>> Thank you very much, Ken. And good afternoon, everyone.
Our project at Cornell is less than a year old,
but we have made a lot of progress.
We are trying to bring real-time experiential design
to urban design and city making.
As you know, urban design, the urban design process,
basically, has two parts to it.
There are the space-making players,
consist of architects, planners, engineers,
who make the buildings and roads,
just, you know, the infrastructure,
the landscape architects do all the landscape.
And then there is a place-making team
that tries to use visualization, narratives,
and other means to create spatial experiences
that would be enjoyed by the users of the city.
Those two parts form a paradigm,
and those two paradigms are really quite,
quite separate from each other.
Each paradigm has developed its own history, content,
and workflows.
The space-making paradigm generally involves
digital systems that make these urban spaces.
And the place-making ones actually focused
on how we experience the city, and how we navigate the city,
the types of narratives that we create
when we move through cities.
Typically, the space-makers dominate the process,
when in actual fact, cities, like architecture are experienced.
So, our job at Cornell is to try to bring the two together.
These are the two paradigms,
and this is the way in which they relate right now.
You have the abstractions and the concepts,
and then you have the visualization.
We think the two have to come
in some sort of symbiotic relationship with each other,
and also inform the process as we move through
with the design of the city.
And we talk a lot about, you know, big data.
I mean, if you are designing whole cities,
or even portions of cities,
you are dealing with massive amounts of information.
So, trying to bring these things together is quite a challenge.
And we want to do it,
not by importing works from DCC software into Unreal,
but actually working in tandem with Unreal.
So, previously we have done this using gaming engines
in an immersive cave at Cornell, but lately we have realized
that Unreal Engine has so much more power
that we can move it beyond the cave
and use much more distributed systems of immersion
in virtual reality.
So, what we have done is looked for two things.
The first is a platform that is capable of doing
the space-making in urban design.
And we have settled on CityEngine
as a very powerful system that can do the job.
And then we also look for a very powerful platform
that can do the real-time experiential work,
which naturally is Unreal Engine.
I think it is totally unsurpassed
in terms of its capabilities.
And then we put a team together to develop
an interface between the two.
The team comprises faculty at Cornell,
students, graduates, and upper-class students,
and also industry partners.
We have partners from FX collaborative, KPF,
HOK, Shock, and we all work together
to try to define the types of flows that we want,
and also the tools that we will need to do this project.
So, I am going to play you a little video clip,
short one, in which the partners discuss what they are doing,
and then I will play you two clips
of what we are trying to do with the software.
>> One of the exciting things about this project for us
in working with both a leading academic institution in Cornell,
and Epic, one of the leaders in virtual reality technology,
to really be on the forefront
of developing workflows and technology
that will impact both academia and the industry.
There is a disconnect between how we design
and how we represent it.
And virtual reality has been a way
to always better represent what we have designed,
but we have yet to actually design in this.
So, this is solving a disconnect
between the abstraction and representation.
>> In the VR environment, we are really hoping
that these new sets of tools will allow us to collaboratively
be in that environment together,
make those changes, and in real-time,
understand what those design moves experientially feel like,
therefore accelerating the decision-making process.
The first iteration of this tool
is looking at bringing in parametric buildings from ESRI
into the Unreal Engine
that you can collaboratively adjust,
and in real-time, understand what those changes
in the urban environment will feel like.
>> The research that we do in the lab
focuses on environmental modeling tools,
such as outdoor comfort, indoor comfort,
energy use in buildings, daylight in buildings.
And in connection with VR, we can bring the data
that these tools produce into an environment
that can be experienced by the designer,
but also by the potential clients,
or the potential urban dwellers.
And getting that kind of feedback loop together,
I think, is really critical to designing
these kind of urban environments.
>> With VR, we are able to reconnect the hand,
the mind, and the eye,
but within three-dimensional space.
We are no longer dealing with the interface of the screen
and the interface of the keyboard,
but actually able to directly interact
with a particular environment through the hands.
>> The students are really excited.
They are curious to kind of explore the technology
and its potentials. I think they clearly understand
that this dramatically changes the way we design,
and finally they have everything together in one place
to explore kind of where the boundaries are,
and how we can develop them further.
>> Yeah, so those are the partners we are working on the team.
Next, we founded a studio in which we are looking at
using these tools to design the city,
but from the bottoms up.
Normally, city design is done with master
planning from the top down.
We are starting from the bottoms up,
because that is the way in which cities really get experienced.
So, the two clips you will be seeing
are designs of existing streets.
They took almost, I would say, about four hours to do,
each one, and the students have actually modeled the streets,
walked through them, brought them into Twinmotion.
They don't rush and all the pizazz to make the place-making.
And then gone in, and are now modifying the designs.
So, let us take a look at the first one.
It is in Vienna. The idea behind this
is that cities start with links and places.
Links are streets, places are your plazas and public spaces.
So, this is an example of the modeling process.
And we are able to do this very quickly.
That is the whole idea.
We do not spend days and weeks on them,
we do them in an afternoon.
And the next one is a street in the oceanfront of Boston.
Again, modeling the existing,
and then making some interventions
to change the buildings, to change the streets,
to change them to rush,
and make it as realistic as possible.
So, these are works in progress. We are going to spend some time,
another couple of weeks on these.
And then we will put them together
and create larger and larger urban settings.
The students who create the most believable streets
will get flown over to go and experience those streets,
and actually test their models with the real stuff,
and see how they correspond to each other.
So, we have received a lot of support,
and these are some of the supporters of the project.
So, thank you very much.
You are all welcome to communicate with us,
and we will keep you abreast of our progress.
>> Thank you. Excellent. Thank you very much.
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