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Effectiveness of Virtual Reality in Participatory Urban Planning: A Case Study

Published: 13 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

In urban planning, 3D modeling and virtual reality (VR) provide new means for involving citizens in the planning process. For municipal government, it is essential to know how effective these means are, to justify investments. In this study, we present a case of using VR in a municipal process of civic participation concerning the redesign of a public park. The process included co-design activities and involved citizens in decision-making through a ballot, using 3D-rendered versions of competing designs. In co-design, 3D-modeling tools were instrumental in empowering citizens to negotiate design decisions, to discuss the quality of designs with experts, and to collectively take decisions. This paper demonstrates that, in a ballot on competing designs with 1302 citizens, VR headsets proved to be equally effective compared to other display technologies in informing citizens during decision making. The results of an additional, controlled experiment indicate that VR headsets provide higher engagement and more vivid memories than viewing the designs on non-immersive displays.
By integrating research into a municipal process, we contribute evidence of cognitive and engagement effects of using 3D modeling and immersive VR technologies to empower citizens in participatory urban planning. The case described in the paper concerns a public park; a similar approach could be applied to the design of public installations including media architecture.

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
MAB '18: Proceedings of the 4th Media Architecture Biennale Conference
November 2018
192 pages
ISBN:9781450364782
DOI:10.1145/3284389
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • MAI: Media Architecture Institute

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 November 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Participatory design
  2. civic engagement
  3. urban planning
  4. virtual reality

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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MAB18
MAB18: Media Architecture Biennale
November 13 - 16, 2018
Beijing, China

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MAB '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 15 of 31 submissions, 48%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 27 of 68 submissions, 40%

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  • (2024)3D Models for Urban E-PlanningRecent Advances and Prospects in Urban E-Planning10.4018/979-8-3693-5956-3.ch012(283-320)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Challenges and Opportunities of Using Metaverse Tools for Participatory Architectural Design ProcessesVirtual Worlds10.3390/virtualworlds30300153:3(283-302)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
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