Urban bubbles

Wow... this is very cool. Digital Urban, a.k.a Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith, a Senior Research Fellow at CASA and team leader of the Virtual London modelling group, has created

six 'Urban Bubbles' on Second Nature Island, each with a staircase leading to a viewing platform. These panoramic spheres provide a quick way to visualise local locations, data points can be subsequently mapped inside the scenes to access any relevant information.

The bubbles are located in a sandbox area above Second Nature. See the Digital Urban blog entry for more information. The picture above shows me standing inside one of the bubbles. These are well worth seeing.

The work also includes visualisations of city datasets

with a key and information point which when clicked display additional background information on the data provided. While early days it does lend itself to a simple representation of data sets within the collaborative environment which is Second Life.