Overview
Public planning projects involve a wide range of stakeholders from different sectors (government, business, and civil society). In order to achieve broad-based solutions, all stakeholders must be given the opportunity to actively participate in such planning and thus make the process as democratic as possible. Currently, this is done primarily with plans, models and texts that are often difficult for non-experts to understand and comprehend. These hurdles make communication and information mediation at the same level more difficult.
The combination of augmented reality with smartphones and tablets offers promising new design and application possibilities in urban planning and development: On the one hand, AR visualizations have the potential to close the abstraction gap between planning (plans, visualizations, diagrams) and realization (space, material, function). On the other hand, the vivid presentation of complex planning and participation processes can encourage younger people in particular to actively participate.
Augmented reality (AR) in particular offers great potential to develop into a meaningful method extension of visualization techniques in public and participatory planning processes.
The visualization of the redesign of Bahnhofstrasse in Augmented Reality is a joint project of the Civil Engineering Department of the City of Lucerne and the research groups Visual Narrative and Immersive Realities Research Lab of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
With the tablet, the planned structural interventions can be viewed three-dimensionally and spatially. The planned second row of trees, the new bicycle station and the mobile seating with planting can be experienced visually. Users can thus experience on site how the Bahnhofstrasse could be designed and used in the future, without the need for any real structural or other interventions.
The visualization is carried out on mobile devices, as they are widely used and they enable the simultaneous use of larger groups of participants in information and participation processes.
