Densification of the Chicago Loop from 1870 to Present

Here's a quick floor-by-floor visualization of the growth of Chicago's commercial core since 1870. See the video below for the full growth animation.

Chicago Loop 1960

Chicago Loop 1980

This video shows buildings emerging as the decades pass and shows only buildings that currently exist today.



High resolution, fullscreen link

Floor-indexing San Francisco: Cube Cities API

Cube Cities now offers API access to our database of floor information for commercial and residential buildings downtown San Francisco. Our database contains over 20 attributes for every building, including floor-specific geospatial data. 

One key application for the Cube Cities API is enabling customer mapping of their internal private data sources such as tenant information. Another is to visualize floor-level data that regularly changes such as energy and water consumption. 

The Cube Cities API provides authenticated access to our dataset through a simple REST API. Contact us for pricing and license terms.

The imagery below illustrates Cube Cities floor data relative to Google's autogenerated 3D imagery, which now provides a complete virtual representation of urban San Francisco. 

One Rincon Hill - South Tower

Transamerica Pyramid

Four Embarcadero Center

Millenium Tower 

345 California Center

555 California Street

Cesium: The Future of Virtual Globes

Cesium is a free, open-source virtual globe platform for web browsers that uses WebGL to create sophisticated 3D maps without a plugin. Cesium uses a geospatial data schema called CZML that can draw building models, lines and polygons overtop of base maps. 

Cube Cities building data such as floors, outlines, internal building cores and multigeometry shapes can be drawn and distributed using Cesium. Using the Cesium platform Cube Cities building data can now be seen with base map data from Bing Maps, ESRI, OpenStreet Maps and Stamen Design.

Learn more about Cesium here.

Cube Cities building geometry in Cesium with the Stamen Toner base map

The video below is an example of a Cube Cities multigeometry building model (500 West Madison Street in Chicago's West Loop) drawn in Cesium with a cycled series of open source base maps.



Fullscreen, high resolution link

Cube Cities: One of Alberta’s 25 Most Innovative Organizations

From Alberta Venture Magazine:

http://albertaventure.com/2014/08/cube-cities/

Cube Cities

Aug 1, 2014

by Alberta Venture Staff

Senior executive: Greg Angevine
Founded: 2010
Headquartered: Calgary

There is lots of free data available on the Internet about real estate for rent – which buildings, how many square feet, cost. But the information has also been, well, flat. Cube Cities is changing that. Over the past four years, Cube Cities has developed software that takes real estate data and creates three-dimensional animations. Now, landlords can drag their Excel sheets full of building information, space availability and tenant listings directly into Google Earth. As a renter, you can watch interactive videos showing you what floors in a building are available, with colour coding to delineate different prices and other search criteria.

But as CEO Greg Angevine says, the software can do much more than that. “What we’ve built is a floor-level visualization,” he says. “Commercial real estate is the obvious application, but we’re also talking about developing a visualization system for first responders in the U.S. and we’re talking to the development authority in Singapore about basically building a city dashboard.”

Cube Markets Flight of Brookfield's Portfolio - Downtown Toronto

The Brookfield Office Properties portfolio in Toronto

This image shows the available office space market in Toronto (in red) and the Brookfield Office Properties portfolio downtown Toronto.

Brookfield office properties in blue, available office space in red.

This video flies to each property in the Brookfield Property Partners (NYSE: BPY; TSX: BPY.UN) portfolio interacting with the available office space market downtown Toronto.

Cube Cities @ TEDx Piraí

Cube Cities is pleased to have our city data visualizations featured by John Jung, Co-Founder of the Intelligent Community Forum in his recent TEDx presentation in Piraí, Brazil.

In his presentation, John discusses the state of the smart cities movement around the world and the implications for society. Cube Cities visualizations of building data in Lower Manhattan and downtown Calgary are used to explain the emergence of intelligent communities. Watch John's presentation here.

Google's 3D City Rollout Across Canada

Over the past several months Google has been rolling out new autogenerated 3D imagery across Canada. Large sections of metro Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, Oshawa/Ajax and Montréal have been released to date. The maps below show the boundaries of this new 3D coverage. Examine the skyline imagery of Vancouver and Montréal to see the fine detail.

Cube Cities can deploy its building visualization technology to any city using this new 3D imagery. The complete coverage of every building in these cities makes them come alive in Google Earth and enables very high quality city data visualization using the Cube Cities technology platform. 

Toronto, Ottawa, Quebec City and Halifax are the largest centres in Canada that have not yet been released in 3D. Subsequent releases have included Victoria, Peterborough and Greater Sudbury (week of July 21st) and Saskatoon (July 29th).

Download a KML file to these 3D imagery boundaries from Cube Cities here.

Vancouver Skyline

Vancouver

Calgary

Edmonton

Winnipeg

Regina

Oshawa / Ajax

Montréal Skyline

Montréal

Visualizing Risk to Buildings

Cube Cities now provides 3D risk mapping services to organizations that maintain data on different types of threats that exist for large residential or commercial properties. With the Cube Cities platform its easy to drop an Excel file with coordinates or building addresses and instantly see risk proximity visualizations. Even very specific floor-level visualizations are possible to explain hazards or danger in a building. 3D risk mapping services are now available in all major North American cities.

Watch the video below to see how Cube Cities identifies buildings of highest risk of damage from the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, wandering towards Park Avenue from East 52nd Street in Midtown Manhattan.




Fullscreen, high resolution link: https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/_mB_SaP5Rcg&hd=1

Below is an animated GIF version of the video created by a posting on this product from Nerdist.com

Styling 3D Building Data

The Cube Cities platform allows customers to create and style 3D maps of dense urban areas using their own building data to produce effective communication tools for real estate. Our large dataset of building coordinates for over 25 cities in North America and Europe can be styled to help customers find specific data in dense urban areas like San Francisco, Chicago and New York. It's easy to load and explore real estate data in these Cube Cities applications by simply dragging a Excel file into Google Earth.

The examples below illustrate some different styling options for visualizing building and floor data in San Francisco's Market Street corridor and surrounding financial district.

3D Visualization of Building Ownership by REIT and Large Cap Firms

Cube Cities visualizes building ownership in selected major downtown markets. See ownership by REIT and large cap firms in downtown Toronto and Calgary in the market videos below. Companies surveyed: Brookfield, Dundee REIT, H&R REIT, CREIT, Allied REIT, Artis REIT, Morguard REIT, Cominar. (Q1 2014)

Downtown Toronto:



Downtown Calgary