Abstract
In this chapter, the authors detail how six commercial products have sought to provide 3D spatial media solutions for the planning domain, and set out their own approach to developing an interactive, multi-platform city information model (CIM) for desktop/WebGL (on a PC), VR (HTC Vive), and MR (Microsoft HoloLens) for Dublin informed by user requirements elicited through interviews with professional urban planners. They demonstrate how a Unity game engine solution can be used to build and manage a multi-platform CIM project from initial stage to the final build. They discuss issues concerning the handling geographic data, data integration, UI development, multi-platform support, interaction types (controllers, gestures, etc.), and potential application. They present core interactive simulations, including shadow analysis, flood resilience, visibility analysis, importing building models, and run-time modeling tool, which are crucial for city information modeling.
TopBackground
Studies have utilized and assessed a series of increasingly sophisticated technologies for visualizing and simulation city landscapes, including: Computer-Aided Design (CAD) (Al-Kodmany, 2002), 3D modeling packages (Schreyer, 2013), 3D Geographic Information Systems (3D GIS) (Koninger & Bartel, 1998; Gu et al., 2011), Virtual Reality (VR) (Doyle et al., 1998; Salter et al., 2009; Portman et al., 2015), Mixed Reality (MR) (Guo et al. 2008; Ghadirian & Bishop 2008), and Building Information Modeling (BIM) (Crotty, 2011). Most recently, research has focused on developing nascent City Information Modelling (CIM) systems that utilize a number of these technologies such as 3D GIS, VR and MR, draw together and interlink at a city-scale a range of 3D landscape and building data, as well as other administrative and operational spatial data, and enable their exploration using a variety of query and simulation tools (Thompson et al., 2016; Stojanovski, 2018).