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	Visualising Landscape Changes

Future Landscapes
For Ed Morgan, applying his expertise in visualisation and terrain-modeling tools for game developers, to the world of landscape architecture was an obvious step. His company, Deliverance Software, has created an Augmented Reality iPhone app that allows the user to see a proposed change to the landscape. Just point the screen of an iPhone in the direction of the landscape to see how it will look in the future. So far the AR app has been used as part of the planning application to build a new park in the heart of Sheffield, which has walls that can act as flood defences.

Morgan and his team approached Professor Lange, at the Landscape Department at the University of Sheffield, with their ideas. A six-month knowledge transfer period followed to allow their students to use Deliverance’s software and streamline it for use with landscape applications. Now part of his development workload is a university project, investigating urban river regeneration called Urban River Corridors and Sustainable Living Agendas (URSULA). This collaboration allows him to test his software and produce models, which are validating the software in the context of landscape visualisation.

Walk about
The landscape visualisation software, WalkAbout3d, is closely aligned to Google’s SketchUp, a popular 3D modelling tool in the architectural industry. Morgan explains that his software uniquely recognises the user’s location and allows you to bring SketchUp models in to WalkAbout3d’s terrain model. The benefit you get, he describes is ‘a real sense of what a future scenario could be like as you walk through it in real time. Also, we’ve produced the ability to output to a mobile device, which is the iPhone, or any smartphone. From those models you can get the real feel of what landscape changes will look like while you are at the location.’

Taking a picture with black iPhone 3GS © Tuomas Kujansuu - iStockphoto

Broader uses
Morgan sees his work increasingly move towards smart mobile devices. ‘We’ve been working on new versions,’ he explains, ‘to produce these complex landscape visualisation models. Getting those finished will be our focus for the next few months. More generally, these visualisation models can be tailored towards sustainability assessment but as accurate representations of future landscape scenarios. That gives them a very broad range of uses.’

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