Immersion creating engagement in urban planning and redesign

Abstract

Engaging citizens and other stakeholders in the urban planning, design and construction process has long been considered critical for good practice in unban planning and design. This industry is experiencing big changes as a result of improvements in digital tools and the ecosystem of related tools due to advances in 3 dimensional software and software-based engagement techniques. This paper proposes a way to breaking down the complex process of city and town planning, design, construction and maintenance projects into a pipeline process to enable improved engagement among the three main stakeholders in the process using immersive or 3D environments. We discuss the complex process of urban planning and design, describe the stakeholders and present a way based on the Virtual CityView or CityView project to include all stakeholders and in particular increase the inclusion of the Citizens in this process. 3D technology has been evolving toward mainstream over the past several years in this field. However, the authors submit this paper because we find that a significant change in both technology and ease of use has just occurred that is creating a distinct increase in the viability of using 3D-based engagement and collaboration in unban redesign projects with laypersons including the public. This shift is the merging of 3D virtual worlds with 3D gaming engines. We discuss our work within the constraints of a new API running on Unity, one of the worlds leading game engine. The API is called Sinespace. We find the result of this type of combination, gaming engines and virtual words, result in a new approach that offers the potential to bring positive impact and cost savings to the public as well as to the professionals and civil servants in the urban planning process.