Building virtual cities
Rob Ingram, Steve Benford, John Bowers · 1996
Urban planners have developed many theories of how urban design affects people's experience of real-world cities. This paper considers how this body of work might be applied to the design of virtual environments. The paper presents and compares two pieces of research, each proposing algorithms for automatically enhancing or generating virtual environments and each inspired by a different theory of urban design. The first describes how Kevin Lynch's work on the legibility of cities can be applied to improve the navigability of three dimensional information visualisations. The paper describes the design, construction and experimental evaluation of a system called LEADS which implements some general purpose legibility enhancing algorithms. The second describes how Hillier and Hansen's work on the social logic of space has been applied to the construction of multi-user virtual cities. The paper describes the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a city generation system called The Virtual City Builder (VCB). It then describes simulation experiments with VCB which uncover relationships between different city layouts and opportunities for navigation and social encounter. The paper concludes by comparing both pieces of work and by outlining possibilities for their future integration.