NEMAC's Jim Fox to Present Before City Council

NEMAC's Director of Operations and Research Associate, Jim Fox, will be making a presentation to the Asheville City Council on Tuesday, June 12th. For the past year, Jim has been a member of the Floodplain Damage Reduction Taskforce, a committee organized by the City Mayor to analyze ways in which Asheville could reduce the amount of damage caused by floods in the City's floodplain. The group was made up of local Businessmen, City Engineers, the French Broad Riverkeeper, and many others from Asheville and the Town of Black Mountain. For the past year, this group has met most Friday mornings to discuss the issues. NEMAC has also supported this effort by providing many maps and graphics that the group was able to use as resources to base many of their decisions. On June 12th, they will make their final recommendations to City Council. Click here to view the presentation:

http://www.ashevillenc.gov/WorkArea/showcontent.aspx?id=7980

NEMAC to Serve GIS Data Via Gaming Engines

As a part of its RENCI mission, NEMAC has begun research that will place real GIS data into game engines. Game engines have the advantage of rendering nearly three orders of magnitude faster than such specialized tools as Visual Nature Studio, and at nearly the same level of realism. In addition, game engines potentially allow for multiple users at different locations to interact in the same virtual environment via the internet. For more information about this effort, please visit the following link to a Wiki created by a NEMAC student:

http://gis-game.pbwiki.com/

NEMAC Research Students Compete in National Google Sketchup Competition

During the 2007 spring semester, two NEMAC Research Students have prepared UNCA Campus 3D models for submission to Google's "Build Your Campus in 3D Competition" (http://contest.sketchup.com/entry.php?rules=1). Egg Davis, a Computer Science and Multi-Media Major, and Lisa Schleicher, an Environmental Studies Major and UNCA 2007 graduate, have built the models for the competition. This work was completed as a prototype and in addition to similar work that the students have done for the Biltmore Village area using Google's Sketchup software. All of this work has been in support of the RENCI mission. By learning how to build 3D models such as these, community planners, decision makers, and emergency responders can all gain a different view of the built environment and potential hazards to this environment, such as floods. For campus, having 3D models such as these could better enable transportation and other planning issues to be addressed. The models the students have built could eventually be visible in GoogleEarth, and should the students place within the top 7, they will win a 3-day trip to Colorado to tour Google and participate in several modeling workshops.

NEMAC/UNCA/RENCI Sponsored Research Featured in the Citizen-Times

Research that has taken place as a part of the UNCA RENCI effort was featured on the front page of the Business Section in Wednesday's Asheville Citizen-Times paper:

http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200770605113

The article focuses on NEMAC collaborators such as MAP and their efforts to create multimedia presentations for an inflatable GeoDome. NEMAC was responsible for creating and providing many of the dataset content for the GeoDome.

NEMAC Visual Content Seen at The 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth

GIS Visualizations created by NEMAC staff and students through its RENCI mission have been converted into "Dome" content through various MAP collaborators and will be presented at the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth June 5-9 in San Fransisco http://www.isde5.org/index.htm. (Read the Press Release: http://www.appliedvis.org/pdf/ISDE5_news_release.pdf.) This effort represents some of the latest technology in 3D Visualization. To see some sample clips of what will be shown, click here: http://www.appliedvis.org/.

NEMAC Featured on the Sunday Front Page

The Asheville Citizen-Times featured a story on the front page of the Sunday, June 3rd edition titled "Tools could lessen hurricane flooding", which talked about efforts that NEMAC and its collaborators are undertaking to help plan and prepare for future floods. The article can be viewed online at http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200770602050. Be sure to check the online version for a link to one of NEMAC's latest 3D Visualization prototypes.

NEMAC Student Wins Local Map Competition

Josh O'Conner, a recent graduate of UNCA and a NEMAC Research Student, who is now working as a NEMAC contractor, recently submitted one of the map prototypes that he has been working on that will serve as an update to the current UCNA campus map to a local map competition. The competition was through The Western North Carolina GIS Users Group http://wncgis.blogspot.com/ and was sponsored by Mallaprops Bookstore. Congratulations Josh!