Public Funding for Marshall Survey Associates Limited

"Advances in IT have led recently to massive improvements in representing the real world in digital form. The technology exists to render buildings with photo realistic surfaces, and enable people to walk through virtual reality (VR) representations of specific streets, from somewhere else, using specialist headsets. The amount of information processing involved to develop data and images into a user friendly 3D rendering is huge, and beyond the scope of most companies who would like to use it. This means at the moment most 3D VR models of cities use far more basic visualisations. They don't have the capabilities for realistic details such as street furniture and doorways, or visual representations of what will happen with future developments, such as accurate representation of changes in traffic or pedestrian numbers. This hampers the true potential of VR as an industrial tool. In this project we will be developing an accessible, immersive VR representation of the City of London. This will include prediction modelling capabilities so changes in, for example, traffic flow due to building work, can be visualised, and also better graphics, so street furniture, building doorways etc can be seen. We will be making this model available both to the public and to paying commercial users, so they can use it to help predict how their developments and other activities will affect the wider city, in a contextual and user friendly way. This will help massively when deciding on planning and development issues within The City. This software will then be expanded to a wider area within London and to other urban areas where levels of accurate visual scrutiny are needed."