SAP acquisition of Right Hemisphere

SAP, the global German software company, has acquired Right Hemisphere (RH). This acquisition is good news for both Right Hemisphere (RH) and SAP as it will enable opportunities for greater investment in the technology platform, and extensive channels to world-wide markets. Our strong partnership and close technical collaboration remain in place – we also see considerable merit in this acquisition for Nextspace and our customers. SAP have stated that they will continue to invest in RH’s operations in New Zealand with the same management team.

This acquisition also provides an endorsement of Nextspace’s technology – as one key element of Nextspace’s Visual City platform is RH’s technology. SAP’s acquisition endorses the enterprise-ready capabilities of these products.

From a Nextspace perspective, it’s business as usual as our current agreements with RH will continue under the new ownership structure.

Don’t hesitate to contact Gavin Lennox (gavin.lennox@nextspace.co.nz) if you have any questions or comments in relation to this acquisition or how it may affect Nextspace or our current projects.

Click here for the full press release.

International Society for Digital Earth

The 7th International Symposium on Digital Earth event was held in Perth on 23-25 August 2011.

The conference was a great success with nearly 1000 delegates from all over the world.  Technologies are developing at a break neck pace. Digital Earth is the lead vision making forum on the application of these technologies to meet the critical needs of the planet.

Nextspace’s Richard Simpson presented a paper on Visual City entitled ‘Advances in Evidence Driven 3D Visualisation’. He also chaired a meeting of ISDE’s working committee for Digital Cities.

Nextspace’s Richard Simpson serves on the executive board of the ISDE, and also on the editorial committee for the ISDE’s academic journal ‘International journal of Digital Earth’. This journal has cutting edge research papers on topics pertaining to the Digital Earth initiative. These include papers on 3D visualisation, sensor webs, evidential (5th dimension) modelling, and cloud computing.

Free Access to the ISDE journal papers is now available online from the Taylor and Francis web site:

Invited papers from Volume 4 Issue 2

Editor’s Choice

Wellington wins rights to host next Digital Earth Summit

The International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) announced at the close of the 2011 Symposium in Perth that the 2012 Summit will be held in Wellington, New Zealand. The date of this event is anticipated to be in September 2012.

Mayor Wade-Brown said Wellington’s bid for the international conference was greatly assisted by central government support and she thanked Tourism New Zealand for their help with funding the bid, Hon Steven Joyce, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, for his support and Land Information NZ for their partnership.  Letters of support for this bid included the Director of United Nations Development Program, Helen Clark, Chair of Nextspace Paddy Boyle and Hon Steven Joyce, Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

Members of the New Zealand contingent at ISDE 7 at the receipt of the award to host the next Summit are shown from left to right  Fiona Milburn (Wireframe), Mark Shafer(Wireframe), Stephen Chritchlow , Mary-Sue Severn (LINZ), Sue Gordon (LINZ – holding certificate of acceptance), Kevin Sweeney (LINZ), Richard Simpson (Nextspace), Mark Billinghurst (HIT Lab), Ian Smith (Auckland Council), Di Anorpong (LINZ)

Click here for more.

Auckland Council Spatial Plan

3D visualization is a powerful means of articulating complex concepts and enabling greater levels of co-location collaboration across large numbers of stakeholders. The Auckland Spatial Plan is a significant initiative to unite a common vision for the recently amalgamated ‘Super City’ of Auckland. Key outcomes include:

• High level strategy for developing a region that relates to it geography.
• Achieve a broad set of planning outcomes.
• Enable better collaboration between multiple parties.
• Provides a mechanism for agreeing joint priorities, actions and investment.

Through this plan the city centre is envisioned to become an international hub for the whole of Auckland. The priorities include a world class waterfront pedestrian promenade, a rail loop, transit oriented development, international convention centre, Wynyard quarter re-development and a new harbour crossing. The definition of the ‘City Centre’ for the purposes of this priority has been expand from that currently provided for in the Auckland City Central Area Plan to include St Mary’s Bay, Freemans Bay, Grafton and parts of Parnell and Northshore.

The task of amalgamating the vast datasets gathered from planning, geospatial and CAD files into a common unified forum has been assigned to Nextspace. Streaming visualization enables a user to mine into the detail of a single nut and bold on a detailed CAD sourced model, and also seamlessly pull out to see the entire city centre. A series of transformational moves illustrate areas of change over both time and space. It is envisaged that this platform could ensure optimal decision making for planners and urban designers, a forum for engaging ideas from professionals and citizens alike and greater dialogue with stakeholders about the future of the 21st century city.

Auckland Council have updated their Auckland Plan home page to now include a showcase video called “Creating the world’s most liveable city”

Alternatively for a direct link to YouTube go here.

This video has been edited by the Communications department at Auckland Council, and gives an overview of the Auckland Plan.  From 1:15 to 1:39 the video showcases Nextspace’s flythrough 3D Digital Auckland model to describe the “Transformational Moves” for urban growth

Water Industry Operators Association of Australia (WIOA)

“Visual Water – An Innovative Platform for Visualising the Urban Water Cycle” was jointly presented by Stephen Webb (South East Water) and Richard Simpson (Nextspace) at the recent WIOA event in Bendigo.  This event was well attended and included over 180 trade booths.

‘us’ Utility Services – a joint venture of South East Water, Siemens and Thiess promoted Visual Water at their booth.  There was considerable interest in this Visual City component as representation of the next generation asset management and 3D visualisation capabilities.

Visual City Presentations

Nextspace will be presenting papers on ‘Visual City’ at the following events being held over the next few months:

4th United Nations Land Administration Forum “Beyond Spatial Enablement” 5 and 7 of October – Melbourne, Australia

This will be held in conjunction with collaborative Workshops in spatial information management. As part of the event, on the 5th of October there will be a dedicated Workshop day for projects on National Infrastructure Management for Land Information, Metadata Automation, and 3D property management and 3D Cadastre. The aim of the workshops are to present the achievement of the projects and to review and update our industry organisations with its progress and for the 3D cadastre project this will be the launch of the project.

Spatial@Gov 15-17 November 2011 – Canberra, Australia Spatial@Gov is the geospatial event organised in conjunction with the peak organisations in Australia and New Zealand representing the public, private, research and professional sectors of the spatial community.

Themes for this year’s conference include:

• Water Security
• spatial@defence
• Government Spatial Activities in Other Countries
• Access to Government Spatial Information
• Emergency Response
• The Spatial Framework for Virtual Australia
• spatial@biz

Surveying & Spatial Sciences Conference23-25 November – Wellington, New Zealand

The Surveying and Spatial Sciences Conference 2011 (SSSC2011) will be one of the largest and most important spatial events in Australasia.

Jointly run by the New Zealand Institute of Surveyors and the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute this event will bring together the disciplines, sectors and user groups in an unprecedented all-of-industry event.

Spatial information and technology continue to develop as integral components of spatially-enabled enterprises. Consumers are continuously using more location-based services, and demanding greater innovation and enterprise.

Auckland’s Underground Eye

Water – Fueling growth

Visual Water at WIOA Industry Conference

Digital Earth Symposium

Food for Thought

Welcome

Welcome to the latest Nextspace newsletter which focuses on our Visual City initiative to provide powerful tools for utilities, cities and infrastructure providers that reduce costs, improve efficiency and decision-making through 3D visualisation.

Digital Auckland

‘Visual City – Digital Auckland’ is our newest video available for viewing on YouTube. This video shows examples of visualisation of city assets and buildings for consultation, planning, historical information and other data visualisation.

Water in the Visual City

Nextspace’s recent whitepaper, ‘Water in the Visual City’, highlights the challenges of managing water resources in fast growing urban areas and demonstrates some innovative solutions and 3D tools. The paper also demonstrates how handheld devices such as the iPad can be used as an “underground eye” to get a better view and understanding of subsurface terrain and water infrastructure.

For more information on Water in the Visual City please see the Nextspace website.

The ‘Water in the Visual City’ Executive Summary and ‘Water in the Visual City’ Whitepaper are both published on our website.

Auckland’s Underground Eye

The Institute of Earth Science and Engineering (IESE) at the University of Auckland has partnered with Nextspace to develop interactive 3D models of earthquake data, faults, and subsurface geologic strata.

3D visualisation enables researchers to better interpret raw geologic data, share it with colleagues and present it to the wider community. The newly opened “IESE-Nextspace 3D Visualisation Centre” is a University-wide resource, and IESE plans to apply this technology to advance understanding of geothermal systems.

TVNZ ran a story referencing Nextspace’s partnership with the IESE

The NZ Herald also referenced Nextspace’s interesting work with IESE

Visual Water to be unleashed at the Victorian Water Industry conference

South East Water/ ‘us’-Utility Services and Nextspace will be giving a joint-presentation of Visual Water at the 74th Annual WIOA Victorian Water Industry Engineers & Operators Conference in Bendigo, Victoria.  This event will be held at the Bendigo Exhibition Centre, 6-8 September 2011.

The paper is entitled “Visual Water – an innovative platform for visualising the Urban Water Cycle” is being presented by Stephen Webb and Richard Simpson at this event. For further information on this event, click here.

New Faces at Nextspace

Rachel Ryan is our new 3D Content Creator & Graphic Artist.  She has specialised research experience in creating digital cities and communicating GIS and other information about buildings via 3D interactive means.  Rachel holds a Masters degree in Building Science. Her artistic abilities have already been put to work, with a widely publicised visualisation of futuristic Christchurch and a panorama vision for the bold ANZAC Centenary Bridge.

To view Rachel’s powerful illustration of a futuristic Christchurch please follow this link.

We also welcome Najam Haq our new Head of Development. Najam is an accomplished professional with over 19 years of experience designing, developing and managing large software systems. Previously he led project teams at FourthWall Media (Virginia, USA) implementing platform solutions for Interactive Television supporting millions of customers. Najam also has experience with artificial intelligence and operations research systems.

The Harbour Crossing Debate

The ANZAC Centenary Bridge continues to attract front page news and public interest. The initiative now includes Westpac Bank as a major sponsor and is building traction within communities. A demonstration of spatial blogging on interactive 3D BIM models helps refine thinking and capture the plethora of interests in a high profile project such as this. Further back ground on this initiative is at the web site www.bridge2015.org.nz

Nextspace at CeBIT

Nextspace attended this year’s CeBIT exhibit in Sydney, Australia, to showcase Nextspace’s groundbreaking earthquake and city visualisation technology to the 30, 000+ Australian business professionals in attendance. An impressed former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promoted Nextspace’s work to the German Deputy Chancellor, Guido Westerwelle as a ‘great example of Australian innovation’! As Australia’s foreign minister he clearly overlooked the fact that New Zealand is not yet an Australian state.

In addition to demonstrating their work with the Institute of Earth Science and Engineering (IESE), showing stereoscopic 3D visualisations of the hundreds of Christchurch earthquakes, the New South Wales Emergency Information Co-ordination Unit (EICU) tapped into Nextspace’s visualisation expertise to demonstrate the real-time streaming of vast 3D urban models to better inform Sydney emergency services during a crisis situation.

Nextspace at CeBIT attracted international media interest – see links below:

New Zealand

France: Un logiciel 3D pour anticiper les séismes

Belgium

Canada

Australia

For further details on this symposium, click here. A free iPad application built for the this event is also available from here.

In the News

New Websites

Digital Earth Summit

3D in Education

ANZAC Bridge

3D Visualisation Cluster

DE Training Kit

Training and Seminars

Right Hemisphere

Food for Thought

In the News

Green Button: Nextspace worked with Integrid to develop a “Green Button” plug-in which allows users of Right Hemisphere’s Deep Exploration software to send large graphics rendering jobs from their desktop directly to Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform. Nextspace and Integrid participated in Microsoft’s Azure launch in late April. For more information see http://www.nextspace.co.nz/green-button, or also an article on the NZTE website at http://www.nzte.govt.nz/features-commentary/Success-stories/Pages/Kiwi-firms-launch-rendering-solution-on-Azure.aspx

Visual City: Right Hemisphere’s extended partnership with SAP and Nextspace’s Visual City both featured in the Dominion Post on 12 July, see http://www.nextspace.co.nz/kiwi-3d-firm-into-next-stratosphere

New Websites

As an organisation with commercial imperatives as well as a not-for-profit mandate, we have sometimes found it difficult to answer the “What is Nextspace?” question. To this end, we have now separated our two functions and published two new website. Have a look at www.nextspace.co.nz and www.nextspace.org.nz. Feedback is always appreciated.

Digital Earth Summit

Richard Simpson presented a keynote address at the 3rd Digital Earth Summit in mid June. The summit was held in the Bulgarian city of Nessebar, a world heritage site. Richard’s topic was “The visual City – Establishing A Language of Progression for Digital Earth in An Urban Context.” Richard is also on the editorial board for the International Journal of Digital Earth, and was recently appointed Chair of the Digital Cities Working Committee. Senior representatives from organisations such as NASA, Japanese Space Exploration Agency (JAXA), European Commission, Chinese Academy of Sciences, UN are on this working committee. For more information see, http://www.digitalearth-isde.org/

3D in Education

Brenda Frisk was a keynote speaker for the second year running at the annual Tech Hui on 15 June 2010 in Wellington. Tech Hui is advertised as “a chance for high school students to hear from a selection of high fliers in New Zealand’s innovative IT scene”. http://techhui.org.nz/home

Brenda’s topic was how students can prepare themselves for a career in the IT Industry. Some issues Brenda covered were: managing your online reputation, the need to communicate in multiple ways, being willing to learn and how to ’stand-out’ to future employers.

ANZAC Bridge

Richard Simpson’s presentation “The Auckland Harbour Crossing – How the Anzac Centenary Bridge could generate great economic outcomes” to the Transport Infrastructure & Economic Development Conference in Auckland on 27 April was well received.

There has also been a lot of development with the bridge in the past few months with NZTA having called for tenders to review the bridge option. More information at www.bridge2015.org.nz.

3D model developed by Nextspace

3D Visualisation Cluster

The May 3D Visualisation cluster meeting was held at the AUT Co-Lab’s Virtual Reality Lab immediately after the VR Lab’s official opening. Cluster members were able to view the Lab’s new equipment and hear plans for joint AUT / industry projects going forward. The next cluster meeting with be held on Thursday August 12th at the Nextspace premises, unless anyone else in interested in hosting. Join the cluster group on LinkedIn to keep up to date: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1192987

Training, Presentations or Customer Seminars

Do you need a great room with state-of-the-art equipment including HD screen, video conferencing, up to 20 computers for training or just a lovely venue for a seminar or presentation? Contact info@nextspace.co.nz if you would like more information, or go to http://www.nextspace.co.nz/products/nextspace-products-services/training-room.

Deep Exploration Training Kit

Nextspace has developed a training resource kit for resellers to deliver the three-day “Deep Exploration CAD Edition: Foundations” course.  Details are available on the Nextspace website at http://www.nextspace.co.nz/products/nextspace-products-services/deep-exploration-training-kit

Right Hemisphere

John Valentine appointed new Vice President of Engineering. Right Hemisphere Contributes Visualization Technology to SAP’s Complex Assembly Manufacturing Solution (CAMS). Right Hemisphere and Flatirons Solutions Bring Advanced 3D Capabilities to DITA-Based Technical Publishing. See http://www.righthemisphere.com/company/news-and-events/press-releases for more detail.

Food for Thought

Mobile 3D City looks good – Currently for iPhone, this is a collection of interactive, 3D tourism guides developed specifically for mobile devices. Check out the numerous points of interest in Paris on the demo video http://www.mobile3dcity.com/

Virtual 3D city on iPad demo – Great stuff happening in the 3D world, see the demo video on YouTube. Think – combining this with GIS and other multi-dimensional data to create a 3D visual interface to the myriad of rich data about our cities currently hidden away and inaccessible.

Visual communication can mean many things. See the infosthetics website for some interesting uses of data visualisation to communicate information http://infosthetics.com/