Multi-touch screens for navigating 3D virtual environments in participatory urban planning

Abstract

Global trends have seen a strong push for more effective participatory planning in democratic societies. Effective communication and universal accessibility are underpinning principles of successful participatory planning. Virtual environments (VEs) have proven to significantly improve public understanding of 3D planning data. This paper will evaluate multi-touch screens as a 3D VE navigation device for the general public in a participatory planning context. The interactivity of multi-touch technology may better engage participants and improve their understanding of planning policies and proposed projects. With the recent proliferation of multi-touch technology in the personal device market, there is great potential for expanding accessibility of participatory planning applications.

What do we study when studying politics anddemocracy?A thematic analysis of how politics and democracy aretreated in SIGCHI conference papers

“…Unlike in the 'Motivating context and background' theme, these papers further elaborated what democracy and politics mean, and expanded these via concrete examples; for example: "Strong representative democracies rely on educated, informed, and active citizenry to provide oversight of the government. We present Connect 2 Congress (C2C) [--] " (Chow et al, 2011). The gist of this group is understanding politics and democracy in the context of the actions of individuals within structures: democratic decision-making focuses on how individuals make decisions, social movements focus on how individuals establish new structures to influence policy making, and the social issues group ultimately focuses on examining established structures critically and even turn into activism.…”

Tactical Patterns for Grassroots Urban Repair

“…As mentioned previously, past HCI work in citizen-oriented urban planning has been largely confined to the conventional participatory design process [16,17,79]. This includes the sub-space digital civics, a "cross-disciplinary area of research that seeking to understand the role that digital technologies can play in supporting relational models of service provision, organization and citizen empowerment... and the potential of such models to reconfigure power relations between citizens, communities and the state" [95].…”

“…While there has been past work in the HCI community in the context of urbanism and planning [10,23,46,70,84,91,93], it has not supplanted official processes. In fact, there has been a great deal of scholarship on augmenting and working within the conventional participatory design process for urban planning [16,17,51,79]. The CSCW community has engaged with grassroots urban activism [31], but as far as we can find, it does not directly address the process of designing new community spaces within the urban environment.…”

WebVRGIS based traffic analysis and visualization system

“…Virtual environments have proven to significantly improve public understanding of 3D planning data [14]. To share the information resources of all departments and the dynamic tracking for the geospatial information of population and companies, an integrated information system of social services is constructed.…”