Game engines in urban planning. Visual and sound representations in public space

New tools and techniques for the creation of virtual urban environments are increasingly used in various stages of urban planning. The continuous improvement of the informatics, in terms of calculation capability, ease of use and accessibility of the hardware, enables to integrate into the planning process tools that few years ago were available for technicians only. In the last few years a sort of pitch invasion of technologies, in the field of computer graphics, has been noticed: software commonly used for developing videogames or in the movie industry is increasingly used also in the architectural and in the urban planning discipline. The research fields, where the game engine can be used, are numerous. In the field of architectural and urban planning, the aim of game engines is the interactive visualization, enabling the user the possibility to move without constraints in the virtual urban environment in order to evaluate the impact of design solutions from different points of view. However in these products the urban soundscape is rarely considered. The aim of the project is to investigate the use of game engines as a tool for urban planning practice, in particular, considering the perception of the urban environment as a set of different sensory spheres, how soundscape and visualscape of a public urban space can be played in a dynamic and interactive virtual environment