Abstract
The design of large dams is a collaborative activity with relevant social and political implications. Planning such large infrastructures requires involving all the interested stakeholders, making shared decisions, tracing the design process. There are currently not many Virtual Prototyping tools to support this collaborative design process. In this paper, we propose a participated planning support system based on mobile and Augmented Reality technologies which allows different stakeholders to take part in the review of a large dam project through an application that automatically acquires information available online, allows all stakeholders to share information, and finally records everything for a subsequent analysis. The development of the application, as well as its use in two case studies and a user study, are described in the paper.
Highlights
More than half of the world’s rivers are regulated by dams [1], forming a cumulative storage capacity of about 8000 km3 [2]
Considering the open issues and limitations identified, in this paper we describe an innovative collaborative remote Virtual Prototyping application based on Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) for the planning of large water infrastructures, such as dams
The saving, update and generation of projects can be performed through the dedicated buttons available in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the application: a wildcard character near the project name indicates whether saving is needed
Summary
More than half of the world’s rivers are regulated by dams [1], forming a cumulative storage capacity of about 8000 km3 [2]. The presence of multiple and competing water uses, both within and between countries, requires the active involvement of the stakeholders in each stage of the decision-making process, from the identification of their preference structure to the negotiations of the decisions to be implemented [14]. This participatory approach may contribute in preventing the rise of disputes over contested use of water at different spatial and institutional scales [15,16], which are instead currently ongoing in many large projects such as the Three Gorges dam (China), Technologies 2018, 6, 68; doi:10.3390/technologies6030068 www.mdpi.com/journal/technologies.
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