simulations of real-world cities, allowing planners and designers to test and evaluate different traffic scenarios and designs in a safe and controlled environment. Next, in the third article of this issue, Thibaud Chassin and Jens Ingensand focus on the role of digital gamification in participatory design. The article "E-guerrilla 3D participation: Approach, implementation, and usability study," describes a new approach to public participation in urban design, where users are engaged in a gamified process that encourages them to explore and participate in creating high-density housing estates. The Chassin and Ingensand evaluate the effectiveness of this approach and discuss the potential benefits and limitations.The fourth article by P Ng, Y Li, S Zhu, B Xu and J van Ameijde is titled "Digital common(s): the role of digital gamification in participatory design for the planning of highdensity housing estates". The team explored the role of digital gamification in participatory design processes and discuss the potential of gamification to create a more engaging and interactive design process and to increase public participation in urban design. The article describes the implementation of a gamified design process and evaluates the results of this approach.The fifth article,"Public Participation in Urban Design with Augmented Reality Technology Based on Indicator Evaluation", focuses on using augmented reality technology for public participation in urban design. Yuchen Wang and Yin-shan Lin describe a novel approach to public involvement that uses augmented reality technology to create interactive and immersive experiences that allow users to explore and participate in the design process. Wang and Lin evaluate the effectiveness of this approach and discuss the potential benefits and limitations.Finally, in the sixth article of this issue, Arash Shahbaz Badr and Raffaele De Amicis present their research titled "An empirical evaluation of enhanced teleportation for navigating large urban immersive virtual environments". They discuss the use of teleportation technology to navigate large urban immersive virtual environments. Bad and De Amicis describe a novel approach to teleportation that allows users to move quickly and easily through large virtual environments. The article discusses potential benefits, limitations, and applications in co-virtual city design applications.The six articles presented here provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art in Metaverse and co-virtual city design. They showcase how VR and AR technologies are used to encourage public participation, artistic expression, and visualisation, and demonstrate their potential to revolutionise urban planning and public engagement. Overall, we believe that this issue's topic is a vital area of investigation that is shaping the present and future of urban co-design processes. The articles offer impactful insights and a roadmap for further research in this exciting and rapidly-evolving field. Co-Virtual City Design": Shuva Chowdhury , Marc Aurel Schnabel, Sky Lo
Editorial21 March 2023
Editorial: Metaverse in co-virtual city design
Decision-making processes in traditional urban design approaches are mainly top-down. Such processes have defects including not only taking a long time to examine the design results, but also leading to irreversible impacts after design implementation. Policy-makers and researchers stress the importance of collaborating with different stakeholders in the process of urban design policies or guidelines making in order to minimize these negative impacts. However, introducing public participation in an urban design from the bottom up is challenging, especially when the process involves abstract urban design concepts such as the indicators. This paper explores a new workflow aimed at enhancing public participations to cooperate in urban design work with the help of a newly designed platform tool powered by mobile augmented reality technologies. The platform is intuitive to use and displays scenes of potential urban design results by superimposing the virtual models on the real-world environment on mobile devices. The public stakeholders are provided with this platform on site to evaluate the initial values of urban design indicators by interacting with the prototype design along with immersive experience. They can also get familiar with the concepts of the given indicators during this process, which helps them better understand the implications of guidelines in future published urban design drafts and estimate the potential results. Their feedback is collected, which can help urban designers further optimize the indicators in urban design guidelines making in order to improve their rationality. This process of urban design involving public participation is repeatable, which makes it possible to continuously adjust the design results. A user study has been conducted to examine the platform’s usability and its ability to enhance the public familiarity with the concepts of given indicators and their willingness to participate in urban design evaluation. The study also attests to the possibility of a workflow that integrates public feedback with the urban design process.
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
21 February 2023
Samuel Rundeland Raffaele De Amicis
Combined with simulation software packages, City Information Models allow analysts and decision-makers to explore 'what-if?' questions and scenarios for various engineering and strategic applications. In this context, crowd and traffic simulations are most commonly utilized. Urban intelligent traffic management and pedestrian flow analysis greatly benefits from the latest generation of 3D City Information Models created from accurate urban-scale geospatial information.
Analysis and simulation tools based on geometric, semantic, morphological, and structural information at the urban scale level offer the scientific foundation for all the activities required for identifying, detecting, planning, training, and analyzing vulnerability that may threaten human lives in urban environments.
Nevertheless, the literature research showed that samples of operational Digital Twins incorporating simulation capabilities are impracticable for small municipalities and rural, low-income communities due to their complex infrastructure, hardware, and data requirements. It is desirable to reduce the requirements for these Digital Twins and still be capable of running comprehensive and accurate simulations based on urban-scale geospatial information.
This article proposes an innovative framework and workflow capable of generating an operational Digital Twin and its visualization in the form of a 3D model using a procedural approach. The Digital Twin is connected with the traffic simulation SUMO and the Game Engine Unity for visualization using the TraCI middleware. The middleware is extended with additional functionalities and acts as an authoring tool. Unity allows visualizations in VR. The entire framework can be run on a single, standalone computer and is ready in a matter of minutes.
The proposed framework for integrating modeling, simulation, and visualization of operational Digital Twins can help guide better decision-making for both rural areas as well as cities.
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
5 January 2023
Provides Ng, 3 more and Jeroen van Ameijde
5 Authors
- PN
Provides Ng
School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
- YL
Yuechun Li
School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
- SZ
Shutong Zhu
School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
- BX
Bingge Xu
School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
- JV
Jeroen van Ameijde
School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
‘Digital Commons’ explores the intersection between participatory design, digital gamification, and community engagement, contextualised in the planning of high-density housing estates in Hong Kong. The research project investigates how digital gamified participatory design can be applied in decision-making processes for the planning of public facilities in high-density housing estates. Focusing on community engagement methods, the project has engaged with residents of a case study housing estate, Jat Min Chuen in the Shatin Wai area of Hong Kong, to facilitate collective planning discussions about the past, present, and future of community facilities. Using a digital community game approach, it has collected opinions and needs from public housing residents, promoted collaborative design thinking processes, and provided a platform for participants to increase their understanding of the complexity of planning problems through 3D visualisation tools. The experiences documented in this study demonstrate how 3D interactivity, real-time engagement, and bottom-up perspectives may enhance the potential of using immersive digital twins during collective decision-making. The gaming outcomes show a high similarity across all teams in close relationship to users’ daily life routines, demonstrating a new powerful role for urban designers as a coordinator of interactive and collaborative planning processes.
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
21 November 2022
Kristof Crollaand Garvin Goepel
4,903 views
9 citations
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
25 November 2022
Thibaud Chassinand Jens Ingensand
3,504 views
3 citations