Interactive modelling of buildings in Google Earth: A 3D tool for urban planning

Abstract

Urban planning and renewal is a very complex process consisting of tasks that require joint decision making. In such tasks, the communication tools to present and convey design ideas are of critical importance. Appropriate visual tools are needed to establish a common language between professionals, and between professionals and citizens. However, there are indications that particular representations and tools may create different perceptions with respect to the background of the actors. Therefore it is important to develop simple tools which will allow specialists and non-specialists to demonstrate their ideas during the discussions. New emerging technologies offer a large variety of visualisation tools that may solve this problem and greatly enrich visualisation and communication possibilities. This paper presents an approach to draw and visualise simple geometric representation of buildings directly in the Google Earth environment. Using this tool the urban planners and citizens can introduce proposed buildings into the existing 3D environments in a commonly used application such as Google Earth. Several alternatives for the proposed buildings can be easily created, examined and evaluated (in the virtual environment). Using the proposed tool the citizens can generate their own solutions for a design evaluation scenario at home or during a joint decision making session at a municipality and present them to the specialists. The developed tool is Java-based and uses newly released API of Google Earth.