Visualization in Transportation Symposium

October 10, 2011 By: Art Kalinski

Where GIS, CAD, BIM and Visualization Meet

Once every five years, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) holds a “Visualization in Transportation Symposium.” The focus of the conference is to review new visualization tools, techniques, and developments related to transportation. The driving force and chair of the conference was Michael Manore, president of Vispective Consulting. This was an extremely well organized and informative conference thanks to Michael and his staff.

TRB is part of the National Research Council — a private, nonprofit institution that is the operational agency of the National Academies. The National Research Council is jointly administered by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. TRB’s varied activities include more than 7,000 engineers, scientists, and other transportation researchers annually. The program is supported by state transportation departments and federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Transportation.

I first attended this conference five years ago when I was the GIS manager for the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the Atlanta Region. As an MPO we were responsible for developing the transportation plans that would parcel out the multi-billion dollar federal transportation budget for the Atlanta region.

With the dolling out of the federal funds collected in the Atlanta region came many federal mandates that ranged from compliance of clean-air directives to the requirement for public involvement in the planning process. Although ARC wasn’t responsible for the actual engineering design of roads, we were responsible for determining the long-range transportation plans that included highway improvements tempered with mass transit expansion. GIS and visualization were key elements of planning, public involvement, and even support of emergency responders.

In the ’90s GIS was a critical tool to display our population data and analysis that was needed to predict population and employment. We used complex statistical models to estimate and forecast population as far as 20 years in the future. We used GIS to display the complex data and make it understandable by our politicians and the general public. In 2006 I learned of a new technology that made our visualization efforts significantly easier — high-resolution metric oblique imagery. Unlike ortho imagery that was difficult for the general public to understand, oblique imagery made comprehension of complex transportation projects significantly easier for the non-technical members of the public to understand.

The 2006 Visualization Symposium consisted mostly of GIS maps, CAD drawings, and artist’s renditions. By comparison, the 2011 symposium expanded and morphed into a significantly more sophisticated group of presentations that not only showed the latest technology but addressed the mind-eye interface of visual perception. There was a wide array of topics that opened the minds and eyes of many attendees starting with a history lesson from Kevin Gilson of Parsons Brinckerhoff.

I was surprised to learn from Kevin that the concept of perspective wasn’t developed until 1423. Filippo Brunelleschi, a leading architect and engineer during the Renaissance, is credited with inventing one-point linear perspective that revolutionized painting. Until then painting and drawings of buildings looked like kids' drawings lacking accurate perspective. The Greeks understood that distant objects looked smaller than close objects, but there was no precise method of making drawings accurate. Brunelleschi developed the mathematical rules that could accurately display perspective, such as the fact that objects not only get shorter but also get fore-shortened as they become more distant.

ESRI and Autodesk were well-represented in the EXPO and break-out sessions. There were many examples of very sophisticated 3D CAD models as well as animation of those models to demonstrate vehicles in motion, real time incident reporting, or temporal displays of long timelines as 4D models. BIM models were addressed in many sessions. (If you’re still not familiar with BIM models, please read my August 2008 column “BIM, Son of CAD and GIS.” BIM use is growing significantly and one could see the merging of GIS, CAD, and “Virtual Design and Construction.” We in the GIS community need to keep an eye over the cubical wall and understand BIM’s impact on GIS.

The GIS presentations demonstrated some of the latest techniques in display of spatial data including temporal animations. Shown here was an especially compelling display by Catherine Morency of Montreal Canada. It shows bridge usage by time of day and neighborhood origin. In the actual animation the vertical bars grew and also segmented by color based on the users.

There were interesting presentations on display of data that was not directly transportation related. Here is one example of temporal marketing data that showed the negative effect of a marketing display. Note the heavy traffic pattern everywhere except in front of the display.

There were several sessions about the psychology of visualization and discussions involving the work of Yale Professor Edward Tufte, the famous graphic display expert. Linda Sharkey of Autodesk gave a presentation on an abstract topic that was very interesting to me as an oblique imagery advocate. She explained a survey she conducted in which she asked adult participants to draw a coffee cup and then a road. In almost all cases the participants drew oblique views of the cups and almost all drew roads with some perspective. By comparison, young children will draw roads with no perspective or ortho views of objects. It seems to take a while to develop the sophistication needed to draw objects as oblique views and with perspective.

I did a presentation showing the benefits of oblique imagery for public meetings, planning and the work of emergency responders. This really tied in well with Linda Sharkey’s presentation, since it highlighted the ease of perception by non-technical people looking at complex transportation issues. (Images courtesy of Pictometry International, Corp.)

The entire conference was recorded on digital video and will be available on the internet. The recording was done by Teach America and is being uploaded to a website so you can view any presentation delivered at the conference. All the presentations haven’t been uploaded yet, but the TRB and Teach America people promise that the remaining presentations should be uploaded soon.

This was an especially interesting conference because of the wide array of presentations. However, the common issue most presenters addressed was human data overload. GIS, CAD and BIM are certainly a big part of the answer. One presenter summed up the conference by quoting Albert Einstein who said, “If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.”