{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/shadow-accrual-maps-efficient-accumulation-of","title":"Shadow Accrual Maps: Efficient Accumulation of City-Scale Shadows Over Time","arxiv_id":"1907.04435","date":"2019-07-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Fabio Miranda","Harish Doraiswamy","Marcos Lage","Luc Wilson","Mondrian Hsieh","Claudio T. Silva"],"abstract":"Large scale shadows from buildings in a city play an important role in determining the environmental quality of public spaces. They can be both beneficial, such as for pedestrians during summer, and detrimental, by impacting vegetation and by blocking direct sunlight. Determining the effects of shadows requires the accumulation of shadows over time across different periods in a year. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient class of approach that uses the properties of sun movement to track the changing position of shadows within a fixed time interval. We use this approach to extend two commonly used shadowing techniques, shadow maps and ray tracing, and demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. Our technique is used to develop an interactive visual analysis system, Shadow Profiler, targeted at city planners and architects that allows them to test the impact of shadows for different development scenarios. We validate the usefulness of this system through case studies set in Manhattan, a dense borough of New York City.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.04435v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.04435v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"shadow-accrual-maps-efficient-accumulation-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/VIDA-NYU/shadow-accrual-maps","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"shadow-accrual-maps","name":"Shadow Accrual Maps","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}