Immersive and non immersive 3D virtual city: decision support tool for urban sustainability

Sustainable urban planning decisions must not only consider the physical structure of the urban development but the economic, social and environmental factors. Due to the prolonged times scales of major urban development projects the current and future impacts of any decision made must be fully understood. Many key project decisions are made early in the decision making process with decision makers later seeking agreement for proposals once the key decisions have already been made, leaving many stakeholders, especially the general public, feeling marginalised by the process. Many decision support tools have been developed to aid in the decision making process, however many of these are expert orientated, fail to fully address spatial and temporal issues and do not reflect the interconnectivity of the separate domains and their indicators. This paper outlines a platform that combines computer game techniques, modelling of economic, social and environmental indicators to provide an interface that presents a 3D interactive virtual city with sustainability information overlain. Creating a virtual 3D urban area using the latest video game techniques ensures: real-time rendering of the 3D graphics; exploitation of novel techniques of how complex multivariate data is presented to the user; immersion in the 3D urban development, via first person navigation, exploration and manipulation of the environment with consequences updated in real-time. The use of visualisation techniques begins to remove sustainability assessment’s reliance on the existing expert systems which are largely inaccessible to many of the stakeholder groups, especially the general public

Zero and low carbon buildings: A driver for change in working practices and the use of computer modelling and visualization

Buildings account for significant carbon dioxide emissions, both in construction and operation. Governments around the world are setting targets and legislating to reduce the carbon emissions related to the built environment. Challenges presented by increasingly rigorous standards for construction projects will mean a paradigm shift in how new buildings are designed and managed. This will lead to the need for computational modelling and visualization of buildings and their energy performance throughout the life-cycle of the building. This paper briefly outline how the UK government is planning to reduce carbon emissions for new buildings. It discusses the challenges faced by the architectural, construction and building management professions in adjusting to the proposed requirements for low or zero carbon buildings. It then outlines how software tools, including the use of visualization tools, could develop to support the designer, contractor and user

Video Data Visualization System: Semantic Classification And Personalization

We present in this paper an intelligent video data visualization tool, based on semantic classification, for retrieving and exploring a large scale corpus of videos. Our work is based on semantic classification resulting from semantic analysis of video. The obtained classes will be projected in the visualization space. The graph is represented by nodes and edges, the nodes are the keyframes of video documents and the edges are the relation between documents and the classes of documents. Finally, we construct the user's profile, based on the interaction with the system, to render the system more adequate to its references.Comment: graphic

Geoweb 2.0 for Participatory Urban Design: Affordances and Critical Success Factors

In this paper, we discuss the affordances of open-source Geoweb 2.0 platforms to support the participatory design of urban projects in real-world practices.We first introduce the two open-source platforms used in our study for testing purposes. Then, based on evidence from five different field studies we identify five affordances of these platforms: conversations on alternative urban projects, citizen consultation, design empowerment, design studio learning and design research. We elaborate on these in detail and identify a key set of success factors for the facilitation of better practices in the future

Argument maps as policy memories for informed deliberation: A research note

This is an eGISE network paper. A significant area within eGovernment is concerned with systems to support democratic policy formation and decision making processes. In modern government, both local and national, consultation with interested parties is an important element in maintaining the democratic process. To date online consultation tools have has used existing software tools, which are simple text based tools that were not tailored to the process. This project proposes to develop an online tool that will visualise the issues and arguments graphically as the consultation process proceeds. Using Discourse Analysis and Ontological Engineering it will create Argument Maps that will server not only to inform participants but also the archive record of the consultation – the Policy Memory. We hypothesise that such a tool would allow citizens to be come more engaged with policy formation and enhance democratic participation

Diversity in virtual reality landscape modelling

This paper examines the range of decisions that landscape architects need to consider in communicating the future of the landscape. The objective of this research paper was to investigate the issues affecting the landscape modelling process. It also aimed to provide a better understanding of the creators of landscape visualisations and the role they play in determining what audiences, often from many disciplines, see and debate. Interviews were conducted to gather ideas from practice and academia. The paper acknowledges that this was a limited exploration with the intention of establishing a base for a further study. Issues relating to the diversity of audiences, diversity of interpretation, appropriate levels of representation and representing the passage of time in VR models and technologies currently available for VR modelling were the focus of the interviews

Visualising linked health data to explore health events around preventable hospitalisations in NSW Australia

Objective: To explore patterns of health service use in the lead-up to, and following, admission for a ‘preventable’ hospitalisation. Setting: 266 950 participants in the 45 and Up Study, New South Wales (NSW) Australia Methods: Linked data on hospital admissions, general practitioner (GP) visits and other health events were used to create visual representations of health service use. For each participant, health events were plotted against time, with different events juxtaposed using different markers and panels of data. Various visualisations were explored by patient characteristics, and compared with a cohort of non-admitted participants matched on sociodemographic and health characteristics. Health events were displayed over calendar year and in the 90 days surrounding first preventable hospitalisation. Results: The visualisations revealed patterns of clustering of GP consultations in the lead-up to, and following, preventable hospitalisation, with 14% of patients having a consultation on the day of admission and 27% in the prior week. There was a clustering of deaths and other hospitalisations following discharge, particularly for patients with a long length of stay, suggesting patients may have been in a state of health deterioration. Specialist consultations were primarily clustered during the period of hospitalisation. Rates of all health events were higher in patients admitted for a preventable hospitalisation than the matched non-admitted cohort. Conclusions: We did not find evidence of limited use of primary care services in the lead-up to a preventable hospitalisation, rather people with preventable hospitalisations tended to have high levels of engagement with multiple elements of the healthcare system. As such, preventable hospitalisations might be better used as a tool for identifying sicker patients for managed care programmes. Visualising longitudinal health data was found to be a powerful strategy for uncovering patterns of health service use, and such visualisations have potential to be more widely adopted in health services research

An overview of virtual city modelling : emerging organisational issues

This paper presents a recent overview of the increasing use of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies for the simulation of urban environments. It builds on previous research conducted on the identification of three-dimensional (3D) city models and offers an analysis of the development, utilization and construction of VR city models. Issues pertaining to advantages, barriers and ownership are identified. The paper describes a case study of the development of a VR model for the city of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK and outlines the role that academic institutions can play in both the creation and utilization of urban models. The study offers a new approach for the creation, management and update of urban models and reflects on issues which are emerging. Areas for future research are discussed

Enhancing urban sustainability using 3D visualisation

This paper presents the results of an initial application of a prototype simulation and visualisation tool (S-City VT) thatwas developed to enable all stakeholders, regardless of background or experience, to understand, interact with and influence decisions made on the sustainability of urban design. The tool takes the unique approach of combining three-dimensional (3D) interactive and immersive technologies with computer modelling to present stakeholders with an interactive virtual development. Use of outputs from the model and a 3D visualisation of the development can help decision-makers judge the relative sustainability of different aspects of a development. The tool employs a number of different methods to present sustainability results to stakeholders. Initial tests on the effectiveness of the different visualisation methods are described and discussed. The paper then presents some conclusions on further development and application of the tool to model and visualise possible results of decisions made at different stages of the project