BUDI: Building Urban Designs Interactively Can Spatial-Based Collaboration be Seamless?

BUDI (Building Urban Designs Interactively) is an integrated 3D visualization and remote collaboration platform for complex urban design tasks. Users with different backgrounds can remotely engage in the entire design cycle, improving the quality of the end result. In BUDI, a virtual environment was designed to seamlessly expand beyond a traditional two-dimensional surface into a fully immersive three-dimensional space. Clients on various devices connect with servers for different functionalities tailored for various user groups. A demonstration with a local urban planning use-case shows the costs and benefits of BUDI as a spatial-based collaborative platform. We consider the trade-offs encountered when trying to make the collaboration seamless. Specifically, we introduce the multi-dimensional data visualization and interactions the platform provides, and outline how users can interact with and analyze various aspects of urban design.