CityScopeAR: Urban Design and Crowdsourced Engagement Platform
This addresses the problem of limited collaborative tools for urban planners and designers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing TUI and AR/MR technologies.
The paper tackles the lack of tangible and collaborative tools in urban planning by introducing CityScopeAR, a mixed-reality platform that enables collaborative urban design, with real-world tests demonstrating its potential for decentralized community engagement.
Processes of urban planning, urban design and architecture are inherently tangible, iterative and collaborative. Nevertheless, the majority of tools in these fields offer virtual environments and single user experience. This paper presents CityScopeAR: a computational-tangible mixed-reality platform designed for collaborative urban design processes. It portrays the evolution of the tool and presents an overview of the history and limitations of notable CAD and TUI platforms. As well, it depicts the development of a distributed networking system between TUIs and CityScopeAR, as a key in design collaboration. It shares the potential advantage of broad and decentralized community-engagement process using such tools. Finally, this paper demonstrates several real-world tests and deployments of CityScopeAR and proposes a path to future integration of AR/MR devices in urban design and public participation.