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UrbanX “Urban planning in mixed reality”

Daniel Laumer, Hasret Gümgümcü | ETH Zurich | Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation

1 Vision 4 Implementation
Urban planning can be a very demanding and time-consuming task. In an
ever faster changing world, digitalization and recently developed technology
have the potential of revolutionizing this field of work completely. Mixed-
reality for example allows to combine real 3D visualization with displaying
information through intuitive interactivity.

The Microsoft Hololens is the market leader for head-mounted mixed reality
smart glasses. It makes it possible to virtually display the buildings and let
the user access the attributes at the same time. In this way, urban planning
enters a new dimension and can even become an immersive experience.

2 App Design

1• Use Esri CityEngine to process and generate a

virtual 3D city model.
2• Export the data to Unity and design the application
interface.
3• Use augmented reality toolkits like the MRTK and
Vuforia to implement all the functionality and
interactivity
4• Finally deploy the application to the Hololens.
5• Use physical markers to augment and track new
buildings in order to place them in the model.
We introduce UrbanX, a Hololens application for efficient and interactive
urban planning. While looking at the model we can directly get several
attributes of a building in a popup window. To compare one feature of all 5 Interface
buildings between each other you can color the whole model rule-based
according to various attributes. A virtual panel shows information about the
area with bar graphs and diagrams. Editing functionalities like deleting or 1. Project description
adding buildings allow the user to freely make changes to the model.
2. Statistics

3 Methodology 3. Visualization buttons

Getting Information Removing buildings 4. Additional functionalities

A click on a specific building will
show a popup window with
several relevant attributes.
To remove an existing building
from the city model, click and hold
to shrink the model to its 2D
ground plane.
Each planning project has its specific goals which must be reached, like e.g.
the number of additional residents. When modifying the city model, the
changes from the initial state are shown as statistics with colored bar charts.
Several buttons can be clicked to visualize the entire city model depending
on an attribute to show more information of the buildings in an appealing
way.

Adding buildings Visualize 6 Conclusion & Outlook

To add a building, physical
markers are used. When looking at
a marker, the virtual building is
placed on top of it.
The entire city model can be
colored depending on an attribute
selected in the info panel.
We showed that the Microsoft Hololens can be a very
useful tool for urban planning.
Especially in the time-consuming idea generation and try-
out step, integrating mixed-reality as an additional
planning instrument will have various advantages. By
sharing multiple devices, a collaboration and interaction
Visit us at our website
with a real 3D city model will soon be no longer a utopia. www.urbanxgis.wordpress.com

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