Development and Implementations of Virtual Reality for Urban Planning and Building Design
Licentiate thesis, 2009

The use of Virtual Reality (VR) has been seen by many as holding great potential in increasing the effectiveness and improving communication in the decision making process in urban planning and building design. VR can faulitate processes so that participants can better understand, identify and analyze problems together to improve their decision making and the future urban environment. However, VR has not attained the impact and penetration that was predicted. The often mentioned barriers for implementing new technologies into the construction industry are human and cultural factors, lack of IT skills, lack of knowledge and awareness and finally the lack of the technology itself including, for example, tools. This thesis contributes knowledge that helps improve the usability and successful implementation of VR technology in the urban planning and building design process. The approach to achieve this has been to investigate both the human usability and technical aspects of VR. In the context of human usability, this thesis deals with whether and how VR can be used in decision making in the urban planning and building design process. In this context it is also important to investigate how different actors experience VR in different decision making contexts in the urban planning and building design process. The technical part of this thesis aims to improve the usability and implementation of VR by presenting new tools and methods that fit the existing planning pipeline in the urban planning and building design process. In this context it is important to create tools and methods that are cost and time effective for producing virtual worlds. The results show that VR was experienced to be useful by the participants in the investigated parts of the decision making process. The VR-model gave a broader understanding about the sizes and volumes of the new buildings and how these interact with the surrounding urban environment. This thesis also presents three enhanced technical methods that integrate VR in a time- and cost-effective way. 1. Semi-automatic creation of a 3D-City model from the City Planning Authorities’ base map 2. Creating enhanced visual quality for ground material 3. Enhanced rendering of BIM models The methods have been integrated into software called MrViz that is used at the City Planning Authorities of Göteborg and Kungsbacka.

Building Information Model

Usability

Urban planning

3D-City models

Virtual Reality

Building design

Geo-Studion, Sven hultins gata10
Opponent: Odd Tullberg, WSP, Sweden & Mike Connell, WSP,Sweden

Author

Mattias Roupé

Chalmers, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Construction Management

Efficient Real-Time Rendering of Building Information Models

PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2009 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND VIRTUAL REALITY (CGVR09),; (2009)p. 97-103

Paper in proceeding

Virtual Reality As a New Tool in the City Planning Process

Tsinghua Science and Technology,; Vol. 13(2008)p. 255-260

Journal article

Visual quality of the ground in 3D models: using color-coded images to blend aerial photos with tiled detail-textures

Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality, Visualisation and Interaction in Africa,; (2009)p. 73-79

Paper in proceeding

From CAD to VR - Implementations for Urban Planning and Building Design

Digital Design: The Quest for New Paradigms [23nd eCAADe Conference Proceedings],; Vol. 23(2005)p. 399-405

Paper in proceeding

Subject Categories

Psychology (excluding Applied Psychology)

Communication Studies

Other Civil Engineering

Lic - Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology

Geo-Studion, Sven hultins gata10

Opponent: Odd Tullberg, WSP, Sweden & Mike Connell, WSP,Sweden

More information

Created

10/6/2017