Partners
The partners of the project are Aarhus University, Cadpeople and COWI.

Aim
The project’s concrete goal is to develop and investigate the use of virtual reality technology, as a basis for improvement of decisions to be taken in a city region that is continually undergoing development. Virtual Urban Planning, VUP, has to function as a combined tool for the benefit of politicians, public administrations, building constructors and architects, private businesses and the town’s citizens. For example, the advanced visualisation technologies available to CAVI will provide citizens and politicians with the possibility of a simultaneous experience that can be discussed during the presentation and offer an opportunity for focusing on specific details, a particular view from a definite point in the city or something similar.

The research aspect initiates from a series of earlier projects with the feature in common that they all discuss the spatial planning with the aid of digital technologies. They range from Karlskrona2, an internet-based multi-user system for use in citizen-based discussion of town planning, to the mixed reality game [kollision:6400], where a physical lp-record is augmented by 3D models and is used for illustrating complex interrelations in the city space. The project’s motive, the town in the computer, the computer in the town, is to deal with planning our city environment, with the aid of dynamic models of the city’s space, an environment that can be experienced purely digitally or by means of, say, augmented reality-technologies in interaction with our physical world.

Results
A 3D-model is created on many levels of detail-addition, where future alterations to the physical relation in the town space can be inserted and tested. In this way, the model becomes dynamic. If, for example, there are several construction suggestions for the same project, they can be “turned on and off” in the model and the individual changes can be evaluated in a more extensive context, since the surroundings are created in 3D. After this, not only the building process, but also its relation to the surroundings can be evaluated.

Team
Kim Halskov Madsen, Morten Lervig, Rune Nielsen, and Bo Degn.