For Urban Vision 3D’s smart city technology, not even the sky's the limit

By Riley Kaminer

James Irving is a true Miami native: he’s been here long enough for the hospital where he was born to shutter its doors, succumbing to the inevitable churn of the Miami Beach real estate market. So Irving knows our streets like the back of his hand – but he’s also got a trick up his sleeves that helps him truly understand the contours of our city.

It’s the core product of Urban Vision 3D: a web-based, maximally high resolution platform that essentially creates a digital version of a city. While it is clearly a professional platform, the experience of traveling through Urban Vision 3D is closer to a video game (dare we say Grand Theft Auto?) in quality and usability than a consumer-focused tool like Google Maps.

Toggling between Google’s satellite imagery and Urban Vision 3D’s offering is not dissimilar to the jarring experience of swapping your Apple Vision Pro headset for an iPad. It’s truly a next generation leap.

There’s no magic in Urban Vision 3D’s special sauce – just a ton of good old fashioned hard work. The company takes hundreds of thousands of pictures from a plane and stitches them together to make lush 3D maps. To give context of just how high quality these images are: while most of Google imagery (taken via satellites rather than aircraft) covers between seven and a half centimeters per pixel, Urban Vision 3D covers just three centimeters per pixel. When you’re mapping out a whole city, that detail adds up to create a much richer user experience.

This technology was pioneered by Israeli startup Simplex3D, which has upwards of 13 years of experience. Urban Vision 3D, where Irving is VP and co-founder, is the Miami-based provider of Simplex3D’s core technology, adapted to the needs of U.S. consumers.

So far, the company has mapped out New York City in its entirety and Miami. Irving told Refresh Miami why Urban Vision 3D decided to tackle the Big Apple first: “It’s one of the most challenging areas, with the FAA and all the other regulations and boroughs. If we could conquer New York, we thought that would be a great first step.” And conquer they did – empowering them to move onto Miami, which was chosen both because it is the company’s home as well as a city increasingly seeking and in need of smart city solutions.

The use cases for Urban Vision 3D’s ecosystems are vast, spanning civil engineering, real estate (the industry in which Irving cut his teeth), public sector, and security. The applications are vast, including measuring spaces with mind-boggling accuracy, as Irving illustrated: “We can measure a roof probably more accurately than you and I can go on the roof and measure it ourselves – within 10 centimeters.”

Perhaps the most useful and unique aspect of the platform is the interoperability. “The entire point of the platform is to blend data. The visual is super sexy, but it’s all about the added data layers.” For instance, a user can lay county data about parcels over 311 calls in an area over future developments – all in one click. In a rapidly growing city like Miami that is facing challenges such as housing shortages, traffic congestion, climate change, and more, having all of this data at your fingertips is critical in making smart decisions.

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Riley Kaminer

I am a Miami-based technology researcher and writer with a passion for sharing stories about the South Florida tech ecosystem. I particularly enjoy learning about GovTech startups, cutting-edge applications of artificial intelligence, and innovators that leverage technology to transform society for the better. Always open for pitches via Twitter @rileywk or www.RileyKaminer.com.