Using virtual reality technology to facilitate web-based public participation

Virtual reality as an advanced visualisation technology is used in many aspects of urban design and management to assist the various stakeholders’ better understanding of the urban environment. This paper is based on an EPSRC funded research project – “Web-Based Participation for Campus-Scale Project Design: The West Cambridge Site”, which aims to facilitate web-based participatory consultation to allow staff, students and local residents to learn about, and debate, planning and building proposals by Cambridge University. Interactive 3D virtual reality models were created of a number of proposed urban development projects in Cambridge and published on the University web site along with mechanisms for surveying users’ opinions of the proposals. These were linked to relational databases on the web server for recording survey responses. Care was taken to provide the participants with a friendly interface and interactive functions to easily navigate the model and accurately understand the issues involved. This paper starts with reviewing the theory and practice of implementing virtual reality visualisation for public participation in urban design. The technical details of creating the 3D virtual reality models, merging them into the web site and linking objects in the virtual reality model with databases, are described. Finally the advantages of, and the barriers to, this kind of virtual reality application are addressed