e-city

If Sim City is the realisation of urban designers’ dream in the virtual world, e-city (edushi in Chinese) is the conversion of reality into the virtual world. I first saw it several years ago when the website was just set. There were very few cities for navigation. Today e-city holds SimCity-like models for over 300 cities and 2800 towns in China. What an amazing achievement for them in the last few years!

I had a quick look at the website again recently, immersing myself in flying through different cities. I have to admit that I was completely impressed by the skill of model makers and the amount of works that they’ve produced. Even the pavilions in Shanghai Expo are built similar to the real ones! Moreover, the website starts to absorb informative data including bus timetable, hotel information,  shopping, latest jobs, and also inevitable nuisance ads. Unfortunately e-city has only Chinese version at the moment. It would be wonderful to develop multiple-language version and expand to other cities in the world.

Although e-city has a stunning 3D effect, the accuracy is a worry. The model makers pay a lot of attention on building landmarks, but despise the less important buildings. I couldn’t even find my parent’s apartment back in my hometown Wuhan!

Anyway, just post some snapshots here to give you a sense of what’s happening.

GPS tracking in beijing

Just note there was a GPS tracking project in Beijing by Luka Frelih. It’s called Frida V. (Free Ride Data Acquisition Vehicle). The project was published on Creative China, Urban China #33 in 2008.

Frida V. is a rugged and comfortable bicycle equipped for efficient exploration and mapping of public urban spaces. It carries a small computer, GPS positioning device, 802.11 wireless network transciever and a basic audiovisual recording unit. The consolidated software and hardware assembly enables automated mapping of stumbled wireless networks, easy creation of location-tagged media and opportunistic synchronization with a server resource on the internet.

The project was initiated as a collaboration between Ljudmila and the _V2 Society in 2004…  Among the cities explored are Rotterdam, Ljubljana, New York City, Maribor, München, Zagreb, Bergen, San Francisco, Manchester and Beijing. Besides being a tool for individual exploration and mapping of the digital communication landscape, it has also been well received for grass-roots mapping of cities like the community-developed OpenStreetMap project. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative map contributed by the public.

In Beijing the journey of bike riding was recorded by photos, videos and mapping tracks. All the information was geolocated in OpenStreetMap. JOSM, a Java application, was used to draw GPS traces. The GPS tracks collected with Frida are orange, tracks in OSM are cyan and under them is the OSM map data in this screen capture of the JOSM map editor.

Although the bike and its GPS devices still look like something from My Favorite Martian, it was a fun project, wasn’t it?