Application of virtual reality GIS in urban planning - an example in Huangdao district

摘要

As an important development direction of GIS, Virtual Reality GIS was founded in 1950s. After 1990s, due to the fast development of its theory and the computer technology, Virtual Reality has been applied to many fields: military, aerospace, design, manufactory, information management, business, construction, city management, medical, education, etc.. The most famous project is the Virtual Los Angeles implemented by the Urban Simulation Team (UST) of UCLA. The main focus of the UST is a long-term effort to build a real-time Virtual Reality model of the entire Los Angeles basin for use by architects, urban planners, emergency response teams, and the government entities. When completed, the entire Virtual L.A. model will cover an area well in excess of 10000 square miles and will elegantly scale from satellite images to street level views accurate enough to allow the signs in the window of the shops and the graffiti on the walls to be legible. Till now, the virtual L.A. has been applied to urban environments and design analysis, transportation studies, historic reconstruction and education, etc. Compared to the early development abroad, the development of Virtual Reality GIS in China is relatively late. It is researched in some universities in early years. But recently, it has been attended by the populace and been used in many social fields: urban planning, environmental protection, historic protection and recovery, real estate, tourism, education etc.. The application of Virtual Reality in urban planning of Huangdao District, Qingdao City is introduced in this paper. As a newly built district, great change has taken place in Huangdao district in recent years. In the backdrop of city development and environmental protection, the traditional urban planning work mode of Huangdao district needs change too. In order to solve the problems of traditional work mode, we developed a VR-based system: Three-dimension Auxiliary Decision-making System of Urban Planning in Huangdao District. This system is worked as a computer platform for the routine urban planning works in the way of Virtual Reality. This system covers 275 km2 area, in which 9000 delicate models (buildings, roads, trees, flowers, etc.) over 20 km2 was built. The data is in access of 45GB. The system can fulfills the following functions: three-dimension cruise: the user can cruise in any place of the scene in any speed and angle, including pre-scheduled route fly, object fly; geometric measurement: the user can measure the distance, area, volume and the visibility of two objects; sun analysis: at the designated city and time, the system can analyze and visualize the sunshine change on the selected buildings; attribute enquiry: like 2D GIS, the system can implement two enquiries: attribute to scene, scene to attribute; projects comparison: building projects of 3DS format can be imported into the system, the user can evaluate them by setting the visibility of different project; project editing: the user can change the height, base area, angel, texture of the project in a real-time way to find the best configuration; indices analysis of existing/planning buildings: in the user-defined content, the system can compute 5 construction indices, such as the construction area, base area, floor-area ratio, construction density, ratio of green space; visibility setting of existing/planning buildings: in this way, the user can realize the blueprint of urban planning in a few minute; export: the system can also export the user-interested viewpoint in BMP format and the animation in AVI format; environment: the system can simulate kinds of weather: rain, snow and fog. Due to the authenticity and interactive browse way of the three-dimension scene, it changes the traditional work and management mode. It supplies a new method for the decision-making of urban planning, and improves the efficiency of routine works. After the establishment of the system, it has been used in the project evaluat