The VEPS project: planning information visualisation

Information visualisation remains at the heart of the planning system. Yet the use of the WWW for planning purposes is a new and expanding area of research. A focus on planning procedures at different stages helps to recognise the difficulties inherent in planning, particularly the outcome of changes to the built environment and the importance of people´s involvement in the process. Effective tools are required for citizen based participation and development of alternative proposals. This paper describes the basis for the coming three years of research in the ´virtual environmental planning system´ (VEPS) project. VEPS proposes an open standard Web approach to enable citizens to view, analyse, interact with and respond to proposed changes, to comment and test their own alternative solutions. This approach, it is argued, needs to be based on an interactive three-dimensional virtual reality visualisation that allows the viewer to experience complex information without need for training.