London university creates a virtual city

A 3-D virtual model of London has been created to help improve transport and planning in the capital.

The Virtual London project has mapped 20 square kilometres of London - about 40,000 blocks - including the City, Westminster, Southwark, Lambeth, Camden, Islington and Hackney.

The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London (UCL) developed the model for the Greater London Authority (GLA), with the aim of improving public participation in city planning.

The model has been developed as a demonstrator to show how data about planning proposals such as high buildings and new transport systems can be visualised and distributed on a city-wide scale.

The project architects, Steve Evans and Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith, say virtual cities of places such as New York and Hong Kong exist, but are mostly made for specific purposes, such as video games.

'We needed one where you could put information in, such as crime levels or pollution. It's not just CAD, it's CAD with information added,' said Hudson-Smith.

'Whatever you want, you can put into the model. For instance, the police can view a map with crime hotspots highlighted on it. That can be used to plan the optimum location of police resources across the city,' he said.

The Virtual London model was built using a number of data sets, such as light detection and ranging data from Infoterra which provides the 3D geometry and street maps from the Ordnance Survey's MasterMap.

Most of the model is a simple block outline of buildings, which are in the precise shape and height of the actual buildings, but the model is supplemented with individually rendered, photo-realistic, texture-mapped buildings that are more costly to develop.

Hudson-Smith says Virtual London will soon be provided to the GLA for planning and consultation purposes, while a publicly accessible website will also be made available, allowing people to visit parts of London online.