An experimental study on collaborative effectiveness of augmented reality potentials in urban design

摘要

Urban design is generally a process of pre-organising land usage and is traditionally regarded as a highly collaborative activity. Augmented reality (AR) technology, the addition of virtual entities into the human's real-world view, once complemented by the versatile nature of embodied intelligent agents, is envisaged to be promising for supporting design assessment and collaboration within design teams. This paper presents a framework for an intelligent agent-based AR system, called Augmented Reality-based Urban Designer (ARU Designer), which could allow designers to assess virtual urban designs in a real, natural, and familiar workspace. In order to demonstrate and validate the strengths and weaknesses of this emerging innovative application, two realistic urban design scenarios were used in one preliminary experiment to compare the performance and effectiveness of the traditional wood block (TWB) method and the Augmented Reality technology (ART) which is ARU Designer. The results from this preliminary experiment showed that although some technological difficulties in the AR system (ARU Designer) introduced negative performance factors on the overall outcome, all the subjects believed that the AR system holds significant potentials for urban design.