BUILDING A VIRTUAL L.A.; UCLA'S COMPUTER-GENERATED MODEL COULD HELP PLANNERS.Byline: Tony Knight Daily News Staff Writer The viewer flies over MacArthur Park swooping past the famous lake and fountain, zipping down Seventh Street past popular Langer's Deli. Click. He zooms across the UCLA UCLA University of California at Los Angeles UCLA University Center for Learning Assistance (Illinois State University) UCLA University of Carrollton, TX and Lower Addison, TX campus, enters buildings, roams through laboratories that haven't even been built yet. Click. He soars above Hollywood Boulevard For uses other than the original street, see Hollywood Boulevard (disambiguation). Hollywood Boulevard is a boulevard in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, United States, beginning at Sunset Boulevard in the east and running northwest to Vermont Avenue, where it straightens out , floating down to street level to glide smoothly over the pink stars on the Walk of Fame. This is Virtual Los Angeles Los Angeles (lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. , a computer-generated replica of the nation's second-largest city, under construction at UCLA's Department of Architecture & Urban Design. It is the brainchild of computer whiz Bill Jepson, who has been working with Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan Richard J. Riordan (born May 1, 1930) is a Republican politician from California, U.S. who served as the California Secretary of Education from 2003–2005 and as Mayor of Los Angeles from 1993–2001. Riordan ran for Governor of California unsuccessfully in 2002. , Councilman Mike Hernandez and others to photograph the streets and buildings of L.A. and assemble them in cyberspace. ``The big project is to build Virtual Los Angeles,'' said Jepson, the school's director of computing. ``That's over 4,000 square miles that you'll be able to drive or fly through seamlessly.'' The virtual city programming is based on software developed by Silicon Graphics Inc. in Mountain View that allows digital photographs of buildings and streets or anything to be sewn together electronically to replicate a virtual environment. Scientists at NASA Ames Research Center NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) is a NASA facility located at Moffett Federal Airfield, which covers 43 acres at the borders of the cities of Mountain View and Sunnyvale in California. This research center is most commonly called NASA Ames. have used the same technology to create a virtual reality model that allows the user to either fly or walk through the Mars Pathfinder landing site. In Los Angeles, the technology has been used to help plan redevelopment in the Pico-Union and Hollywood areas. It was instrumental in the design of the Catellus Development Corp.'s office project that will be built on top of the Metro Red Line station at Wilshire Boulevard Wilshire Boulevard is one of the principal east-west arterial roads in Los Angeles, California, United States. It was named for H. Gaylord Wilshire (1861-1927), an Ohio native who made and lost fortunes in real estate, farming, and gold mining. and Vermont Avenue Vermont Avenue is one of the longest running north/south streets in Los Angeles. Located just west of the Harbor Freeway for the major portion south of downtown Los Angeles, it starts in Griffith Park at the Greek Theatre in the Los Feliz neighborhood as a one-lane divided road (it . More realistic view And it had a dramatic impact on developer Ira Smedra's Village Center Westwood project when the virtual reality version of the project was shown to a community meeting by projecting it on the wall. The residents thought the project was out of scale, which resulted in a downsizing (1) Converting mainframe and mini-based systems to client/server LANs. (2) To reduce equipment and associated costs by switching to a less-expensive system. (jargon) downsizing , Jepson said. Jepson said he hopes some day the city Planning city planning, process of planning for the improvement of urban centers in order to provide healthy and safe living conditions, efficient transport and communication, adequate public facilities, and aesthetic surroundings. Department will require all proposed big projects to be reviewed that way so residents can see the real visual impacts - not just a lovely architectural rendering Architectural rendering, or architectural illustration, is the art of creating two-dimensional images showing the attributes of a proposed architectural design. Traditional rendering techniques are taught in a "master class" practice (such as the École des Beaux-Arts), where . ``The architects and developers are going to show you what they want you to see,'' Jepson said. ``With this technology, anyone can go and say, wait a minute. Let's see what this looks like from my front porch. And we can go and sit on their front porch and look at it.'' Hernandez has been a champion of the project, helping secure $350,000 in start-up funding through Rebuild L.A. so that Jepson and his students could ``map'' large areas of the Pico Union District with their digital camera. ``Every building, every tree is part of this thing,'' Hernandez said. ``They actually have me walking down the street. ``The real value is to allow citizens to participate in the planning process,'' he said. ``It really benefits in developing large projects and in looking at the impacts of those projects on communities. With virtual reality you can actually see it before you build it.'' Jepson also is working closely with the mayor's Office of Economic Development and with their help has built a virtual reality model of much of downtown Los Angeles Downtown Los Angeles is the central business district of Los Angeles, California, located close to the geographic center of the metropolitan area. The sprawling, multi-centered megacity is such that its downtown core is often considered just another district like Hollywood or . The mayor has funneled $200,000 in city funds to the project in the past two years, said Deputy Mayor Rocky Delgadillo, the head of the office. ``This is the way for us to tell the rest of the world that we are the technology city,'' Delgadillo said, ``that technology from multimedia, new media and entertainment, down through bio-med and aerospace is here. There really is no other place on Earth that has the kind of intense technology that the L.A. region has.'' Jepson takes the viewer on a tour of downtown, starting by circling above the 72-story Wells Fargo Building This structure is not to be confused with the Wells Fargo Center (Portland, Oregon), the current tallest building in Portland. The Wells Fargo Building is a historic office building in downtown Portland, Oregon. , then diving swiftly to street level to course along Broadway. In this model, Jepson's team has included cars, buses, fire engines and the like moving up and down the narrow downtown thoroughfares. Suddenly at an intersection there's a flash of something passing and the viewer's perspective changes rapidly. ``Oops, we got hit by something,'' Jepson says, mouse-clicking quickly to remedy the situation. ``It's a BMW BMW in full Bayerische Motoren Werke AG German automaker. Founded as an aircraft engine manufacturer in 1916, the company assumed the name Bayerische Motoren Werke and became known for its high-speed motorcycles in the 1920s. being chased by a police car.'' He explained that the system has been programmed so that the viewer can experience the virtual environment from inside a virtual vehicle. ``That's an easy way of getting on the bus,'' he said. ``You let them hit you, and the next thing you know you're on it.'' Down from heights In the Hollywood Boulevard model, Jepson demonstrates the power of linking the technology to the Internet. The viewer swoops down from the heights to stop in front of Frederick's of Hollywood Frederick's of Hollywood is a well known retailer of lingerie in the United States, with stores in many modern shopping malls across the USA. The business was started by Frederick Mellinger (inventor of the push-up bra) in 1946. . Jepson clicks on the store and immediately jumps to the Frederick's Web site. Even though Jepson can connect to the Internet, his Virtual L.A. is not yet publicly available on the Internet. The hope for the future is to create ``avatars,'' or virtual people to represent individuals using the software from on-line servers. ``You could be traveling in the virtual reality, and if someone else is traveling on the same street you would see their avatar and they could see yours,'' Jepson said. One of the most detailed programs is of the UCLA campus where several buildings are either under construction or being planned. Through virtual reality, planners can compare various building designs, different construction materials, even interior decorating schemes. The viewer is brought inside the Gonda Neuroscience and Human Genetics Human genetics A discipline concerned with genetically determined resemblances and differences among human beings. Technological advances in the visualization of human chromosomes have shown that abnormalities of chromosome number or structure are surprisingly Research Center, which is under construction on Westwood Boulevard, but in virtual reality it's already completed and furnished. ``You can go inside and walk around,'' Jepson said, moving the viewer inside then turning the perspective to bring into view a grassy quad and the MacDonald Medical Center across the way. ``Again, this doesn't exist. But we have all the furniture, and carpets and fabrics that will be in the building, so we could build it.'' But why stop there? Click. You're flying past the colonnades Colonnades may refer to one of two things
``It's the kind of teaching tool that people would die to have,'' said Bay Area archeologist James Packer, who has studied the Forum of Trajan for 25 years and with aid from the Getty Research Institute helped Jepson assemble the data to reproduce the vast ancient structure. Visit to the past ``I've spent my entire life lecturing to people about the architectural style of ancient buildings, and this would be just an incredible tool to actually take them through it,'' Packer said. ``It's really exciting stuff, almost like we're going to be able to visit the past.'' He said he'd seen a virtual reality model of St. Peter's Basilica ``built'' by an Italian computer firm that allows the viewer to fly around in the structure, closely examining details of the cornices and hovering over Giovanni Bernini's ornate bronze baldacchino. For the Forum of Trajan, Jepson's team used photographs of the ruins, drawings Packer had done, pottery shards and other artifacts artifacts see specimen artifacts. from the archeological excavation to reproduce the vast structure in central Rome. The project required painstaking attention to detail. To create one ornate frieze frieze, in architecture, the member of an entablature between the architrave and the cornice or any horizontal band used for decorative purposes. In the first type the Doric frieze alternates the metope and the triglyph; that of the other orders is plain or that stretches around the entire inner periphery of the temple, they used a fragment of the original frieze to make a ``tile'' in cyberspace and then replicated that tile all the way around. ``It's not easy to come up with this data,'' Jepson quipped. ``Aerial photographs of ancient Rome are almost nonexistent non·ex·is·tence n. 1. The condition of not existing. 2. Something that does not exist. non .'' CAPTION(S): 2 Photos Photo: (1--color) Stars adorn sidewalk along virtual Hollywood Boulevard. UCLA School of Arts & Architecture (2--color) UCLA computing director William Jepson is building a computer-generated city from photographs. Tom Mendoza/Daily News |
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