What Makes an AR-Ready City? | How Charleston, SC innovators are using inCitu to unlock better conversations about growth, inclusivity, and resiliency
The Rise of Augmented Cities
“AR is coming for cities” declares a recent Bloomberg CityLab article quoting Jonathan Askin, Director of the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic, who says “I think we’ll see a growing digital divide between cities that embrace AR and those that thwart it.” Recent market research predicts hundreds of cities will be using virtual and augmented technologies by the end of the decade. Despite this paradigm shift, it’s still somewhat rare to find 3D data in the open data portals or GIS hubs of U.S. Cities. Now that the public-facing uses of 3D information about our cities are poised to explode, what can cities do to become, and what does it mean to be, an AR-Ready City?
A Digital Renaissance in Charleston
In Charleston, SC, inCitu engaged with two local partners: Paul Turner’s Virtual America, and Moondog Animation Studio, who were already envisioning a 3D renaissance for their city with projects exploring reality capture, digital twins, and augmented art and history. Sharing a belief in the power of AR for civic engagement, they launched a partnership with inCitu to make Charleston one of the first two US Cities to pilot our open-data-to-AR pipeline, a standardized process we developed for NYC’s complex development landscape a few months earlier. Over eight weeks, we combined open data and data from developers to bring future projects to life in augmented reality and engage local residents with the future of their built environment.
Charleston is well-known for both its architectural beauty and its distinction as the birthplace of historic preservation. Charlestonians are serious about architecture, so we studied local development carefully and came up with what we call the “Charleston style” that is applied to our default estimated buildings in the area:
Eyes on the Street
For inCitu’s Charleston launch, we set up AR demos at the office of Charleston mayor John Tecklenburg, The South Carolina Historical Society, and College of Charleston’s School of Science, Engineering, and Math. We worked with our partners and local advocates to activate a handful of Charleston’s future development sites. In October, we were honored to attend Charleston Digital Corridor’s Oyster Roast event, where we invited community members to view Charleston Tech Center’s next building in AR.
On King St. we visualized a mixed-use property, which planned to include 50 luxury apartment hotel units and 5,000 square feet of retail space fronting a busy commercial area. Organic engagement was strong and immediate, as mere minutes after installing a decal at King St, we witnessed a group of students engaging with the AR on their own. When we interviewed them, they were excited by the quick, seamless AR experience allowing them to see the changes coming to their streets. This anecdote validated our mission to help engage young people and other segments of the public that have valuable thoughts and feedback about the future of their city but aren’t as represented in formal planning hearings.
Making Complex Challenges Tangible
Charleston also ranks as one of the metropolitan areas most vulnerable to flooding. The city is currently involved in several large waterfront development proposals including an ambitious Perimeter Protection Barrier plan that has opened a public conversation about the future of Charleston’s waterfront. Charleston is the home of historic preservation, so we knew Charlestonians demand careful, multi-stakeholder conversations about urban change.
Once again working with our local partners Virtual America and Moondog Animation Studio, we chose to visualize part of this complex waterfront infrastructure project. This allowed us to show City of Charleston stakeholders on all sides what has been proposed as well as educate them on environmental impacts related to sea level rise. Moondog Animation did an exceptional job modeling a section of the upcoming seawall. Again we saw immediate organic engagement with on-site QR Codes. Accessing key public infrastructure projects like the seawall lets planners, policymakers and the public weigh the benefits and impacts of new development while also making the costs of inaction tangible.
AR-Ready Cities
Our experience in Charleston helped us realize that scaling AR for cities heavily relies on the quality and availability of city planning data. Small improvements could make a big difference. For example, comparing Charleston and San Francisco — where we were able to generate 96 projects, all “Ready to AR”, from publicly available information in only a few hours — we saw that availability of just a few key attributes such as building heights and footprints could have made a huge difference in the amount of projects we could bring into AR automatically.
We know the future of city planning is in 3D, and as Spatial Computing practices such as reality capture, augmented reality, and digital twins become widespread, open data needs to work in 3D by default. That’s why we’re using insights from Charleston to develop and promote a data specification for the future built environment that will go alongside all inCitu cities as we scale, and encourage better data standards that fit the coming era of spatial computing. By developing and adopting new standards as a consortium, industry partners and cities could help ensure compatibility with the incoming tidal wave of 3D tools and use-cases, and turn digital divides into opportunities.
What can cities do to prepare for an onslaught of spatial computing and mixed reality? How can our industry support new standards to help? Let us know what you think! In coming weeks, inCitu will feature ten “AR-Ready” cities that are best equipped to leverage augmented reality for public good and democratize access to city development information on their city streets.
As we wrap up our Charleston pilot, we are thankful to our local partners Virtual America and Moondog Animation Studio and excited to continue the discussion around how AR Ready Cities can bring open data into the spatial computing era with a panel at SXSW 2024.
