Nick Young from the Centre for eResearch has been working with Vasso Koutsos from Communications and Marketing to make accurate 3D models across Leigh Marine Science Centre, City, Grafton, Newmarket, Epsom, and Tamaki campuses to support the university’s marketing initiatives. These are being created using public datasets from Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), the open source 3D modelling tool Blender, and the BlenderGIS plugin.

The models have been extended to include markers at places of innovation such as Unleash Space and ABI, and short transition clips have been rendered for the upcoming digital brochure. Additionally, Nick has been working on an interactive web experience to view all of these campuses spatially relative to each other – it can be viewed here. In this version, the videos produced by the UoA Media Productions team can be viewed by clicking on the markers. These campus models have been made publicly available online on Sketchfab, so that anyone in the world can download them free of charge. Hence they are reusable for other purposes.

In addition, the Visualisation Suite hosted by the Centre is featured at the newly created Centres of Innovation & Entrepreneurship website in the purpose of showcasing the vibrant, collaborative space where is designed to spark and develop the brilliant ideas of students from all faculties across the University of Auckland.