The Research Cluster "Smart Communities and Technologies" (Smart CT) at TU Wien will provide the scientific underpinnings for next-generation complex smart city and communities infrastructures. Cities are ever-evolving, complex cyber physical systems of systems covering a magnitude of different areas. The initial concept of smart cities and communities started with cities utilizing communication technologies to deliver services to their citizens and evolved to using information technology to be smarter and more efficient about the utilization of their resources. In recent years however, information technology has changed significantly, and with it the resources and areas addressable by a smart city have broadened considerably. They now cover areas like smart buildings, smart products and production, smart traffic systems and roads, autonomous driving, smart grids for managing energy hubs and electric car utilization or urban environmental systems research.

3D spatialization creates the link between the internet of cities infrastructure and the actual 3D world in which a city is embedded in order to perform advanced computation and visualization tasks. Sensors, actuators and users are embedded in a complex 3D environment that is constantly changing. Acquiring, modeling and visualizing this dynamic 3D environment are the challenges we need to face using methods from Visual Computing and Computer Graphics. 3D Spatialization aims to make a city aware of its 3D environment, allowing it to perform spatial reasoning to solve problems like visibility, accessibility, lighting, and energy efficiency.

This is a joint project with the civil engineering faculty and several companies. Its aim is the development of an Integrated Framework “Housing 4.0”; a digital platform supporting integrated planning and project delivery through coupling various digital tools and databases, like Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Design to Production and Parametric Habitat Designer.

Our goal is to exploit the potential of BIM for modular, off-site housing assembly in order to improve planning and construction processes, reduce cost and construction time and allow for mass customization will be explored.

The novel approach in this project is user-involvement; which has been neglected in recent national and international projects on off-site, modular construction supported by digital technologies. A parametric design tool should allow different stakeholders to explore both high-level and low-level options and their impact on the construction project so that mutually optimal solutions can be found easier.

The project develops new procedural modeling methods for interior scenes.

The core idea of the project is the enhancement of current state-of-the art navigation systems by visual information obtained from geo-referenced photographs. The aim is to establish a suite of tools together with algorithmic foundations that will be essential for any large scale image-based guidance project.

The aim of the GAMEWORLD project is to procedurally generate cities, villages and other game environments mainly to be used in tomorrow's video games.