Investigating the Role of Virtual Reality in Planning for Sustainable Smart Cities

Abstract

Abstract:With rapid population growth, urban designers face tremendous challenges to accommodate the increasing size of the population in urban areas while simultaneously considering future environmental, social, and economic impacts. A "smart city" is an urban development vision that integrates multiple information and communication technologies to manage the assets of a city, including its information systems, transportation systems, power plants, water supply networks, waste management systems, and other community services provided by a local department. The goal of creating a smart city is to improve the quality of life of citizens by using technology and by addressing the environmental, social, cultural, and physical needs of a society. Data modeling and data visualization are integral parts of planning a smart city, and planning professionals currently seek new methods for real-time simulations. The impact analysis of "what-if scenarios" frequently takes a significant amount of time and resources, and virtual reality (VR) is a potential tool for addressing these challenges. VR is a computer technology that replicates an environment, whether real or imagined, and simulates the physical presence and environment of a user to allow for user interaction. This paper presents a review of the capacity of VR to address current challenges in creating, modeling, and visualizing smart cities through material modeling and light simulation in a VR environment. This study can assist urban planners, stakeholders, and communities to further understand the roles of planning policies in creating a smart city, particularly in the early design stages. The significant roles of technologies, such as VR, in targeting real-time simulations and visualization requirements for smart cities are emphasized.

Scientific Landscape of Smart and Sustainable Cities Literature: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The SSC integrates the two concepts of urban development, but according to different authors, these are approached differently, depending on the starting point for creating the SSC. For some, the SSC is a sustainable city that should become smart because thanks to intelligent solutions, it would be able to meet the challenges of urbanization and achieve the goals of sustainable development [38,58,59]. Others suggest that the starting point for the SSC creation is smart city, which should not focus on technology and smart solutions only but should also take account of the impact of these solutions on the development of the social, economic, and environmental capital [7,12].…”

“…In addition, the analysis results proved that, so far, most publications indexed in the WoS and Scopus databases have focused on showing the SSC concept theoretical foundations. There were also publications describing practical aspects of the SSC concept implementation, but they usually related to the implementation of smart solutions in cities (e.g., [58][59][60]). The publications presenting the experience of cities in the implementation of the SSC concept were few (e.g., [61][62][63]), and an increase in its number could only be observed in the last two years.…”

It’s Not a Fad: Smart Cities and Smart Villages Research in European and Global Contexts

“…By examining the determinants of the urban development process, the authors provide insightful suggestions for urban management and planning for Lhasa. Elmira Jamei, Michael Mortimer, Mehdi Seyedmahmoudian, Ben Horan and Alex Stojcevski focus on the application of virtual reality (VR) solutions in the context of smart cities [6]. In their paper, titled "Investigating the Role of Virtual Reality in Planning for Sustainable Smart Cities", the authors review the capacity of VR to address current challenges in creating, modelling, and visualizing smart cities through material modelling and light simulation in a VR environment.…”

Raumbezogene Visualisierung trifft auf Landschaftsforschung und „Pinballology“: Beispiele der Landschaftskonstruktion in Flipperspielen

“…Discussions on immersive 3D environments are not only limited to questions addressing an improved visualization and use, but also they have already been suggested as valuable present and future tools for different application scenarios, such as landscape and urban planning (e.g., Jamei et al 2017;Ma et al 2020;Salter et al 2009;Virtanen et al 2015). The social construction of landscapes in video and computer games, which are based on modern visualization techniques, has only hardly been addressed so far (Edler et al 2018c; Fontaine 2017; Kühne 2019).…”