NYC400 will be a celebration of New York City’s quadri-centenary. The project will deliver the world’s densest three-dimensional data model at a 5 cm spacing as both a 21st century record of the city 300th birthday and as an on-going resource for study, planning, and entrepreneurship. The most detailed features of the city will be visible including foliage, signage, and utility lines, as well as the buildings, streets, and bridges.
The available data will include much more than simply the city’s geometry. Video, still imagery, hyperspectral bands, and electrical resistivity will also be provided for the entirety of New York’s 305 square miles. The data will be made freely available for viewing and downloading for non-commercial use to researchers, students, teachers, government agencies, and the general public.
Beyond it being a visually compelling memorial to New York’s quadri-centenary, the data and its derived model will create a platform in which to harness the current and emerging generation of data for a wide range of uses. A sampling of those uses are listed below.
| SECTOR | USES |
| Architecture | Historic Preservation |
| Botany | Park Maintenance |
| Business Development | Virtual Tourism |
| Computing | Gaming |
| Disaster Management | Risk Mitigation |
| Energy | Utility Line Management |
| Environmental Engineering | Wind Modeling |
| Film | Location Scouting |
| Forestry | City Plantings |
| Geography | Education |
| Gerontology | Handicap Accessibility |
| Government | City-scale BIM |
| Government | Infrastructure Monitoring |
| History | Demographics |
| Insurance | Risk Analysis |
| Public Health | Epidemiology |
| Public Safety | Anti-terrorism |
| Real Estate | Site Development |
| Transportation | Auto-navigation |
| Urban Planning | Right to Light |
| Recreation | Orienteering |
The proposed project is unique in its offering with respect to data quality, data coverage, and data usefulness. The usefulness of the data stems from the fact that is will be more than an order of magnitude denser than what is currently available, will be comprehensive in its coverage, and will be made available in a way that is readily accessible to both novice and expert users. These major advancements in both data quality and accessibility will encourage and enable the participation of sectors currently excluded from the realm of remote sensing data usage. For example one will be able to rapidly evaluate obstacles at the sidewalk level to wheelchair access.