Advanced Visualization of Neighborhood Carbon Metrics Using Virtual Reality: Improving Stakeholder Engagement: Fid-Bau Portal

Advanced Visualization of Neighborhood Carbon Metrics Using Virtual Reality: Improving Stakeholder Engagement

Houlihan Wiberg, A. / Løvhaug, Sondre / Mathisen, Mikael / Tschoerner, Benedikt / Resch, Eirik / Erdt, Marius / Prasolova-Førland, Ekaterina

Abstract

This work addresses how immersive how immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), can help to deal with the increasing complexity and decreasing usability when modeling Zero Emission Buildings (ZEB) and Zero Emission Neighborhoods (ZEN) in smart cities. There is a need to handle both “top-down” neighborhood-level data used in municipal planning with “bottom-up” data used in project planning at building and material level. This level of information can quickly become overwhelming, particularly when dealing with diverse stakeholders such as planners, architects, researchers, and citizens who are all important in the design process of future ZENs but who may not have a scientific background.

Visualization is paramount to communicate complex data dynamically and interactively allowing architects and other diverse stakeholders to engage in decision-making and the design process. This paper investigates using VR to visually communicate multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) at different scales to improve stakeholder’s participation in the design process. The results indicate that virtual reality is suitable for communicating and contextualizing complex data and that ZENVR is an appropriate tool for visualizing KPIs in ZENs. The use cases for ZENVR include citizen engagement, promotion, and advertisement of ZENs, as well as interdisciplinary communication and collaboration between professionals.

Architects play an important role particularly in the early design stage to make design decisions that directly lead to a reduction in the GHG emissions at both the level of ZEB and ZEN. At (existing) neighborhood scale, not only architects but also other stakeholders play an important role in the decision-making process. However, it is not easy for architects and other stakeholders to easily understand and visualize how their design contributes to the overall GHG emissions for the neighborhood. VR may enable diverse experts and decision-makers to evaluate results early in the design stage and on-site. The VR application currently is experimental, and further work should investigate including more KPIs in the application and studying the associated effect on stakeholders. It would be advantageous testing the application’s compatibility with other VR systems and exploring possible adaptations. The results presented in this paper demonstrate how VR can help to improve stakeholder participation and more easily integrate science-based knowledge on GHG emissions and other KPIs in the early design stage.