Ken Snyder

<p>For the last couple of years I have been tracking decision support tools that bring audio into the planning process. At our <a href="http://www.communitymatters.org" title="CommunityMatters">PLACE<strong>MATTERS</strong>06</a> conference, Harris Miller Miller &amp; Hanson Inc. (<a href="http://www.hmmh.com" title="hmmh">HMMH</a>) demonstrated their suite of acoustical environmental tools for planning, including a simple online <a href="http://www.hmmh.com/soundscape_02sbuilder.html" title="soundbuilder">soundbuilder</a> enabling visitors to create  different mixes with several sound overlays. <br />

<p>4 tools that support community building at the street level.</p><p>Just heard from my co-worker, Chris Haller, who is at Where 2.0 that Google has announced yet another cool tool for visualization. Street View provides panoramic views embedded as an additional view to g-maps. Initially this tool is only available in 5 cities: Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco. </p><p>Was able to locate the following YouTube <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91wuBqlny50">demo</a>. Corny video, but cool technology.</p>

At the <a href="http://www.planetizen.com/www.communitymatters.org" target="_blank" title="CommunityMatters07">PlaceMatters06</a> fall conference, participants were treated to the first sneak preview of <a href="http://outside.in" target="_blank" title="Outside.in">outside.in</a>, a spatially enabled hub for blogs and forums that adds location-based information to online discussions. Steven Berlin Johnson, author of several books including Emergence, and The Ghost Map, and the leading inspiration behind outside.in’s conception, demonstrated the beta site during his keynote session. It created a buzz with conference participants quick to recognize its potential as a tool for encouraging community dialogue and place making. <br />

Chris' last posting is big news!<br /> <br /> Imagine a google earth world where millions of enthusiastic users build replicas of their homes and the stores/ buildings in their neighborhood and then they become veiwable by anybody else. Wiki style, people can work collaboratively to improve and constantly update buildings. What would normally cost billions of dollars for 3D design company to make available then become part of a 3D vitual town/yellow pages. And it would be built for free and rapidly.<br /> <br /> Like <a href="http://secondlife.com/whatis/">Second Life</a>

Several years ago I was with a group of people who decided to approach the makers of SimCity to see if we could convince them to develop a similar but more credible tool for planners, enabling towns and their residents to look at real planning challenges and experiment with different scenarios in their own community. The response was a solid "no, we're not interested, we're interested in making games.”<br /> <br /> Can't blame them, considering the market for gamers is easily a thousand-fold greater than that for serious minded planners (not to mention realistic planning tools need real data to run credible analysis; imaginary cities don't).