Geomapping, Virtual Landscapes

University of Toronto’s Center for Landscape Research has developed digital tools designed to explore existing landscape conditions and test proposed designs from a multidimensional perspective under the direction of John Danahy and Robert Wright. For over 25 years, the CLR has experimented with real-time and immersive environments by allowing users to represent and experience a variety of landscapes more accurately.

In the early 1980s, the team pioneered a series of revolutionary tools, including PolyTRIM, a software program that provides a toolkit for the interactive representation and modeling of landscape, synthesizing multiple technologies and digital media types into one complete virtual work environment. PolyTRIMs toolkit includes real-time rendering, ray-tracing exports, paint, CAD, GIS, photogrammetry, parametric modeling, visual assessment, exhibition interface, and network collaboration tools.

The immersive lab at the CLR enables students to experience designed landscapes once limited to their imaginations entirely. The lab is a room around which large screens are placed to create a panoramic effect. Users can travel through this 4D-stimulated screen, change the direction of their progress as they ‘stroll’ or ‘drive,’ look from side to side and change their viewsheds. Users can interface with the landscape to adjust the time of day, season, and climatic conditions. Vegetation can be adapted to correspond with environmental changes; the visualization of a mature tree in full springtime bloom transforms into one that is now winter-stark and bare of leaves. The CLR lab effectively engages users with the landscape by actively involving them in choosing the parameters of the scene during their animated journey through the landscape.?