Summary: |
Facing the challenges of aging infrastructure, the search for better renewable energies and growing population in cities, Government agencies, municipalities and utilities are looking for more accountability, risk mitigation and collaborative decision making around investments in infrastructure design and construction. Often, what’s requested by stakeholders is a better overall process to understand, experience, and collaborate around infrastructure development while balancing the demands for sustainability with the need for economic growth and livability. For many stakeholders, an accurate 3D city model can help design professionals, agencies, and public stakeholders alike understand the impact of projects more intuitively than can 2D plans. The visually immersive presentation and interaction (interactive 3D navigation, manipulating, annotating, publishing, collaborating and distributing information on-demand) of 3D models can help to meet these challenges. Infrastructure planning processes typically involve several parties, from designers, agencies, and public stakeholders. Collaborative processes require that information is available from different platforms at any time. Collaboration includes the ability to markup and comment so that reviewers can share feedback with designers, as well as the ability to allow teams to improve efficiency by distributing design across communities of editors. Cloud-centric workflows enable users to enhance the process of collaboration throughout the planning process, such as comments and collaboration, in order to achieve a more confident and sustainable decision on infrastructure design and construction. This means being able to pass information, connect to the team or doing editing work on the same dataset using the internet connection to reach the model stored in the cloud. Moreover, 3D models enable all stakeholders to stay on the same page regarding proposed development, because of the more natural, intuitive way for communicating with non-technical stakeholders. Besides the collaborative environment the way those 3D models are visualized are important in terms of acceptance. Based on even simple GIS and CAD data the look and feel should be as realistic and immersive as it can represent the reality as it is or as it can be. |