DAT203 - Infrastructure

In every city, there is an infrastructure - London has one, Birmingham has one, Manchester has one, even our own Plymouth has one as well. However, the infrastructure of Plymouth isn't as well developed as other competing cities around the UK, in fact, pretty much every major city in developed Europe. In today's lecture, we was shown many examples of urban infrastructure, both in fiction and reality, of which we were then introduced to our assignment, a joint project with Plymouth City Council.

The reason for Plymouth's slow development dates back to after World War 2, when the city was bombed by the Nazi Luftwaffe. The city had more bombs dropped on it than Coventry, and as a result, most of the city had to be rebuilt from the ground up. in 1943, Sir Patrick Abercrombie drew up a plan for redeveloping the city, and was then enacted after World War 2, with 20,000 new houses built by the 1960s, and a new Civic high-rise completed during that same period. 

The city was designed with the automobile in mind, which has resulted in an American-influenced infrastructure and architecture, which was typical of many American cities at the time. In addition, it was also fitting for Plymouth, as it was a city that has historical links with the Plymouth in the United States, of which the Pilgrim Fathers discovered, but following a trend of pedestrianisation in the 1980s and the 1990s, the main roads going through the city centre's main shopping districts were paved over, and this has resulted in an important piece of infrastructure being severed or severely curtailed. 

In addition, the ills of the existing transport infrastructure were then felt in the 2000s and the 2010s as other comparable cities were then becoming fully developed, and with the recovery from the global financial crisis still underway, this has now come more important than ever, with the airport now closed and better railway links being needed to help boost growth in city commerce and to increase the speed of redevelopment.

DAT203: Augmented Reality: more about it

Although it has been said that the Wizard of Oz can be considered to be the very first example of augmented reality (or a model of which a typical AR setup is based upon), the first documented example of a form of augmented reality dates back to the 1950s, with the advent of Sensorama, which was a machine that produced visuals, sound, movement, and even smell. However, it was not considered a success, as there was no financial backing to support the project and to apply patents to it.

In 1966, the first form of visual augmented reality, the head-mounted display (HMD) was invented by Ivan Sutherland, which provided the user with a view of a virtual world, which applied the principles of the Wizard of Oz model. Whilst the phrase 'augmented reality' was coined in 1992, the first, modern functioning form of augmented reality was created in 1992 by the US Air Force Research Laboratory, known as Virtual Fixtures, and in 1999, a standard platform of augmented reality, ARToolKit, was created by Hirokazu Kato of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, and has since been ported to many platforms, including mobile devices, of which their potential was not realised until the boom of smartphones in the late 2000s.

A more recent implementation of augmented reality was created in 2008 as Wikitude, a travel guide that utilises the smartphone's built-in camera to overlay information onto the screen, and then provides the user with information about places to visit, shops, restaurants etc.