from traditional aerial surveys, to paint the landscape in its colors.

The technique is also a lot more accurate than the one employed in Google Maps, for example. The new representations have a resolution of about 4 centimeters on all three axes, whereas the popular map program only has a 15-meter resolution. “It's almost what you'd see if you flew around the area,” Hart explains. “Now it's not just buildings, but floors within the building that could be annotated. Insurance companies, among others, might be interested to know which businesses work on which floor to assess flooding risk,” he concludes.