The folks at Redfish Group in Santa Fe, NM have launched simtable which lets users sculpt the landscape and project onto it visual media that is produced by agent-based models of how the landscape changes. Wildfire is their current simulation using standard cellular automata models. What is nice about this kind of media is that it takes the kinds of ideas we developed in our own Analogies project – digital media and models projected back onto physical bases – but enables users to interact with the landscape. They are experimenting with urban landscapes as well but watch their video accessible from here and in YouTube to see them literally light a fire on the landscape and watch is spread and then introduce barriers and constraints manually by changing the landscape to stop the fire continuing. We must do something similar in CASA with our London datatable.
