Topic: "Developing a Geo-located Augmented Reality Mobile Application for Participatory Urban Planning"
Abstract: Nowadays, transparency and openness of decision-making process in urban planning is becoming more and more important for residents. People need to be aware of what is going to be constructed or arranged in their surrounding in advance and contribute to its development. Planners and decision makers lack information on public participation. In recent years, augmented reality systems have been improved significantly. Supplementing and visualizing 3D objects in the real environment opens promising perspectives in using the augmented reality to urban planning. Therefore, within this research a Yes Here mobile application based on augmented reality that can support participatory urban planning process was developed. Moreover, the application was adapted to the use for urban planning of Kazakhstan. Current version of the application contains two imaginary urban projects located in the City of Villach (Austria) and two real future urban projects located in the City of Astana (Kazakhstan). Also the research provides methodologies for the development of such augmented reality application for urban planning, on the basis of developed workflow of participatory urban planning and data workflow. Additionally, the Yes Here was tested on five mobile devices running on Android platforms and evaluated by the residents of the City of Villach. To do this, the research describes the methodologies of conducting the testing and evaluation of the developed prototype, which are outlined in the prototype testing and evaluation workflows. Eventually, the research provides discussions and conclusions of the obtained results, as well as information for the potential improvement in the future work.
Keywords: geo-located augmented reality, urban planning, participatory, public.
Achieved Results of Master Thesis:
The main focus of my Master Thesis was in developing a geo-located augmented reality mobile application that can support participatory urban planning process interactively and efficient. The application running on Android platforms was developed and named “Yes Here”. Figure below illustrates the system architecture of developed application.
In the thesis the following three main results were highlighted: Workflow of Participatory Urban Planning, Data Workflow and Working Prototype (Yes Here). First two results are intermediate and devoted to provide instructions for further developers of such mobile applications for participatory urban
planning processes as Yes Here in interactive and efficient manner with opportunity to adapt it for
different urban planning scenarios and
independently on the country of applying to.
To prove the concept of my Master Thesis and for practical realization, the developed prototype included two real urban projects located in my home place – in the City of Astana (Kazakhstan). For implementing these urban planning scenarios and testing the application, it was even necessary to make a trip to Astana, which is thousand kilometers away from the City of Villach. Eventually, everything planned for the thesis worked well and was successful. Some on-site testing photo-results of urban projects in augmented reality are shown in the figure below.
Developed Yes Here application includes a video-tutorial:
Video demonstration of abovementioned urban project in augmented reality is here:
11 tasks of the subject "Discrete Combinatorial Optimization" that I solved, wich covers:
- Fundamentals of Graph Theory;
- Transportation, Assignment and Routing Models;
- Network Models for Shortest Path Problems;
- Flow Problems, Spanning Tree Problems.