Cube Cities Blog

The Cube Cities Blog

25 July 2016

Central Park Shadowing from Manhattan's Supertall Skyscrapers


In 2013 The Municipal Art Society of New York published a report called The Accidental Skyline that investigated the shadows that will be cast onto Central Park from the supertall skyscrapers under construction and planned for midtown and especially along 57th Street. The report contains examples of traditional urban planning diagrams that illustrate the shadow projections from different times of year and allow stakeholders to understand the extensive shadowing that many of these "pencil towers"will project over the park.

Using the shadow functionality now available with Cesium, we've created a visualization of this shadowing phenomenon from eight of the largest buildings recently constructed and planned for midtown. The video shows the shadows casted by the buildings as the sun rises and sets on September 21st, the same date chosen by the MAS as indicative of a typical fall day in Manhattan. Watch the visualization below:



Note: Video timeline is in UTC, which is 4hrs ahead of EST.

Visualizations like these are not only important urban planning tools but are necessary communication devices to help the public understand the impact to public spaces from large developments and allow for informed civic engagement.

Contact us to see the same shadowing visualization for any building in the world in our new Shadow Casting app.

19 July 2016

3D Floorplan Explorer App

Floor Plan Explorer: American Machine & Foundry Building
With the innovations that the Cesium mapping platform have made recently to easily convert and load SketchUp models into the 3D map its easy to combine our floor-level markup with a high-quality photo-textured model of a property to show precisely where information like floor plans are located. This is a compact web app that works on mobile devices and gives brokers and property managers an easy way to share floor plans and suite-level building information.

Here's a demo of a building in New York City.

15 July 2016

3D Manhattan Submarkets, Refined for CRE

Our floor-level visualizations of Manhattan are looking wonderful and performing very quickly with the latest version of Cesium. Customers are using them to showcase their commercial real estate databases in 3D to expose available office space, show tenant moves, highlight lease expiries and more. Below are two high resolution images of Lower Manhattan and the Park Avenue submarket, as mapped by CBRE. Open the images (right click and save them after opening them) and try printing them to see just how refined the image quality can be with Cesium. Great for presentations and quick communicating what's happening in one or many submarkets in New York City.

Lower Manhattan
Park Avenue Office District