UrbanISE 'VR-in-a-suitcase' is a portable tool for participative urban planning and mobility research. Our tool transforms complex urban design proposals into fully immersive cycling experiences, allowing planners, policymakers, and, importantly, citizens to experience street designs in a real-world scale before they are built.
We aim to lower the entry barrier for adopting VR tools in urban planning by providing a starter kit before complex implementations.
The VR-in-a-suitcase setup combines a VR headset, laptop, bike trainer, speed sensors, and an Unreal Engine virtual environment into a plug-and-play toolkit. Users can place any regular bicycle on the trainer and ride through street plans that showcase urban interventions such as new bike lanes, street greenery scenarios, or street redesigns, experiencing scale and size in a way that matches the real-world experience.
UrbanISE 'VR-in-a-suitcase' helps cities evaluate and refine design decisions, communicate plans in a powerful way, and reduce costly trial-and-error in physical infrastructure.
Urban planners generally recognize the potential of VR-based tools. While the awareness of existing use-cases of VR in urban planning tends to be fairly low due to low adoption, planners also find it easy to imagine new use-cases for VR where its strengths could come truly into play.
VR is a powerful communication tool that conveys scale, context and lived experience in ways that non-immersive 2D and 3D representations cannot. It supports understanding for both planners and laypeople alike, while also enabling testing scenarios and comparing street plans. Using VR as a complementary tool alongside traditional methods helps inform, justify, and validate planning decisions. This makes it a valuable tool in the participatory planning process.
Despite these advantages, why is adoption so low? Instead of technical limitations, barriers can be generally traced to requirements for specialized expertise, complexity of technical implementations, cost of maintenance and troubles in deploying virtual tools.
Our tool lowers the barriers to VR adoption by removing many of the obstacles that have traditionally held it back. It requires less specialized expertise to operate, can be prepared in a fraction of the time, and is inexpensive both to create and maintain. Crucially, it is also easily deployable. We seek to provide a tool, with which organizations no longer need significant technical resources or infrastructure to create and immersive and informative experiences.
Tuuli Toivonen – Principal Investigator
Tuuli is a Professor of Geoinformatics and the head of the Digital Geography Lab. Her research explores the possibilities of using novel (big/open) data sources and spatial analyses to support environmental and sustainable land use planning and decision-making. Tuuli oversees and supports project implementation.
Omkaranathan Ravindran – Project Manager and Technical Lead
Om is an XR specialist with extensive industry experience in 3D visualization, XR, VFX and CAD.
Olli Jakonen – Project Planner/Coordinator
Olli is a researcher and a PhD student in Urban Studies with a background in sociology, specializing in urban technologies and smart cities.
Petri Kangassalo – VR Specialist
Petri is a landscape architect and a PhD Student with expertise in planning support systems and development of 3D and VR applications for visualizing urban greenery and biodiversity interventions.
Pawan Gami – 3D Specialist
Pawan is a 3D expert with 18 years of experience in computational geometry and 3D graphics rendering and rendering software.
UrbanISE VR (Grant Agreement ID 101248556) is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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