Abstract
Neighborhood planning and design is a complex and iterative process that
usually involves different stakeholders and groups with diverse interests and
goals. These include developers interested in the economic opportunity of
development, politicians and administrators interested in public policy values,
and neighbors interested in compatibility. These stakeholders work
collaboratively to negotiate a mutually acceptable proposal that fulfills many
qualitative and quantitative requirements and expectations. Until now, few
Planning Support Systems (PSS) were capable of supporting the complexity and
interactivity of this collaborative decision making process smoothly through
the whole decision making process from the initial planning phase to final
completion. In our research, a multi-display, collaborative urban planning
system was implemented. The system uses a multi-touch tabletop computer as a
central interactive display for designing a neighborhood. Multiple additional
projectors can be connected to the tabletop display to present other
information, such as 3D rendering of the neighborhood or some quantitative
statistics summarizing the plan. Various ways to connect multiple displays
together were investigated. The final system uses a distributed, federated
architecture to connect the displays through a network. Informal user feedback
was gathered from different types of users. In the thesis we discuss various
design issues regarding multi-display systems and tabletop urban planning
systems and how they were resolved. There are a number of extensions to our new
system. One is the ability to support other types of displays and input
techniques, such as handheld devices or remote tabletop displays. These and
other future research directions are briefly described.
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