Special Features - Virtual London

Virtual London
(20/03/07)

Virtual London: a digital model of Stratford in London. (Image from the British Council)

Fly from the Tower of London to Big Ben without leaving your desk.

With planning underway for the 2012 London Olympics and a population that's expected to expand by no less than a million over the next decade, the Virtual London project has arrived.

3D digital model

It's a digital virtual reality simulation of London designed to involve planning professionals and ordinary Londoners alike in the process of shaping London's future. It's also a fun way to take a digital tour of the city!

Virtual London is an impressive computer model which depicts every building in the Greater London area in three dimensions. The model was created by the team at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London.

Monitoring air pollution and flooding

CASA director, Professor Michael Batty, explains the importance of the model "for monitoring things like air pollution and flooding and to look at planning schemes for the impact of high buildings. Anything involving change to the city can be recorded in the model to produce a simulation of what would happen in reality".

Advanced mapping

Professor Batty describes how Virtual London is built using the latest Geographic Information System (GIS): "The data has two sources. One is the Ordnance Survey's MasterMap providing details of every building in the UK. Then, to get the buildings in 3D, we use information collected by aircraft which fly across the area pointing a laser beam (Lidar) on the buildings below.

"When the laser beam hits the top of the building it records the height from the ground. We tag this height information on to the Ordnance Survey map. We can then paste photographs on to the buildings to fill in their features."

Digital panoramas

Batty continues: "We embed digital panoramas within the model to give users a greater sense of what places look like. As you're navigating in the model, when you get to a globe you can enter and view the panorama."

Neighbourhood watch

Google Earth has made it possible for CASA to devise a system where ordinary people view and update their own neighbourhoods. The next challenge is to make it accessible to a whole range of different audiences.

There's also a commercial use and Professor Batty predicts that "Virtual London would be a good way to attract new businesses to an area, enabling them to find out what the place is like before they actually relocate."

By 2012 visitors to the Olympics should be able to take a detailed digital tour of London before they even arrive.