Cadalyst - October 2008 - (Page 14)

techtrends By Kenneth Wong SimCity for Real Combining CAD, GIS, and gaming, CommunityViz lets planners and residents see the future in 3D. I n the published meeting minutes of zoning commissions and planning committees across the country, one software program’s name keeps showing up. In May 2008, Matt Noonkester from Kimley-Horn & Associates, a land planning consultancy, went before the Technical Coordinating Committee of the Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization to explain the use of a specific geographic information systems (GIS) solution for the tricounty transportation and land use study. The software selected was CommunityViz, which Noonkester predicted would “become the new socioeconomic software data platform.” In July 2006, Alex Weinhagen, director of planning and zoning for Hinesburg, Vermont, told the local planning commission that he believed CommunityViz could “help [the commission] develop visual representations of possible rezoning options for the village growth project.” The same software made cameo appearances in the Missoula County Open Lands Citizen’s Advisory Committee meeting in March 2008 and the Eureka Township Envisioning Task Force meeting way back in August 2001. CommunityViz is a set of extensions for ArcGIS, a family of GIS solutions from ESRI. Currently priced at $750 per seat, CommunityViz won’t likely raise the eyebrows of many who hold the purse strings. With the software’s dynamic maps, charts, and 3D models, planners and developers can produce GIS-based simulated landscapes that are accessible to the council and committee members who might be unfamiliar with GIS. By displaying the future scenarios in 3D, users can show the decision makers, for instance, the number of new homes and schools they would need to build in the next five years or the effect that a series of shopping malls would have on the natural environment. If desired, you can even use CommunityViz to help them determine if they can collect enough taxes ESRI to pay for the projects. www.esri.com Alex Miller, president The Orton Family Foundation of ESRI Canada, called www.orton.org CommunityViz “SimCity for real.” And the comPlaceways www.placeways.com parison to the popular computer-based, cityTerraCognito GIS simulation game is spot www.terracog.com on. The next release, The Vermont Country Store CommunityViz v4 — www.vermontcountrystore.com slated for this fall — 14 Figure 1. In CommunityViz, a planner can adjust assumptions to compare differing opinions or values. The dynamic charts provide up-to-date results based on dozens or hundreds of impact indicators. is expected to feature a new 3D component called Scenario 3D, based on OGRE 3D, an open source C++ scene-rendering engine designed for computer games. Orton Family Legacy The origin of CommunityViz can be traced back to The Vermont Country Store in Weston, a small town nestled in a valley and buttressed by the Green Mountains. Here, in a community of roughly 600 residents, Lyman Orton and his three sons run the family store, still standing on Main Street today as it did when his parents, Vrest and Ellen Orton, opened its doors in 1946. Today, the original store is the physical flagship of a mail order catalog and online retail business. Orton and his neighbor Noel Fritzinger had long participated in community planning, so in 1995, the two established the Orton Family Foundation as a resource for small cities and towns trying to cope with the socioeconomic changes in the region. Profits from the store support the foundation. As they began the search for tools to help them answer some of the most fundamental questions about land use, the men had the forethought to bank on technology. During the next eight years, they invested in the development of a 3D geospatial tool that would later become CommunityViz v1. Eventually, setting its sight on financial sustainability, the foundation transferred the sales, support, www.cadalyst.com cadalyst October 2008 http://www.esri.com http://www.orton.org http://www.placeways.com http://www.terracog.com http://www.vermontcountrystore.com http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - October 2008

Cadalyst - October 2008 Contents Editor’s Window Cad Central SimCity for Real Designs Spring to Life — 3D Publishing Tools Make File Sharing as Easy as Opening a Book Xi MTower 2P64X — Dual Quad-Core Workstation ArchiCAD 12 — BIM Software Dell Precision M6300 — High-End Mobile Workstation Cad Manager Mcad Modeling Aec Insight Cad Cartoon Issue Indexes Hot Tip Harry

Cadalyst - October 2008

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