How mixed reality is transforming city and urban planning

From IT Pro.

“Almost any data can be integrated – the challenge is how to represent it to make sense for humans,” adds Todd Richmond IEEE member and director, Tech + Narrative Lab, Pardee RAND Graduate School.

A building information model (BIM) might have sensors providing information on temperature or foot traffic, but other data are harder to present visually; one example Richmond mentions is biometric data to track user sentiment. “Some of it’s still sci-fi, but less than you might think. The data’s there, but the analysis and visualization is still a work in progress.”

Richmond adds the infrastructure to deliver VR to begin with is a potential stumbling block. “5G helps but has limited roll-out, but more importantly, there aren’t enough inexpensive hardware options for widespread adoption.”

And even if there were, repurposing a VR experience for a handheld device – which is more in the realm of augmented reality (AR) – rather than a fully kitted VR experience might just mean scrimping on the features that make VR compelling in the first place.

“With enough bandwidth and devices, anything is scalable,” Richmond continues. “Interactions is the hard part – what affordances do you provide for users who are fully immersed versus those participating through a limited onramp?”

“Ideally the metaverse will follow the internet model of being agnostic with on-ramps and technologies all working in a subset of standards,” Richmond says, “but there is a risk of competing standards.”