A VR-centred workspace for supporting collaborative urban planning

Collaboration between urban planners, government officers and other stake-holders is a key task in the urban planning procedure. This paper presents a VR-centred workspace prototype for supporting collaborative urban planning. This workspace comprises a variety of technologies such as semi-immersive stereo display, table-top display, mobile devices and an optical tracking system. A system framework for VR-centred workspace integrates a user interaction layer along with service and data management capabilities. This open-structured framework can support various visualisation and simulation modules and facilitates collaboration. We have implemented this prototype and some test scenarios have been examined with user groups.