Rapid Prototyping of Urban River Corridors Using 3D Interactive, Real-time Graphics

Development of urban river corridors is a complex task with many elements needing to be drawn together. URSULA, Urban River corridors and Sustainable Living Agendas, is a major project looking at sustainability led redevelopment of these areas. Part of this process will be the use of interactive, three dimensional computer visualisations to not only create a dialogue between stakeholders, but also to facilitate the development and assessment of proposed changes, or “interventions”, that the project will generate. It is proposed that by providing a system that quickly produces real-time visualisations that include the URSULA interventions, an environment can be created where designers and professionals working with land and built form are able to make collaborative design decisions. This paper reports on a pilot study of the rapid prototyping of 3D landscape visualizations of urban river corridors using existing software tools. The objectives of the pilot were to gain an understanding of the processes involved in the production of the visualisation models, and also to gain insight into the time scales involved. The examined workflow began with pen and paper sketches of designs for an area of Sheffield, which then proceeded through several levels of detail using SketchUp, until they were finalised in Simmetry3d, a software tool that allows users to interact with the models through computer game style walkthroughs. The pilot successfully produced visualisations which were tested with stakeholders, both expert and non-professional, in an office environment and also at the virtual reality studio at the University of Sheffield. The results show that while it was feasible to use visualisations to facilitate discussion over proposed designs, a barrier existed to further discussion; this was the time taken to refine the models based on the discourse they created. By identifying bottlenecks in the generation of the models, future research will investigate ways of removing or reducing them so as to enable collaborative design using rapid prototype visualisations with a group of stakeholders. In conjunction with this, methods of linking extra data to the visualisations and ways of analysing these models will be investigated in order to allow for more informed decisions to be made through the use of visualisation for sustainability assessment. Rapid Prototyping of Urban River Corridors Using 3D Interactive, Real-time Graphics 199