Improving Urban Planning with VR

Modeling your complex realities

 Improving Urban Planning with VR

Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany)

Meike Drießen, July 14, 2023

Researchers at Germany's Ruhr-Universität Bochum demonstrated measurable physical reactions to potential changes to urban settings using virtual reality (VR) tools. The researchers simulated the changes in a three-dimensional (3D) model using the Unity3 game engine, allowing users to immerse themselves in the environment to view traffic flow and interactions between cars and pedestrians. The researchers observed an increase in stress levels among participants exposed to higher traffic volumes through the simulations. Said Ruhr-Universität Bochum's Julian Keil, "Until now, residents and other stakeholders have been involved in the planning stage of construction measures, but only in the form of surveys, i.e. explicit statements. Our method enables spatial planners to assess implicit effects of possible measures and to include them in the planning, too."

Digital Twins for Urban Planning

Reminds me of the urban/city planning games like SimCity.   And then also the Agent Models we used to construct simulations of very complex country spaces.  The Digital Twin idea allows us to further specify the details of the participants,  which was hard in the past methods.   But are we aiming to optimize or just explore?

Digital Twins Give Urban Planners Virtual Edge
By Financial Times in CACM

Showing the interrelationships of municipal activities and the data they generate.
Digital twins give a city's planners, policymakers, resource managers, asset owners, and  
Digital twins—virtual simulations of cities—give urban planners, policymakers, resource managers, asset owners, and citizens the advantage of more dynamic tools and information, which can benefit new construction and traffic management, and provide tools for residents to explore the effects of planned projects.

One example is Glasgow, Scotland's Future City project: the initiative's tools offer citizen-accessible data on sustainability overlaid on interactive maps, customized dashboards with widgets on environmental conditions, and data on seasonal food availability.

Meanwhile, Cambridge University's National Digital Twin Project created a U.K. network of city-scale digital twins, with guiding principles that prioritize trust, transparency, social value, ownership, responsibility, and security.

Neil Thompson at engineering company Atkins Global said, "Digital twins offer new opportunities for sustainability and wellbeing—from a physical and a psychological perspective." ..... "