Ten ways to understand the urban environments better with XR
Urban planning is not for those impatient. Cities are increasingly complex systems driven by a myriad of different interests, opinions, and desires. When planning urban structures and environments, we debate long-term processes and a future not yet here. For this, we must rely on descriptions of that future, visualisations and simulations, and hope that everyone involved understands them correctly — evidently a challenge for the public participation.
If creating a shared understanding of the future-plans poses a challenge, we are simultaneously more or less doomed to fail with grasping even the current situation. A multitude of unseen factors affect the urban space and its development. Although some of these currently remain as unknown-unknowns, some can be addressed by inviting the right kind of expertise to the planning process. As the task of creating urban plans extends to concern a more diverse community, boundary objects are needed to facilitate the knowledge exchange and to make sure that all parties understand the topics and proposals similarly.
Augmented Urbans explores how extended reality (XR) technologies can support integrated urban planning: to bring new knowledge resources and stakeholder groups to the planning table, and to make urban planning a task for everyone to participate in. The field is still largely unexplored, and only relatively few applications and trials exist. Those that do, even with their limited scope, already show promise and provide a view over the potential future opportunities.
Previously in this blog, we traced out connections between XR technologies and social-ecological urbanism. This post, in turn, gathers ten examples of ways in which XR technology can pursue either to facilitate better comprehension of the current urban environment, empower the public participation, or increase the accessibility of untapped knowledge resources within the urban planning process:
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| AR for visualising urban planning projects on-site
The augmented reality (AR), which by definition adds content layers to existing reality, seems rather a suitable tool for presenting future developments on-site. For this to fully take off, some technical obstacles still need solving e.g. in terms of placing contents correctly within outdoor space or having enough broadband for comfortable user experience. These, however, are quickly developing.
The Augmented Reality for Collaborative Urban Planning project, for example, pursues to improve citizen’s understanding of future urban plans by visualising them with place-specific augmented reality, by allowing them to provide feedback, and by analysing the results throughout the design phase.
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| AR and 3D for making the invisible visible within urban space
In addition to showing future-plans, also other layers of information invisible to the human eye can be presented with AR. Of this, several case examples already exist:
A | New York Times app visualises the current air pollution levels in your city and enables comparing the situation to other cities
B | An app developed in the research project Architectural Democracy enables removing the building facades and brings vacant spaces visible to the local community, enabling debate on their potential future uses
C | Earth Autopsy visualises contaminated soil residues from the old gas plant to be taken into account while developing the area
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| Mixed reality for empowering the local community
New technologies can, at their best, empower local stakeholders to contribute to planning the urban environments they live in. In the ‘Block by Block’ initiative realised in Johannesburg, UN-Habitat and Ericsson worked together to enable local stakeholders to experience the feel of planned buildings, public spaces or streets that do not yet exist.
“Mixed reality holds tremendous potential for real-time digital visualizations, both at the street and neighborhood level and the overall urban skyline and city grid. This new visually realistic blending of reality with virtual imagination can create a more intuitive space for planners, architects, residents and other stakeholders to viscerally experience and re-imagine future environments. Architectural sketches and designs can be made more legible and accessible, thus pulling users into the process of design and strengthening the long-term viability and buy-in of urban projects.”
Marcus Nyberg, Ericsson
Read more in UN-Habitat report: ‘Mixed reality for public participation in urban and public space design: Towards a new way of crowdsourcing more inclusive smart cities’
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| VR for raising climate awareness of the local community
As an immersive media, virtual reality (VR) can offer a powerful tool for raising awareness via personal experiences. Virtual Planet utilises VR to show residents of Santa Cruz the near-future implications to their community if they do not take action to combat the rise of the oceans. The initiative combines the use of virtual reality as communicative media with participatory workshops and outreach activities to engage the local community which makes it an interesting case to note.
Read more about the Virtual Planet ‘Sea Level Rise Explorer’
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| VR for capturing and conveying individual spatial experiences
Virtual reality is also perceived to embody a potential to boost the level of empathy towards others. The Palimpsest, created by the Interactive Architecture Lab in University College London in 2016, taps into this and pursues to build collective memory by using 3D scanning and virtual reality to record urban spaces and the communities that live in them. The initiative also explored whether VR could act as a neutral platform for people to view government proposals in 1:1 scale, and provide feedback.
Read more about making of the Palimpsest
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| VR for pre-collecting user experiences
The project MindSpaces dives even deeper into monitoring the spatial experience. As part of the project activities, blueprints of urban outdoor spaces are presented to locals in VR, thus enabling them to experience the space before its implementation. While exploring the virtual space, local stakeholders are equipped with lightweight devices that measure their brain activity, skin response, and heart rate. Based on the readings, neurologists then use machine-learning programs to identify the most pleasant, stirring or emotionally appealing aspects about the proposed design; an insight for developing plans further.
Read more about the project in Horizon — The EU Research & Innovation Magazine
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| VR for previewing temporal changes and their effect on urban space
One of the benefits of virtual reality resides in exploring and experiencing different scenarios. While conducting the public participation for Bruno Granholm square in Helsinki, virtual reality was used to present alternate urban plans, enabling the public to view them from various angles in different seasons, times of day, and weather conditions. Virtual experience entailed also an opportunity for sharing comments by taking up to six pictures of the model and annotating those with short textual comments.
Read more about the Bruno Granholm square street plan and Helsinki pop-up
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| Gamified AR for strengthening understanding of nature-based solutions
Especially after the success of Pokemon Go, gamified AR solutions have been widely explored for different purposes. Earthwatch AR seeks to raise awareness on how nature contributes to a sustainable city via nature-based solutions. In augmented reality, people can introduce natural elements like trees and green roofs in different combinations, and see how these can increase urban resilience concerning the effects of the climate crisis, but also how they provide other benefits such as improved liveability or habitats for wildlife. The AR application builds on Earthwatch’s scientific research into nature-based solutions from 17 cities across nine countries.
Read more about Earthwatch AR
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| 360° for virtual site visits to keep the spatial experience in mind
Using 360° videos or photography offers an easy and relatively cost-effective way to capture the current situation on-site. Filming 360° videos allow including virtual visits to the planning site to participatory stakeholder workshops or meetings to convey the spatial experience of the site. Combined with voice-overs, a further layer of information can be added with e.g. citizen experience of the space, historical notes, future plans, identified planning challenges, or currently open questions to focus attention on. Temporal changes of seasons, times of day, and the development of urban structure can also be followed up upon.
Practical example from Augmented Urbans Cesis: online participation platform combines 360 photos with automated chat for sharing comments (in Latvian)
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| AR for connecting historical layers and urban narratives
MauAR invites to take a walk along the former border strip of the GDR and familiarise with Berlin history. The app aspires to deepen the understanding of historical layers of urban space by visualising the Berlin wall where it used to be. The former border strip can be viewed in different decades to see how it changed from barb wire border to a massive wall more than three metres in height. Additional information is available in photos, videos and audio recordings.
BONUS | Engaging the local community around a tangible interface
Extended reality can also take a tangible form to create a setting for collaborative problem solving as was done at HafenCity University’s and MIT Media Lab’s joint Finding Places initiative. Around twenty local community leaders and members per session were invited to a workshop held around interactive tables with a task to identify places suitable for accommodating refugees within the city of Hamburg. Based on the experiences gathered, the combination of tangible objects such as LEGO bricks and focus frames and augmented information projected on the table seemed to provide common ground for stakeholders to voice their opinions.
Read more about Finding Places
And this is only the beginning, please share your thoughts!
During our Augmented Urbans exploration, it has been inspiring to see a notable increase in the urban planning cases utilising extended reality as a tool. Every new use case provides an opportunity for learning, so please, share the examples you have come across in the comments section.
We also very much look forward in hearing your thoughts about examples presented here, what you find useful, what should be developed further, and what might still be missing — let this post be an opening for joint discussion, the floor is now yours!
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Text: Päivi Keränen, Project Manager of Augmented Urbans at Metropolia UAS, Advisor at the Helsinki XR Center
