About
Crystal Wilson founded PlaceVision in 2001 to help urban planners and architects communicate effectively online with stakeholders and communities. She helps clients make visible what is otherwise misunderstood, unseen, or only imagined.
She received her Master’s in Urban Planning from University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), concentrating in Electronic Visualization in a way that merged her interests in technology and sociology. She later became the Assistant Director of the University’s Great Cities Urban Data Visualization lab working on projects for the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) and Northeast Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC now CMAP). The CTA project involved constructing DVD’s from photos taken along the route of every CTA train and from many stations. The purpose was to allow planners to visualize without taking the ride themselves.
Crystal has the ability to explain technology in plain English. She is currently writing a book that demystifies web-based tools for firms and prepares them for what’s to come. For clients, she translates needs assessments into technology blueprints then implements them.
Prior to PlaceVision she worked as a communications coordinator for local government, a historical commission, and a planning firm. Projects included downtown revitalization work with the Alabama Historical Commission while an undergraduate at Auburn University; a website, Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House And Its Neighborhoods under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant; and the construction of a 3-D model of the Kenosha, WI downtown district that showed alternative uses for available lots in a redevelopment area.
In 2002 I was an urban planning graduate student in Chicago at the University of Illinois; I had a vision that in the near future we would be able to project buildings and city plans onto the physical environment and I was determined to learn how. Virtual Reality was the best tool to augment an environment at the time. I collaborated on a manual for urban planning virtual reality that is now outdated but some of the same principles apply to AR. I wrote in the VR manual, “The user within a real time display has free range of movement. The user can walk, fly, or examine any object within the scene by moving closer and walking around it. Preselected viewpoints allow the user to travel easily from one place to another. Within a simulation, the user can manipulate buildings by moving and scaling them…”
AR will allow us to see an alternate view through our phone’s screen of the built environment. We will be able to virtually manipulate buildings such as scaling and moving them, tagging features, and adding street furniture and trees. Our virutal and physical worlds will blend and infinately connect those that have been there to those that are present in the space.
AR tools are becoming increasingly available but it is still a mystery how to use them. My intention is to focus on the use of Argon browser to extend the capabilities of a web site into a geospatial intelligence that will enable architects and planners to create more livable and engaging environments.
