VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS IN PLANNING AFFAIRS Getting closer to geographic data, a better way!

Urban environmental elements and planning involve a complex data and phenomenon. It is required to have a better understanding of concerned geographic data to make a decision or plan for the applications like urban planning, infrastructure management, and visibility analysis and tourism promotion. Current practice in any public or private sector planning context at any spatial scale involves better visualization techniques. In many planning issues, GIS is combined with other several computer tools to enhance the planning process and decision-making. The rapid advancement in science and technology had opened wide options for a change and development of current methods and concepts. Computer data visualizations, not only help laypersons, who often have trouble in understanding or interpreting complex data, but they also can help experts with its various capabilities. High performance visualization tools provides dynamic work sphere to combine interactive urban environmental elements with internet based visualizations (web 3D) and Virtual reality. This study is based on such visualizations. The main focus of the research is to display the geographic data comprising of spatial as well as the non-spatial data in these virtual environments. The first part of project, named as web 3D project enables online internet access to 3D urban models including geometry and thematic attribute data. The second part of project is focused on virtual reality, which let the user immerse in the data, that is you are surrounded by the landscape and you can walk, fly around the city. One can visualize the existing scenario in C.A.V.E or H.M.D and can test future natural and built environments. And also a program is developed to access the attribute information like name of building, usage etc. for the objects in virtual reality, which will display in runtime while navigating the scene.