This week has been another one of those informational weeks. I was recently recruited to be a part of the Atlanta transit project. This project is geared towards focusing on Atlanta’s public transportation history, particularly MARTA’s planned transit lines as well as existing ones. With this being said our plans are to create one all inclusive map of how MARTA’s transit lines were originally planned to extend to and where they actually ended up being today. With Atlanta’s new street car being prepared for release in the next upcoming months, we can see how public transit has impacted life downtown and how public transportation remains as an important issue for large cities like Atlanta.

When analyzing the “game plan” for the project I was taught how to search for archival maps of Atlanta’s MARTA plans through GSU’s libraries resources. With these maps we can therefore sift through all the maps and record all of our findings to avoid overlapping and duplicates.These maps are then used in a large and very resourceful software called Arcmaps where we can over lay these old transit plans over another realistic map that places it to be geographically accurate. All this information was very enlightening and interesting when learning how all the mapping processes work. This project is going to be an exciting and educational experience for myself who is a computer science major in order  to obtain some hands on experience with mapping. I am glad to be what you call a rookie introduced to all the experts and professionals, because I get to collaborate with the best in the field.

I am excited to see what new things I learn, and with that, an update on my other project:

As some of you may know I am working on creating an interactive 3D model of the block at Decatur st. and Peachtree center ave. (formerly known as Ivy st.). Progress has been made much slower than we anticiapted, but only because we did not account for the delays when  confronted with the challenges of 3D modeling and finding historically accurate, head-on pictures of the buildings on the street. So I have taken the initiative to continue to look for picture on the immense world wide web as well as attempt to gain experience and knowledge on how to help with the interactive part.

I took  the liberty to download Unity which has been decided to become our interactive game engine, and I have proceeded to watch lynda.com videos on the gaming software in order to be of more assistance to my project “mates”. As I have only just begun the long and informational process of learning how to create and build in this gaming software, I realize that I have only scratched the surface.

I will continue to update you all on these interesting and innovative projects and hope to share with all of you the journey and headaches that innovation takes, but ultimately show you all the amazing finished products. (although that may be further down the road)