Galileo describes infrastructure

I’ve been attending Autodesk University from the comfort of my little office, via the Autodesk Virtual conference at au.autodesk.com. While there are many, many things to blog about (such as: it’s super cool, but who really needs WiFi on the Pi bicycle shown during the Manufacturing keynote yesterday?), one of the most interesting new developments is Autodesk’s latest entry in the 3D cities field. If you were at AU 2008, you may remember the segment during the opening keynote when Autodesk showcased a fly-through of a digital city. I think the project was to plan the route for a royal wedding in Scandinavia — how would the motorcade pass enough citizens who wanted to congratulate the happy couple while maintaining security? What route minimizes traffic disruptions? Where can security and safety personnel be placed to greatest benefit? How to manage crowd flow? Autodesk is now working on the next phase of that type of technology, an extension to Civil 3D that the company has code-named Project Galileo. It’s not quite at Autodesk Labs yet, but the demos in the Infrastructure keynote showed that is intended to be a planning tool that creates 3D city models from civil, GIS and building data and then enables that model to be extended, intelligently. Galileo should enable users to conceptualize space usage before getting into the details on an infrastructure change — it’s almost like sketching in mechanical design, but with Civil 3D capturing actual data so that a sketch of a pond in an office park is related to the cost of building and maintaining that pond, for example, to use in planning the cost of the project. But a purely data-driven approach doesn’t necessarily work with all audiences. As an Autodesk presenter said during the keynote, “Think about visualization as part of the process, not the end of it.” In civil projects, obtaining approvals is usually one of the trickiest and most time-consuming tasks, since it often involves presenting the project to people who can’t “see” the final result from engineering drawings or architectural renderings. Autodesk is positioning Galileo to enable planners, engineers, GIS analysts, project managers, and designers to help stakeholders understand infrastructure projects; the visualizations that are possible once all of the data is collated and accessible can be very realistic and help set the project in the context of its surroundings. Since I participated virtually in this session, I couldn’t gauge the audience’s response to Galileo. But I bet it will become a very popular download once available. EPCs (engineering, procurement and construction companies) and other service providers are looking for technology like this to give them more services to sell to their clients, while owners are always looking for ways to streamline communications about new projects. If you were at the session, what did you think? Does Galileo fit into your plans?