Digital modeling project promising

The aerial view of downtown Los Angeles was spectacular – glittering high rises, cars moving along the freeway, pedestrians waiting for buses.

All of this was visible under the roof of Perloff Hall through a virtual, real-time re-creation of 25 square miles of the city, made over decades by the Urban Simulation Team at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.

Hundreds of people gathered at UCLA on Thursday afternoon to interact with nearly 30 exhibits demonstrating the range of digital research being conducted by the humanities departments, including the Virtual Los Angeles Model.

Later in the demonstration, Bill Jepson, the director of the simulation team, digitally simulated a flight from the sky and onto a freeway. Then a red line appeared to guide the direction of the simulation, demonstrating how the model could be used as a dashboard navigational system.

“You could use this model to navigate (your car) with visual cues based on the buildings around you,” Jepson said. “All of this could appear on a dashboard LCD.”

This type of modeling has countless applications, including real-time tracking of public-transit or law-enforcement vehicles, he said. But he added the original, and primary, purpose of the model is to allow communities to see how new developments or projects could change the city landscape around them.

Another exhibit demonstrated how digital technology can be used in the classroom to change the way students learn about literature.

Katherine Hayles, an English professor, demonstrated how digital animation and sound can transform a static poem into a visually and aurally stimulating environment. After Hayles opened up the animation for the poem “Faith,” the words began to gradually appear in different colors and move around the screen to visually create the different layers of the poem.

“As you see the words appearing, you can get a tactile sense,” she said. “This is a different way to do literature because it brings in color and animation. ... It contributes to the meaning behind the words.”

Another academically focused exhibit was a digital library containing about 500 gigabytes of digital images of cuneiform tablets.

“We control and build content that sites like Wikipedia can link to,” Cale Johnson, a professor of near eastern languages, said. “We document tablets from around the world. ... Our database includes about 300,000 tablets listed in catalogues.”

Johnson added that in compiling this database he helps set the standard for digital archiving.

Other examples of using technology to digitally model environments included projects reconstructing ancient Rome and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

The modeling technology can be used to recreate these environments on large scales to help people understand “historic urban environments,” according to the event brochure.

Part of what makes these models special is their ability to show the places in real time, with water and other objects moving in a way that allows people to understand how everything worked together, according to literature at the exhibition.

Other exhibitors such as Michael Phelps came from outside UCLA in the hopes of forming a partnership with the university. Phelps said he works for a company that specializes in digitizing old manuscripts – such as original 12th and 15th century literature – without damaging the binding and could potentially help universities digitize and expand their library holdings.

“We are going to digitize hundreds of manuscripts stolen from a monastery 150 years ago,” he said. “We will be able to digitally restore the library of this monastery.”