The Future Central Park South Skyline

The Central Park South skyline will change dramatically in the years to come. Supertall skyscrapers along the 57th street corridor in Midtown will rise to great heights and reorient eyes upwards. The imagery below shows the view today and the 3D map shows the heights of the buildings now under construction.

Today's Midtown Skyline

Tomorrow's Midtown Skyline

Here's a quick video of a Cesium-based application that exposes floor level data in the Nordstrom Tower and One57.

New York Supertalls: 432 Park Avenue

We're particularly interested in visualizing the new super tall developments along 57th Street in Midtown. Here is imagery of 432 Park Avenue, the 1,396 foot tower that topped out late last year. Red floors indicate the suites remaining on the market in this luxury residential building developed by CIM Group.

We'll share more visualizations of the other mega developments under construction in Manhattan soon.

432 Park Avenue, background buildings colourized by building type.

The GM Building, 432 Park Avenue, and 745 Fifth Avenue from Grand Army Plaza

Cesium / Reality

Examining Hollywood's 3D Cities

We've been paying attention to the 3D city visualizations found in recent Hollywood movies. They can be described as immersive, wireframe building models that illustrate data across large urban areas. Military or emergency services actors typically utilize these wireframe city models to gain awareness of local activity in tactical scenarios. 

Floor-level building visualizations are found in these visualizations, used as the best way of understanding cities in these sci-fi visuals. Color choices are monotone and clean, simplistic geometric models populate the map to provide for transparency and insight.

Examples from the movies Transformers 3 and Hunger Games: Mockingjay are seen below.

Floor-level view of Chicago's Loop from Transformers 3

Transformers 3

Computerized view of The Capitol from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay

When considering the software options available today to recreate the sophisticated interfaces we see in cinema, there are few off-the-shelf products. It would be very difficult to deliver such high quality, real time city visualization systems without significant investment in proprietary technologies.

We're imagining these kind of visualization concepts as we build applications at Cube Cities. Below are examples of the Market Street corridor in San Francisco and the US Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles, visualized with our wireframe styles calibrated for tactical location finding.

San Francisco

Floors of the US Bank Tower in Downtown Los Angeles