Using mixed reality (MR) to improve on-site design experience in community planning

Abstract

In recent years, designing in existing environments has been consistently emphasized in community planning. However, practicing such on-site design is not easy for designers, because the current technical conditions do not allow virtual design objects into real environments for 3D visualization and interaction. Thus, designers’ intuitive design perceptions, accurate design judgments, and convenient design decisions are hardly supported. This paper explores the possibilities of using mixed reality (MR) technology to improve designers’ on-site design experiences in community planning. For this, we introduced an MR design support system (MR-DSS) for the interactive on-site 3D visualization of virtual design objects. With the MR-DSS, we performed a design experiment with sixteen participants in a typical on-site design scene of community planning. The results showed that the MR technology could provide designers with intuitive design perceptions, accurate design judgments, and convenient design decisions, thus effectively improving their on-site design experiences.