the project

What I envision is a program that makes it easy for any user to build a model of any thing, and, especially, any place. Everyone? Simplicity is clearly a key. I want to plunge right in.

Let's say you want to explore your town in virtual reality, so you want to build a model of it. A model is made out of points, so you can start by listing some points to represent your town in the very simplest way. Later, you can add more points. The only requirement: you need to list the points in some form that the computer can read.

You can start with some assigned "(0,0,0)". Then you can choose, perhaps in a "guesstimate" manner, two other points. I'm looking at topo maps that are available free on line, and that can give me some information about where to locate points 2 and 3. Hmm. This is pretty interesting. I find that I'm living in a big 1 mile square block, which isn't actually aligned with major streets, the way I'd expect, but that's an aside. The main point is, there's a ten foot topo line, 1150 feet, that crosses the south west corner of the block exactly. I can list that point as (0,0,1150). Then there's a point (.24, .4, 1150), where the decimals are miles east and mile north, where the topo line changes direction, and another, (.3, .46, 1150), where it changes direction again.

This is probably a bit crazy, but a computer could read this blog post and create a rendering using the listed points. All it has to do is look for numbers in parentheses ... This would have a special advantage because there's a lot of information about how the points were selected, or, that is, their significance, which can orient the user doing future work on the model.

I want to be clear that the purpose is to give users their own highly custom visualizations of places or things. The word "own" is entirely significant to the purpose ... referencing intellectual property matters.

A model with three points is probably a good place to start describing a rendering method, or algorithm. I'm thinking I can document a process for developing that algorithm, and implementing it as applications, on this blog.

Part of the mission is to make this freely available to everyone - the keyword in the blog title, of course - as a way to generate community based planning activity. More about that as time goes by, if all goes well.