Roadmap Proposal: Interactive Buildings & Street Objects

OpenGrid has been built around the concept of displaying point-data on a map. The points displayed on the map can be customized, ranging from what data is displayed to the aesthetics of the dot itself (e.g., color, size, opacity). The points can be further customized to be displayed as a heatmap, choropleth, or tile map--but these are aesthetic aggregations of point data. Buildings and streets have been presented as context to the point-data. That is, data is displayed on a map which is often display on top of a street or building. The street and building provide no information, but provide context to the dot.

There are several businesses cases where the building or streets contain information and would be valuable for the user to "interact" with buildings or streets. By interaction, the user is able to click on the building to see data associated with that building. Likewise, clicking on street "segments" could yield information about that street.

Examples of street segment data includes:

• Street name
• Segment ID
• Traffic counts
• Road conditions (weather)
• Road conditions (surface issues)
• Potholes reported on segment

Examples of building data includes:

• Building address
• Building identifiers
• Building characteristics (e.g., stories, year-built)
• Aggregated count of events at building
• Energy consumption data

New search functionality

Right now, searching on OpenGrid essentially consists of polygons on a map. Some are pre-defined while some are user-defined. For instance, searching for events along a street will often require the user to carefully align a 'line' polygon with a street.

Alternative, interactive buildings and streets could introduce new search functionality. Conceivably, a user could click on the street segment(s) and conduct a query for events on that street(s). Likewise, users could click on building(s) and conduct queries for events at that location(s).

Google Street View

Clicking on a building or street could also provide users the option to present a street view of that area. For buildings, Google's interior views could also provide an interior shot of buildings as well.

Interactive buildings and street segments should also consider new search functionality and interaction.

Potential for 3-D interaction in later interactions

Interacting with buildings at a 2-D level can open for a more meaningful bridge into a 3-D environment. When users interact with a 2-D objects, over time, they will begin to request to interact with individual floors of data. As building sensors, micro-grids, and sister-projects develop (e.g., UI Labs), that data can begin to be included into the OpenGrid platform. Introducing 2-D interaction will then open the possibility of introducing meanginful 3-D interaction.