Development of a Smart City Concept in Virtual Reality Environment

Abstract

Abstract. There is an increasing interest in smart city concept as a technology-based alternative to conventional urban planning approaches. The design and implementation of smart cities require multidisciplinary efforts. As one of the first examples, a smart city concept was developed in Turkey in the year 2018 in collaboration with researchers and experts from various disciplines, such as geomatics and civil engineers, architects, computer scientists and urban planners. The developed concept aimed at designing a city district that targets sustainability, human-centricity, smartness, and safety, along with a sense of place and reflects local expectations in an unconstructed sub-urban area. In the project, the collaborative design process and the usability issues of the presentation environments have been of importance for geomatics professionals. Within the study, the existing settlement areas were modelled by using aerial photogrammetric data and combined with elements designed in various Computer-aided design (CAD) software. In this paper, the smart city design elements, which originate from the design principles such as ensuring nature conservation, green, cultural, safe and smart living spaces, and social responsibility, are explained briefly. The city was presented to the stakeholders via Unity game engine for a realistic experience prior to construction. The potential of Virtual Reality (VR) environments for the design, modelling, and visualization of very high detailed smart city concept is presented and various issues are discussed. The model experiment videos with VR, web-based model and project video can be accessed via the web page www.bizimsehir.org.

Immersive Technology and Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Sustainable Smart Cities

“…As shown in Table 3, which lists smart city technology applications in immersive technology and BIM in sustainable smart cities since 2014, case studies [6][7][8][20][21][22][23]31,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49] are the most used method for integrating smart city in immersive technology, followed by literature reviews [6,7,9,19,31,39,[50][51][52][53][54], interviews [8,20,22,36,37,[43][44][45][46], questionnaires [8,20,22,36,37,[43]…”

“…The decision-making stage of the building process has been the subject of extensive research, particularly in the areas of facilities management [12,22,40,43,44,47], building sustainability [19,25,51,55], and building energy [45,52,56]. Evaluating the automation of the BIM-BEM process in building design and improving the interoperability between BIM and BEM are crucial for cost savings in building energy.…”

Extended reality (XR)—A magic box of digitalization in driving sustainable development of the construction industry: A critical review

“…The smart city refers to the development of digital cities based on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and Big Data technologies (Wu et al, 2018). With the advancements in ICT in recent decades, the smart city has become a global phenomenon affecting cities large and small (Buyukdemircioglu & Kocaman, 2022).…”

“…The smart city refers to the development of digital cities based on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and Big Data technologies (Wu et al, 2018). With the advancements in ICT in recent decades, the smart city has become a global phenomenon affecting cities large and small (Buyukdemircioglu & Kocaman, 2022). Meanwhile, the quarantine policies resulting from the COVID‐19 pandemic have led to an increasing distribution of people's communication and work in a mixture of remote and in‐site forms, making it necessary to rethink how to apply a set of collaborative technologies in moving towards a sustainable world (Nikolic & Whyte, 2021).…”

“…Jamei et al (2017) explore the potential of VR in designing and planning smart cities, considering economic, environmental, and socio‐cultural aspects, highlighting its significant role in the design process. Buyukdemircioglu and Kocaman (2022) discuss the potential of VR environments in designing, modeling, and visualizing detailed smart cities, highlighting the collaborative design process and future improvements, citing Turkey's first smart city project. Broucke and Deligiannis (2019) propose a VR system to visualize and explore real‐time smart city data from Brussels, comparing the perceived workloads and immersion parameters between the existing smart city web platforms and the proposed VR application.…”