Virtual City@Chalmers: Creating a prototype for a collaborative early stage urban planning AR application

Contemporary urban planning require multi-stakeholder collaboration to create liveable, accessible and resilient cities. Information and communications technologies can play an important role. This paper presents and discusses the development of a prototype for an indoor multi-stakeholder augmented reality (AR) application to support collaborative design in early stage urban planning. The prototype is integrated into VirtualCity@Chalmers, a platform for modeling, simulation, and visualization of urban environments. Based on a user-centered approach, four main steps were carried out: literature study, interview study, development of guidelines, and development of the first version of a collaborative AR prototype. The guidelines for the prototype development address design and layout, collaboration, analysis, and object creation and manipulation. At the current state of development, the AR application allows users to visualize a projection of three-dimensional assets over a flat surface. Further research will focus on user testing and integration of simple Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations.