Scale smart Interactive Models for Cities (SIMCITIES)

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

With around 1000 cities of more than 500'000 inhabitants in 2016 and more than 55% of the population living in cities, cities represent more than 70% of CO2 emissions. The UN have a program to help cities be more sustainable and have chosen AugmentCity to be their visualisation and simulation tool for their smart and sustainable cities and communities. In our context, a simulation is like a computer game where people can play a dedicated role and see the results of their decisions and actions. AugmentCity makes data visualisation and simulations of cities and presents them in cinema-like environments. AugmentCity intents to make a real world SimCity™ where the cities are real cities and the players are the mayors, the city planners and the citizens. The vision is to gather data about flow of goods, energy, water, waste, commuters, tourists, persons, vehicles, emergency patrols and combine it with measurements of noise, air quality, weather, effect of climate change, public safety issues such as flooding and wildfires, and visualise simulations about circular economy, city planning, city regulations or public safety issues. Partnering with cities around the world will put AugmentCity and Norway on the map of simulation and establish Campus Ålesund as the world capital of simulation. To make life-like graphical models of cities, show the data in a way laymen understand, and make models to predict how the city will be in 5, 10, 25 years is a daunting task. The current way of doing that is manual, and not a lot of data can be shown and very little simulation can be presented in ways people can understand. The aim of the research and development project is to create methods to automate the work such that we can simulate new cities in record time.