Aim

VU.CITY’s project aims to help built environment professionals understand how developments in the City of London will impact the wider city through prediction modelling and VR.

Summary

Most decisions made on new buildings have been based on two dimensional images and videos. Now, for the first time, planners can put buildings into a fully interactive virtual reality twin and experience it at a human scale.
VU.CITY helps built environment professionals to create, refine, share and understand the journey of a development to make better planning decisions, faster. In collaboration with City of London Corporation, Innovate UK, Marshall Associates and New London Architecture, they have helped create the most advanced, fully interactive virtual reality ‘digital twin’ of London’s Square Mile . This virtual Square Mile enables people to walk through virtual reality representations of specific streets, remotely, using specialist headsets. It captures buildings to 2cm accuracy across the entire area.
The model of the Square Mile has been created to help understand the city’s transformation at human scale, to fully explore the impacts and make improvements before projects are agreed on. The Square Mile twin further supports collaboration in a virtual space, ensuring that all involved in the design and commissioning of buildings can review proposed changes together, share knowledge and ultimately come to more informed, meaningful decisions.

Target Audience

Built environment professionals
Architects
Visualisation and planning experts

Outcome

VU.CITY’s project has been impactful in informing modern design and building processes. The team is now building on their success to further understand how to enjoy and operate cities, such with traffic flow, security and tourism. They envision a new market of ‘digital tourism’, where ‘tourists’ across the globe can immerse themselves in the sights of their favourite cities through their screens, exploring streets and monuments in the greatest detail without having to navigate through a throng of other sightseers.
VU.CITY believes that virtual digital twins of cities have much to offer. Their technology marks a monumental step to ensure the changes we make keep London an iconic place where people want to visit, live, work and thrive.

Contact

Carole Dilley

Applications

Content – AR, Infrastructure – 5g

Investment

£440,738.00

Start

2019-03-01

End

2020-08-28

Actual sector

Education, Arts, entertainment and recreation

Potential sector

Agriculture, forestry and fishing, Electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply, Water supply, sewerage waste management and remediation activities, Construction, Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles, Transportation