Virtual Reality in Urban Planning and Design

Axford, Stephen; Keltie, Garry; Wallis, Christine

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-36651-5_20

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, it was not until relatively recently that the technology to create a VE has become free and accessible enough for widespread dissemination and use, despite a perception of expense and inaccessibility (Axford, Keltie, and Wallis 2007;Germanchis, Cartwright, and Pettit 2007), having the potential to benefit professionals (from the selfemployed to those working in large companies) and communities. Specific instances include Second Life (Linden Research Inc., 2015; e.g.…”

Section: Vgesmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Mountains of work’: spatialization of work projects in a virtual geographic environment

Moore

Bricker

2015

Annals of GIS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The challenge of successfully managing multiple work projects is a highly complex one, requiring advanced time management amongst other skills. This research proposes spatialization -making non-spatial phenomena spatial -as a novel alternative to the many digital and analogue tools that help people manage project time. A virtual geographic environment (VGE) demonstration prototype spatialization built in the OpenSimulator online virtual environment is presented here. A landscape visual metaphor is employed, through which 3D terrain depicts project areas as proportional to project duration, and 'hills' in the landscape are sized according to project difficulty. Progress on the project is assumed to be marked from the boundary to the project finish, which is the 'summit' of the zone. There are explicit path objects in the VGE to reinforce this, as well as a beacon object at the summit. Advantages include visualization of all of a user's projects at once, though there is the loss of a unified time structure, since each project has its own time-space. The avatar-driven exploration that VGEs can afford enhances the potential positive cognitive involvement of the user. Also, the online VGE offers opportunities for virtual project meetings in the spatialized environment. Issues to be addressed in future include increasing the within-project complexity in the spatialization, adding semantic meaning to the placement of projects in the VGE and using cartographic (colour and texture) and terrain (smoothness for uncertainty) variables to depict other project attributes.

show abstract

Section: Vgesmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Mountains of work’: spatialization of work projects in a virtual geographic environment

Moore

Bricker

2015

Annals of GIS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Virtual Reality (VR) has been investigated as a technology that could aid the urban planner (Camara and Raper, 1999;Axford et al, 2007;Döllner, 2007). VR is also a human-oriented technology, which suits the typical collaborative process of urban planning.…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The link between VR and urban planning is strong: "… exposure to computer games is generating an expectation that similar techniques could be used to show what a future city will 'look' and 'feel' like" (p.284) and the inner city redevelopment trend within the profession is such that demands like this will increase due to an increased need for consultation. However, there has been a slow uptake within urban decision making arenas due to fear of cost and lack of awareness of new technological developments of this kind (Axford et al, 2007). Lopes and Lindstrom (2012) report on an application of OpenSimulator to city planning in Uppsala, Sweden, in the context of a possible Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system for the city.…”

Section: Definitions and Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Usability of Online Geographic Virtual Reality for Urban Planning

Zhang

Moore

2013

Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Virtual reality (VR) technology is starting to become widely and freely available (for example the online OpenSimulator tool), with potential for use in 3D urban planning and design tasks but still needing rigorous assessment to establish this. A previous study consulted with a small group of urban professionals, who concluded in a satisfaction usability test that online VR had potential value as a usable 3D communication and remote marketing tool but acknowledged that visual quality and geographic accuracy were obstacles to overcome. This research takes the investigation a significant step further to also examine the usability aspects of efficiency (how quickly tasks are completed) and effectiveness (how successfully tasks are completed), relating to OpenSimulator in an urban planning situation. The comparative study pits a three-dimensional VR model (with increased graphic fidelity and geographic content to address the feedback of the previous study) of a subdivision design (in a Dunedin suburb) against 3D models built with GIS (ArcGIS) and CAD (BricsCAD) tools, two types of software environment well established in urban professional practice. Urban professionals participated in the study by attempting to perform timed tasks correctly in each of the environments before being asked questions about the technologies involved and their perceived importance to their professional work. The results reinforce the positive feedback for VR of the previous study, with the graphical and geographic data issues being somewhat addressed (though participants stressed the need for accurate and precise object and terrain modification capabilities in VR). Ease-ofuse and associated fastest task completion speed were significant positive outcomes to emerge from the comparison with GIS and CAD, pointing to a strong future for VR in an urban planning context.

show abstract

“…In urban planning, the 3DCM such as the one presented in [3] provides alternative design plans which show the future city for urban planners to evaluate the architectural and aesthetic design of the city. There are also other applications of 3DCMs for exploring the past, present, and future of a city [4], assessing the environmental equity in viewing environmental amenities (e.g., green space, water bodies, historical buildings, mountains) [5] or accessing sunlight [6], and evaluating multi-constellation Global Navigation Satellite System performance [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Integrated Simplification Approach for 3D Buildings with Sloped and Flat Roofs

Xie

Feng

2016

IJGI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Simplification of three-dimensional (3D) buildings is critical to improve the efficiency of visualizing urban environments while ensuring realistic urban scenes. Moreover, it underpins the construction of multi-scale 3D city models (3DCMs) which could be applied to study various urban issues. In this paper, we design a generic yet effective approach for simplifying 3D buildings. Instead of relying on both semantic information and geometric information, our approach is based solely on geometric information as many 3D buildings still do not include semantic information. In addition, it provides an integrated means to treat 3D buildings with either sloped or flat roofs. The two case studies, one exploring simplification of individual 3D buildings at varying levels of complexity while the other, investigating the multi-scale simplification of a cityscape, show the effectiveness of our approach.

show abstract

Virtual Reality in Urban Planning and Design

Cited by 12 publications

References 1 publication

‘Mountains of work’: spatialization of work projects in a virtual geographic environment

‘Mountains of work’: spatialization of work projects in a virtual geographic environment

The Usability of Online Geographic Virtual Reality for Urban Planning

An Integrated Simplification Approach for 3D Buildings with Sloped and Flat Roofs

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About