A multi-display collaborative urban planning system with a federated architecture

Neighborhood planning and design is a complex and iterative process that usually involves different stakeholders and groups with diverse interests and goals. These include developers interested in the economic opportunity of development, politicians and administrators interested in public policy values, and neighbors interested in compatibility. These stakeholders work collaboratively to negotiate a mutually acceptable proposal that fulfills many qualitative and quantitative requirements and expectations. Until now, few Planning Support Systems (PSS) were capable of supporting the complexity and interactivity of this collaborative decision making process smoothly through the whole decision making process from the initial planning phase to final completion. In our research, a multi-display, collaborative urban planning system was implemented. The system uses a multi-touch tabletop computer as a central interactive display for designing a neighborhood. Multiple additional projectors can be connected to the tabletop display to present other information, such as 3D rendering of the neighborhood or some quantitative statistics summarizing the plan. Various ways to connect multiple displays together were investigated. The final system uses a distributed, federated architecture to connect the displays through a network. Informal user feedback was gathered from different types of users. In the thesis we discuss various design issues regarding multi-display systems and tabletop urban planning systems and how they were resolved. There are a number of extensions to our new system. One is the ability to support other types of displays and input techniques, such as handheld devices or remote tabletop displays. These and other future research directions are briefly described.Science, Faculty ofComputer Science, Department ofGraduat