Singapore Views

Motivation

Researchers in the field of urban planning and architecture need to present their results to stakeholders, government agencies or public audiences at some point. They usually use multiple different software tools and they work primarily with spatial and temporal datasets. But presentation tools like PowerPoint lack the support for this specific type of datasets which forces researchers to use static texts, pictures and videos to communicate with audiences and their ability to respond to questions is purely limited to the content of the presentation at hand.

Approach

Singapore Views is an interactive visualization and presentation platform developed by Dr. Jan PERHAC at Collaborative Interactive Visualisation and Analysis Laboratory (CIVAL), Singapore-ETH Future Cities Laboratory. The platform specifically targets researchers to allows them to commence and conduct their research projects via an interactive 3D-4D visualization. The platform supports raster and vector GEO data, legacy media (pictures, videos, texts), 3D models, scientific data and point clouds.

CIVAL’s interactive storytelling as part of a wider knowledge visualization domain is emerging as a highly capable way of allowing researchers to engage audiences with their findings in a novel way.

Status

The platform has been used by several SEC teams and by entities at CREATE, Singapore’s universities and Singapore government agencies. Its findings have been presented at various conferences and published in coupe of journals.

Current Developments and Future Plans

The platform is being gradually enhanced with new functionalities.
Some of the features currently under development are: support for local data streaming, interconnection with external geodatabases, native import, modification and export of GIS data, procedural and reactive UI, support for running python and R scripts for analytical purposes.

One of its upcoming features will include large-scale data analysis and simulations backed by the power of a supercomputer. Computational capabilities and infrastructure provided by the National Supercomputing Centre of Singapore (NSCC) present a fantastic opportunity to bring this functionality to wider scientific audiences of Singapore.

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