Computer Map Giving Planners Visions for a New L.A.
Remember the movie “Disclosure,” in which Michael Douglas walks into a three-dimensional virtual reality contraption to dig up information on his sinister boss?
Bill Jepson, the director of UCLA’s urban simulation team, remembers--and snorts at what he considers a crude vision.
He may well be entitled to his derision.
Jepson, 49, has spent the last three years pioneering a striking three-dimensional computerized map of Los Angeles. The map allows a viewer to “walk,” “drive” or “fly” above the streets while reading the graffiti, “for rent” signs and movie marquees--or to even “walk” in off the sidewalk and “view” the paintings on the walls of a building lobby.
Jepson and a staff of six have slowly mapped out 20 square miles of Los Angeles, with six more years of work required to map out the city’s major commercial areas.
So far, the majority of his clients have been developers using simulations to examine their proposed developments. The simulator has also been used to re-create ancient Rome’s Forum of Trajan at the new Getty Center.
Jepson’s computer program, loosely derived from a NASA program intended to help Neil Armstrong train for his first moonwalk in 1969, has been financed by about $300,000 a year in government grants and private contracts.
True, the simulation lacks subtlety. A simulated Pershing Square, for example, has no waterfall, pedestrians look like robots, cars sometimes loom as large as buildings and street noise is noticeably absent.
What remains, however, is a three-dimensional perspective that changes at about 30 frames per second. One click of the computer mouse can instantly “grow” 10-year-old palm trees. Another click can change the street’s feel by replacing the palms with pines or oaks. Yet another click can show how a new building might look with different kinds of brickwork.
To build his program, Jepson has his mostly student staff photograph targeted areas, to which he “tiles on” aerial photos taken largely for insurance purposes after the Northridge quake, and now available through a CD-ROM. The resulting simulation is one of buildings--and entire blocks--that can be viewed from any angle.
David Allison, curator of information technology at the Smithsonian Institution, called programs like Jepson’s “a major innovation in applying technology to society; undoubtedly, the wave of the future.”
Allison said such simulations are increasingly being used not only in architecture and urban planning, but in visualizing the movements of air masses and in weather reporting. Simulations are also being used to visualize explosions and the movement of shock waves, as well as how moving parts fit together in machinery, cars and aircraft, he said.
“This is much larger scale than anyone else has done,” said Michael Zyda, professor of computer science at the U.S. military’s Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey. “It pushes the edge of the available computer graphics hardware.”
The work is tedious. A UCLA staffer will spend about 40 hours re-creating a single city block. Undeveloped areas take substantially less time.
Ask Jepson about the future, and he will say he envisions a fire captain coordinating firefighting personnel without ever leaving the office, “seeing” through the smoke into a burning structure--how many floors it has, how the hallways run, which businesses are on what floor and whether any pose special fire hazards.
Similarly, hooked into a car’s built-in CD-ROM, the simulator could lay out a “red carpet” showing a lost driver the proper route to his or her destination. Not only would the program show where to turn, as some programs already do; it would show the landmarks along the way, including, say, the gas station on the left corner on which to turn.
The Getty Museum’s curator of antiquities, Marion True, said the museum was attracted to Jepson’s system because “we saw a chance to use this extraordinary technology to reconstruct the Forum,” which includes a huge open plaza and law court, two libraries, a central column and a temple.
Before the simulation, she said, a visitor might view an isolated remaining column and fail to grasp why the Forum of Trajan, which is near the Roman Forum, was considered “a major innovation in Roman architecture, extraordinarily influential in urban planning throughout the Empire.” The simulation on a movie theater screen “re-creates the ancient urban environment so that a visitor can walk through it and feel what it was like to be in the middle of it all,” even gazing at the polished marble from the emperor’s private quarries, she said.
The simulation is so extraordinary, she said, that Roman museum officials have inquired about establishing a similar exhibit in Rome.
Developer Ira Smedra, who owns several key properties in Westwood Village, said the simulations helped him discover a flaw in plans for the main plaza.
*
“We saw that the original location of the escalators interrupted the flow of [a proposed] pedestrian plaza. We also saw that by moving the escalators to the far end, we were able to achieve a nice, open feeling,” he said.
Smedra moved the escalators.
He was also able to “look” out windows and find that they were unexpectedly blocked, then modify the buildings to reopen those views.
Chuck Kanner, president of Kanner Architects, who has worked on plans to develop Westwood, called the simulation “the difference between looking at a [still] picture of a building, and a motion picture of it.”
But Kanner said the program “lacks spirit. It doesn’t have enough memory to get all the little details of the fountains and the people and the tiles and the things that bring a project to life. . . . It fools you because it looks so real--but it’s still kind of cold.”
Jepson has heard this all before. He says that within the next few years he plans to add memory for 3-D sound, to get his humanoids to move less like robots, and to even develop more realistic crowd scenes.
