Experimental Study on Augmented Reality Potentials in Urban Design

Urban design is generally a pre-organizing process of land usage and is traditionally regarded as a highly collaborative activity. Augmented reality (AR) technology, the addition of virtual entities into the real world view, can support design assessment and collaboration within design team. This paper presented an experimental study that investigated the capability of Augmented Reality in the field of urban design and other related design tasks which involve group design and planning processes. Two realistic urban design scenarios were used to compare the performance between two treatments: the traditional wood block (TWB) method and the AR technology (ART). The results obtained from this experiment showed that although some technical difficulties in the AR system introduced negative performance factors on the outcome, all the subjects believed that the system holds significant potentials in urban design.