ARTHUR: A Collaborative Augmented Environment for Architectural Design and Urban Planning

Projects in the area of architectural design and urban planning typically engage several architects as well as experts from other professions. While the design and review meetings thus often involve a large number of cooperating participants, the actual design is still done by the individuals in the time in between those meetings using desktop PCs and CAD applications. A real collaborative approach to architectural design and urban planning is often limited to early paper-based sketches. In order to overcome these limitations, we designed and realized the ARTHUR system, an Augmented Reality (AR) enhanced round table to support complex design and planning decisions for architects. While AR has been applied to this area earlier, our approach does not try to replace the use of CAD systems but rather integrates them seamlessly into the collaborative AR environment. The approach is enhanced by inDigital Peer Publishing Licence Any party may pass on this Work by electronic means and make it available for download under the terms and conditions of the current version of the Digital Peer Publishing Licence (DPPL). The text of the licence may be accessed and retrieved via Internet at http://www.dipp.nrw.de/. First presented at the International Conference of Human and Computer 2004, extended and revised for JVRB tuitive interaction mechanisms that can be easily configured for different application scenarios.