Salzburg, Austria, First Pilot City of Autodesk Digital Cities Initiative

Autodesk (CA, USA) has named the city of Salzburg, Austria, the first pilot city in its new Digital Cities initiative. The Digital City initiative provides a collaborative environment for visualising, analysing and simulating the future impact of urban design and development at a city-wide scale.

Autodesk has chosen to work with Salzburg to help them integrate their city data into a 3D model of their city. This combination of city data with realistic visualisation and simulation tools can allow Salzburg to view and interact with the city landscape, as well as analyse the impact of future urban planning, tourism and economic development projects before they are built.Scientific personnel from Salzburg University's Centre of Geoinformation are involved with the implementation of Digital City for the city of Salzburg.

A Digital City allows stakeholders from the public, city government, construction, and business communities to work together to understand how many different proposals could impact the urban environment by experiencing the future of the city before it becomes real.

The goal of this pilot program is for Salzburg to be able to bring together 3D models of above and below ground features in an open platform that supports secure and robust integration of CAD, building information modeling, geospatial, civil engineering, and infrastructure data over a wide geographic area.

By combining this data with realistic visualisation, analysis and simulation tools, a Digital City can deliver an intuitive and compelling way to understand the impact of plans and proposals from any point in time and from any point of view.