Sheldon Brown’s “Scalable City” software aims to show how fields like video games and urban planning can take advantage of computational power, and in the process automate work that previously might have required dozens or hundreds of animators and artists.
Brown’s algorithms automatically create cityscapes that urban planners might love for their aerial aesthetic value, but that create fundamental problems of scale.
Based on so-called “L-curves,” which Brown said are similar to fractals, the Scalable City multimedia system can rapidly terraform barren landscapes, filling them in with gracefully curved roads and neighborhoods full of new houses.
Bill Detwiler is the Editor for Technical Content and Ecosystem at Celonis. He is the former Editor in Chief of TechRepublic and previous host of TechRepublic's Dynamic Developer podcast and Cracking Open, CNET and TechRepublic's popular online show. Previously, Bill was an IT manager in the social research and energy industries. He has bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Louisville, where he has also lectured on computer crime and crime prevention.
