LUCI - Land Use Consulting Innovations (Origins)

Our roots are in real-time 3D, GIS, fast databases, and visualization.  The original ideas for using 3D Visualization go back 15 years to when one of us was a systems engineer at SGI.  At the time we were working with a company called ITSpatial Inc. out of McClean Virginia.  They were value added resellers of MultiGen-Paradigm's VR simulation tools.  They were quite advanced at creating visual databases from city data.  Another contact at the time was Doug Pritchard at eMedia - Doug is an architect who is now in charge of the Glasgow, Scotland VR project for preserving their ancient buildings.  As a '3D graphics guru' at SGI at the time, I began to develop a vision of how to combine all these influences.  With the demise of SGI I jumped to Niagara College, which is a very forward looking college in the Niagara Region.  At Niagara College we formed the Centre for Advanced Visualization (CFAV).

CFAV's original target audience was manufacturing, and helping local manufacturing companies visualize their designs.  That didn't last long as the manufacturing sector really has no need of visualization services because they tend to only communicate internally.  Then manager of the facility, Toni Williams, heard of an opportunity to help the PeaceBridge Authority communicate its design ideas to the public.  This was the beginning of the facility's success.  Land Use Planning engineers have the unique problem that they have to explain their designs and intents to the general public.  3D Visualization is the easiest way to do this.  Thus began a new trend in colleges - applied research.

At CFAV applied research reached its pinnacle and became the model for research at colleges.  It also happened to coincide with the push for commercialization of research and the idea that research funds should be applied only to problems that have a commercial or industry focus.  As a consequence we became involved in both research and fulfilling commercial contracts for visualization.  The commercial contract gave CFAV the cash it needed to leverage funds from agencies such as OIT, NSERC and OCE.  OIT was the first funding agency to recgnize colleges on a even footing with Universities and deserves a great deal of credit in opening the door for applie research.  At CFAV I (as principla researcher) applied for, and got, an unprecedented 4 investments by OIT.  All of these leveraged against cash for commercial 3D Visualization services.

As we grew the facility the roster of impressive clients grew quickly.  Parsons Engineering, the City of Burlington, the City of Welland, Morrison Herschfield, and a number of others were attracted by new research into traffic simulation visualization, the use of GIS in visualization and a number of other research themes all aimed at increasing visual realism and the speed at which these visualizations could be assembled.

Once CFAV was factored off as CFAV Inc. it was time to explore those same ideas in the context of agriculture.  A background in remote sensing and 3D Visualization quickly brought us to the idea of Precision Agriculture and the development of the PrAgMatic system.  This in turn, through a grant from OMAFRA, brought us the ideas of Digital Soil Mapping (DSM) and Image Segmentation.

Over the last decade we have written countless grant proposals for support in the application of 3D Visualization to Land Use Planning.  We have achieved close to an 80% success rate, and have fulfilled a large number of research contracts.

Land Use Planning is a more general term than saying Urban Viz as it can encompass that and much more.  Case in point - a recent proposal to create a huge 3D model of a watershed that supports only agriculture.

We have a broad range of skills (and people) to deal with everything from GIS systems, to marketing and social networking, to programming and to 3D modelling and simulation.

Mike Duncan Ph.D