Urban renewal
Overview
This showcase focuses on providing mixed reality technologies for urban planning teams within the physical enviroment of a planning site. The teams can consist of architects and specialists as well as investors, politicans and any citizens interested in observing and affecting the early stages of the planning process.
This innovates the practice of urban renewal, by bringing it outdoors, involving citizens and other stakeholders and emphasizing its cooperative and experimental aspects.
Key Challenges
- Mixed Reality:
Exploring different ways of combining the real and virtual domains within the mixed reality technologies in the context of urban planning. -
Collaboration:
How to support collaboration between the participants during the design process. -
Immediacy:
How to support users in generating ‘content’ in a fluid and informal way as part of the process -
Integration:
How to integrate the technologies with common work practices of planners, such as creating scale models (of buildings), sketching and annotating, as well as negotiation.
MR-Tent
The mixed reality tools we are developing are hosted in our MR-Tent (mixed-reality-tent). The MR-Tent, a formidable design task in itself, provides a shelter for the project equipment, also protecting projections from ambient light, with flexible openings and a view onto the site.
Projects
Real urban renewal projects were involved as partners for field work:
- Psychiatric hospital of Sainte-Anne, Paris.
- Urban renewal office of Vienna’s 16th district.
- New courthouse in Paris (TGI de Paris)
- Former barracks in Cergy-Pontoise
- Public park in Ponotise
The technologies have been also presented to a broader public:
- European City of Science (La Ville Européenne des Siences 2008) in Paris
- Exhibition: Outdoors in the City (Draußen in der Stadt 2007) in Vienna
ColorTable
The ColorTable is a tangible user interface, designed for creating mixed reality scenes in medium-sized urban planning contexts. It allows assigning content to colored tokens and positioning them on a physical map. The composed scene is visualized on the fly on a three-dimensional projection.
Different content types are supported:
- 2d billboards (trees, flowers, ..)
- 3d geometries (houses, building blocks, ..)
- curved streets (with varying traffic types and densities)
- ground textures (grass, stone, water,…)
- photo-realistic panoramic background with depth-map
- and many more…
The traffic as well as many of the billboards and geometries are associated with sounds. The sounds are played through 8 speakers to ensure the spatial awareness.
The ColorTable was also integrated with the Urban Sketcher, which allows users to sketch directly on the projection.
Further Reading
For development at TUGraz see: IPCity @ TUGraz
For development at TUWien see: IPCity @ TUWien
Institute for Design & Assessment of Technology
Multidisciplinary Design Group
http://www.media.tuwien.ac.at/
