(Re)Tweet City - A great use of CityEngine from en-topia

Please take a look at the outstanding blog post here from en-topia. They have even been kind enough to provide sample rules and instructions through GitHub

If you're not into the developer world or like me just getting into it, the number of API's seems to increase ten-fold by the day into a dizzying array of wonderful tools that allow access to all kinds of exciting data. One of these API's is the Twitter API. My very shallow knowledge of the API is that it can be used to carry out a search of tweets, providing back a list that, if geotagged, can be mapped.

The guys at en-topia have taken the simple 2D mapping of Twitter data another step forward by applying geotagged tweets to buildings. The 2D building data is plugged into CityEngine and a rule file is applied giving the building an extrusion based on the number of tweets located in or around that building. From what I can take from their article they are able to take live feeds from Twitter (or a search result over a given period of time) and feed this into CityEngine, outputting a time-lapse style video. Of course the tweets can be applied to any 2D data you wish, in another example they show the data applied to a 1km grid instead of buildings. Depending on the scale of the area you wish to show this is a great example of how easily CityEngine can be used to create the same type of output but for different inputs but based on the same attributes.

I guess the next step, which is in the hands of Esri, would be to make it possible to create a 3D Web Scene that itself can handle ongoing updates and show 'live' data that is supplied by a pipeline of (Python?) processes.

This is such a great use of CityEngine, I think anyone who sees this and understands the power of the Twitter API and/or CityEngine instantly sees the potential to make something similar for their area of expertise.