Visualising Digital Twins to Encourage Co-Creation in Urban Planning

Sammanfattning

The importance of public participation and stakeholder involvement in urban planning has continuously increased over the last few decades. Today, it is seen as a key aspect in designing effective urban spaces. Digital twin technology has the potential to optimise and solve many problems in urban planning, including promoting stakeholder participation and making information easier to understand and discuss. This study aims to determine how to design and develop a platform for digital twin visualisation to support stakeholder discussion during urban planning workshops. The Unity game engine was used for this purpose, after which a workshop was held in which participants tested the platform. To gather information regarding the digital twin platform from the participants, a survey was used. The platform was found to be user-friendly, as the 3D aspect made it easy to understand and operating it was simple. It supports discussion by creating different markers that can be placed on areas of interest. Discussions can additionally be documented on the markers. With the features available, the platform could be successfully utilised in certain workshops. However, it lacks testing in real projects. For this reason, the actual benefit of its use in practise cannot be concluded. This study contributes to research on an alternative, less expensive method for using digital twin technology in urban planning.