Jialiang Yao

A GIS based virtual urban simulation environment

This paper presents the development of a virtual reality urban planning tool based on GIS and Virtual Environments to facilitate scenario generation and collaborative urban design. Our system provides an open structure for users to support various visualisation and simulation modules, for the prototyping of urban designs. An Urban Scene Generation module is used within this urban planning system for generating the urban layout, on which the various collaborative planning tasks are carried out. A 3D urban model is generated from a GIS database by extracting features such as landscape, roads, and buildings. The system allows the users to place CAD models within the virtual environment. Various statistical data related to population, crime, and employment are also visualised in this virtual environment. A VR based user interface is provided to handle urban simulation data, query information and discuss urban simulation scenarios.

Towards a collaborative urban planning environment

Various urban planning stakeholders may have conflicting views on development plans and proposals. In order to achieve a shared understanding and facilitate decision making among stakeholders, this paper presents a collaborative urban planning workspace. This workspace is comprised of advanced display systems and optical tracking technologies. A distributed system framework is designed to integrate user interaction, rendering, services and data management capabilities. The system prototype has been implemented and some test scenarios have been examined with user groups.

A multi-touch natural user interface framework

This paper presents the design and implementation of a multi-touch gesture interface framework that has been designed and implemented for collaborative urban planning. The user gestures required for supporting collaborative urban planning have been defined by analysing a well established urban planning environment, previously developed by the authors. Although, the urban planning have been considered as the application context, the overall multi-touch gesture interface framework has been designed and implemented as a layered architecture to support any high level applications. This layered gesture architecture comprises a multi-touch raw data layer, a basic gesture layer and an application specific gesture layer.