This is virtual Singapore, a detailed map of the city that carries a stunning amount of granular data, room details about how much square footage there is in an individual building to how much sunlight pours through a window on a normal day. The 3D map, part of Singapore’s Smart Nation plan, was created by the French company Dassault Systems. The goal of the project was to pack as much data into the map as technically possible.
The first things that cities are coming in… they are looking to one as a flat world when you look into detailed view of the cities. They are looking to 2D layers of data, so you have files of information. You have Excel sheets of information. You have many type of source information which are disconnected. So you can have geospatial information. You can have static information. All those must be reconciled in your consistent model. The visual clarity and detail of the map are stunning, but the practical applications are so broad that Singapore officials like George Loh are just starting to understand what this program is capable of. So we could analyze whether which area is prone to flooding during heavy rainfalls or we can use the same platform to analyze the indifferent precincts, how we could add in measures to allow the air flow into precincts to cool down the precincts in hot weather.
The program also has the ability to add in real people using the tracking information from their cell phones and this could help city planners dealing with issues such as how to move people from one place to another quickly, say during an emergency evacuation. Now during the actual event, we could have actually live feed-in from the telcos, you know, you people carry cell phone where they go. That helps me know how many people and then we could evacuate the people who use based on the draft plan as well as the modernization or on-site. But tracking all those people without their consent presents a huge security and privacy issue, one that Loh says his team is taking seriously. We need to look in some measures to ensure privacy is maintained. We will not infringe a privacy policy of Singapore. But creators of the map hope that working with this much detail will help them plan and simulate a safe and citizen friendly Singapore years into the future.