Hello!
Finals week is upon us and with it the completion of our project! To recap, we are team Reslife. Our goal was to present the spread of students around campus based on their class year. We did this by using both cityengine and arcgis maps. In city engine we created a 3D model of Carleton’s campus and colored the faces of the residence halls based on the percentage of each student year that lived there. In arcgis maps we did the same thing but with circles and colors. To see all of this for yourself visit our website here.
So I was reading through your nice right up when I was intrigued by a piece of hyperlinked text. “Trapped in Goodhue” has scared me for life.
We decided it’s a classic that no student here at Carleton should go without seeing.
Comparing between the two ways you display your data, I find the ArcGIS display to be more useful than the CityEngine model. The CityEngine page’s default is to have all of the layers turned on and a video mode taking the viewer around the campus. While I see the intention behind this, the stacked layering makes the video chaotic and confusing.
Cool product – certain aspects could use improvement.
Thanks for your feedback! At that point in the week we were kinda rushing to get the CityEngine part finished since we’d run into more than a few unexpected problems and never really learned enough of how to format CityEngine. Now that you mention it though it does look pretty terrible at first sight, I’ll definitely look into fixing it.
Guys the color coding of CityEngine was a really call on your part, with the colors it is very easy to see the different grades in a building.
Team ResLife,
Your final project website is really nicely presented with a uniform theme and clear organization — you even made yourself a TRL logo! Overall, the site details your project’s goals, challenges, and eventual triumphs very well, and you did manage to extract some useful information and visualize it in interesting ways that do tell a story about the changing nature of reslife on campus.
Your data collecting and processing steps are really well documented, especially when coupled with Wes’ tutorial on the Java scripting, which should be linked from the site. I would love to have seen a similarly detailed writeup of the visualization side as well. How did you go about deciding on the ArcGIS format you settled on, and what steps were necessary along the way? As for CityEngine, the results are great, once you stop the video and turn off all layers but one as David suggested. Setting the height of the layers to the percentage was a great call. Can you share the CityEngine rule you wrote and discuss that process a bit as well? I would also love to see a swipe enabled, which you can do if you group the layers, so that you can directly compare different years. If you have the time, a reexport of the CE scene and a bit more detail on the process would really make the presentation pop.
It would have been nice if you could have told more of a story or done a social network analysis as you had hoped, but given the problems with data and access this was great work overall.