The Major Increase In Available Office Space Downtown Calgary, Visually

From a landlords market to a tenants market in just over one year. Those changing market conditions downtown Calgary caused by the low price of oil reducing demand for office space can be seen through these data visualizations from Altus InSite. This 15-month time lapse highlights the number of available options for office space, distinguishing head lease and sublease space options as blue and green, respectively. Sublease space (office space leased from an existing tenant who has a direct lease with the landlord) is first to enter the market as large energy tenants look to reduce costs by shrinking their occupied real estate and "subleasing" floors or partial areas of floors in buildings they occupy.

This 3D visualization of Calgary's office market is interactive and can be explored on Altus InSite's 3D View for Canadian office markets.

The increase in available office space downtown Calgary over 15 months.
(Click to expand)

The same time period shown from another angle on downtown Calgary.

Visit to One Canada Square @ Canary Wharf

We recently had the opportunity to visit the Canary Wharf Group's offices at One Canada Square in London's Docklands district. They have a panoramic view of the City of London from their 39th floor office. The company has built an impressive physical model (pictured below) of the existing Canary Wharf buildout that includes models of the proposed and under-construction towers in the quickly expanding business district. The graphic directly below shows the location of their office space in our floor visualization app. London's Canary Wharf is a perfect example of a dense urban area where floor-level data visualization has many applications to communicate the varied aspects of large-scale mixed use development.

39th Floor of One Canada Square (click to expand)

The 1.2M square foot, 50 floor One Canada Square

Canary Wharf Group's model presentation room

Canary Wharf Group's model presentation room

View West towards the City from the 39th Floor of One Canada Square

New York City Residential Listings in 3D

Available units highlighted in red at One57, click to enlarge

Here's a look at an application we've recently developed that can visualize residential listings for New York City. This application allows us to fetch all listings in one or more buildings and use high quality phototextured models of the subject properties. An example is shown above with the supertall skyscraper One57 in Midtown Manhattan. 

Combining residential listing data feeds with 3D interfaces like those developed by Cube Cities is a powerful way to analyze market data. It becomes possible to see exactly where space is located in a building and so the views and floorplans are more easily understood. Users can even see the real-world views automatically with this type of 3D application.

Our residential application can be used to showcase sale or rental listings and can easily receive data from standard industry data feeds or internal private data using Excel files.

Cube Cities @ Carleton University

We were honoured to present our work at Cube Cities at the Tools & Technologies for Campus and Building Cluster Sustainability Management Workshop at Carleton University this week. Professor Liam O'Brien organized an outstanding and very well attended event showcasing the latest in data visualization techniques for building energy and design management. The NSERC-sponsored event hosted approximately 50 researchers and industry representatives to discuss the current state of the art and future industry and researcher needs. Cube Cities was included on a panel discussing building performance data and design visualization with groups from Autodesk, Carleton University, UBC and the University of Calgary.

Additionally, it was exciting to learn about a new project at Carleton that is using Cesium to visualize energy and water usage data in buildings on campus. Learn more about that project at the Human-Building Interaction Lab here.

Cesium-leveraged example imagery of a building analytics app from Shawn Shi (and team) at Carleton's HBI Lab

Events like these remind us of the versatility of the Cube Cities technology to energy management and BIM techniques that have become core to best practices in real estate development and portfolio management.

Altus InSite Launches Cesium-based, 3D Search for Office Space

The updated AltusInSite.com website with the Cube Cities 3D Search Portal

We've launched a new search portal on the AltusInSite homepage that uses the latest Cesium 3D mapping software. This new portal replaces our previous Google Earth-based 3D map that had been running on the AltusInSite homepage for the last year. Because we've migrated to Cesium from Google Earth, the new portal is cross-platform and cross-browser compatible. 

Additionally, our 3D office market coverage has been expanded to include Ottawa, which joins Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montréal in our 3D search results.

Visit the AltusInSite homepage to begin exploring our 3D office markets with Cesium or click any of the direct city links below.

Downtown Toronto Office Market

Direct Links to Live Office Market Data in 3D

Downtown Vancouver

Downtown Calgary

Downtown Toronto

Downtown Ottawa

Downtown Montréal

Cube Cities Real Estate Videos for Retail: CrossIron Mills

Here's a look at a video solution we produce for real estate companies in the retail sector. This example created for Ivanhoé Cambridge's CrossIron Mills shopping centre in Calgary demonstrates their need to communicate property information to prospective retail tenants who are not familiar with the location. With short videos like these we can quickly describe the area demographics, local economic development activity, travel times and infrastructure capacities to retailers considering tenancy in the property.

These videos are created with Google Earth Pro and use customized data visualization elements from Cube Cities.

Our New Cesium-based API

Cube Cities now offers an API that can visualize any 3D building along with floor-level data using a simple to use URL. We're using Cesium to deliver this solution so it works with any modern web browser as well as iOS and Android tablets.

The Empire State Building in the Cube Cities API with selected floors highlighted

Our API allows users to easily highlight any floors using their own property data sources using parameters in the URL. This means that the API can be used to add a real-time 3D visualization of property data inside of a customers existing application without any need to share property data with Cube Cities.

Background buildings enabled in the Penn Station submarket

Functionality to display background buildings, show a floor plan, change the base map, adjust the camera position or use high quality phototextured 3D building models is also possible. Contact us for a demonstration.

A How-To Guide For Exploring 3D Buildings in Cesium

Cesium is a great way to explore models of 3D buildings in their actual locations on Earth. Cesium is also an easy (and free) means to embed 3D models on a web page so they can be explored by users on nearly any platform. Here's a quick How-To on loading a building model from SketchUp into Cesium.

Step 1
Create a new model or open an existing model in SketchUp. To find a model of a real building use Trimble's 3D Warehouse. Download the model in SketchUp format. For this example we've shared our model of the Shanghai World Financial on the 3D Warehouse.

Trimble's 3D Warehouse

Step 2
Export a Collada (.dae) file from SketchUp. When doing so its best to create a new folder and export both the .dae file and Collada assets into the new folder. For this example we've exported the file to a folder called WFC.

Compress the Collada folder containing the export into a new file. We now have WFC.zip.

click to expand

Step 3
Use the Cesium-to-glTF Converter tool on the Cesiumjs.org website to generate a .gltf file from the compressed model folder. Simply drag the WFC.zip into the box and the Converter will return a glTF file. The model will be displayed on the page once it's successfully converted.

Cesium-to-glTF Converter page

Step 4
Copy the glTF file to a webserver where you will be running an instance of Cesium. We'll assume Cesium is already deployed on the webserver.


Step 5
Both the .glTF file and the model's coordinates need to be pointed to in the Cesium startup script.

Remember that Collada models are not geolocated. This means that the latitude and longitude of the model needs to be included in the Cesium loading script. If the model has already been geolocated we can find the latitude and longitude in SketchUp from the Model Info window.

Finding geolocation in SketchUp 15.2

SketchUp reports the model has Latitude: 31.236433N and Longitude: 121.502979E

The directional 'N' and 'E' can be omitted and we can record the values into the Cesium script in the following format:

var viewer = new Cesium.Viewer('cesiumContainer');var entity = viewer.entities.add({

    position : Cesium.Cartesian3.fromDegrees(121.502979, 31.236433),

    model : {

        uri : 'WFC.gltf'

    }});

viewer.trackedEntity = entity;

Step 6
Open and explore the model in Cesium! Click here to see our example page for the Shanghai World Financial Center. Note the page opens directly to a correct birds-eye view of the building model. Remember that because Cesium is amazing and uses WebGL this page will open and behave identically in current web browsers on Mac, PC, iOS or Android.

Shanghai Financial World Center, 100 Century Avenue, Pudong, Shanghai, China

Keep in mind that you can use the Base Map Picker to see different maps around your model no matter where its located on Earth. Imagery providers include Bing Maps, ESRI, OpenStreet-Map and more.

Base Map Picker in Cesium

Contact us with any questions or for help setting up your own 3D building model in Cesium.

The Density of the 'XYZ' Buildings at Rockefeller Center

The 'XYZ' Buildings

These three enormous buildings in midtown are collectively known as the 'XYZ' buildings, each sharing a similar slab-design that maximizes floor area. The Exxon Building (1971), McGraw-Hill Building (1969) and Time-Life Building (1958) represent the expansion of Rockefeller Center in the 1960s. Harrison, Abramovitz & Harris was the architectural firm that designed each building.

Combined with 1211 Avenue of Americas, which was built in 1973 and also designed by Harrison's firm, these four massive buildings comprise nearly 8.7 million square feet of office and retail space. 

McGraw-Hill: 2,500,000 sqft

Exxon Building: 2,300,000 sqft

Time-Life Building: 1,970,000 sqft

1211 Avenue of the Americas: 1,925,425 sqft

Total = 8,698,425 sqft

When standing in Times Square or on Sixth Avenue anywhere from 47th to 49th Street, these buildings project a feeling of commercial power and corporate establishment.

The imagery below illustrates these buildings in their midtown context with the background buildings of midtown visible in the last image.

8.7M sqft
(click to expand)

260 & 261 Madison Avenue + 1 Vanderbilt massing

The Cesium mapping software makes it easy to load and manipulate high quality photo textured (Collada) models of office buildings and articulate them with property data. The imagery below showcase these Grand Central-district buildings that were both built in 1953. Web applications that illustrate buildings in this method and can reveal floor level data are products provided by Cube Cities.

260 & 261 Madison Avenue

Floor information highlighted on 261 Madison Avenue

The imagery below compares the scale of 260 & 261 Madison Avenue with One Vanderbilt, the supertall skyscraper proposed West of Grand Central Terminal on 42nd Street.

For comparison purposes, the rooftop heights of 260 & 261 Madison are 300 and 347 feet, the proposed height of 1 Vanderbilt is 1,514 feet. SL Green Realty is the developer behind 1 Vanderbilt.

One Vanderbilt = Orange
260 & 261 Madison Avenue = Blue