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.

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.

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

Timelapse of Office Space Availability Downtown Montréal

The video below shows a time lapse of changing office market conditions downtown Montréal from Q3 2014 to Q2 2016. This is a data product for the five largest Canadian cities that can now be provided by Altus Data Solutions. Note that this video hides all of the non-commercial buildings as well as the commercial buildings that do not have vacancy. Explore the Montréal office market here.

Commercial buildings with available space in Downtown Montréal

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.