CityViewR: open data for smart cities, in VR

Aimed at decision-makers and data-analysts, CityViewR combines the best of the Web and VR. It uses open data to collect low regional statistical data which users can combine with their own data. CityViewR presents these data in an immersive room-scale setting, letting users view these data in new ways. Which hopefully leads to a better insight in social and economical developments in the city, and in turn to more evidence-based policy making.

About the demo

The demo presents data about Amsterdam. This city was mainly chosen because the winner of the Virtuleap Hackathon will earn a spot there (at the little blue dot). Data on city district level ('wijk' in Dutch) come from the OData service of CBS, the Dutch statistical institute. Because data are loaded in real-time, all variable labels are in Dutch. By default, the first view will show the distribution of migrant groups across the city. Clicking on bars will show the statistical figures. Data source: CBS Open data Wijken en buurten 2015. To show that CityViewR can also deal with microdata, we prepared a synthetic dataset derived from an open data source on energy labels. Click 'own data' to view more than 4.000 data points (green correlates with low energy consumption, red with high energy consumption). Data are read from a csv file containing latitude, longitude and values.

Best viewed with HTC Vive in the experimental Chromium VR browser. Other configurations fail regularly unfortunately. Reloading the page sometimes helps. Remember, this is still very experimental stuff.

What's next?

This is a prototype. CityViewR can easily be extended to cover all Dutch municipalities, and probably many other cities. Prerequisities at the moment are that there needs to be some GEOJSON information available to map the data, and of course a data API.

On our todo-list: