Saturday 6 April 2013

Volatile Territories

Over the past couple months I've been gearing up for Smart Geometry 2013 which is taking place at the Bartlett/UCL in a little over a week. I'll be running a cluster this year alongside Bruce Davison and Elizabeth Tweedale entitled Volatile Territories. Here's a brief description straight from the cluster page:

"Volatile Territories will explore speculative urban design solutions through the self-organization of spatial boundaries within a set of hypothetical, yet measurable, political, economic and technological constructs."

Most of the preparatory work has revolved around establishing a line of communication between a few different software platforms that we'll be providing. Those who've been following along with the last few posts may have already guessed that one of those platforms is an expansion of my recent thesis work on multi-agent space planning. Here's a look at the tool in its current state.




Below are some screen grabs of an output test in Rhino which we'll be using as a handy middle man of sorts. Importing is handled through Grasshopper which spits out the floor space belonging to each agent and an isosurface defining their respective territories. The latter proved to a be a but of a tricky endeavor since the marching cubes algorithm had to be generalized to handle any number of spatial regions rather than just inside or outside a single threshold. Hopefully it won't have been in vain and we'll be able to do some colour 3d prints during the workshop.


















Platforms: Java, Processing, C#, Grasshopper, Rhino