Hacking a building a Techie's way
Have you seen the game trailers for Watch Dogs ? In the game, the player is a cyber-vigilante that explores a connected 'smart' city and accesses its 2D and 3D information like a high tech Batman. As an example of this, the game even has a website called We Are Data that shows real geo-located information about Paris, Berlin, and London from social media sites and public government datasets. The game seems like a glimpse into a distant future but believe it or not, we have the technology to make this notion of a 'smart' city happen now. Unfortunately the building industry is currently very change-resistant and far behind almost every other industry in adopting new technologies, despite the fact that it has potentially the most to gain from interactive data visualization technologies and the Internet of Things . The technologies also already exist to model our buildings and communities in extremely high levels of detail, including fabricati...