A Development Methodology of Virtual Reality Models for Urban Light Rail Transit Projects

Requirements of VR systems for LRT projects were studied, and a methodology for development of VR model was proposed from the perspective of traffic, landscapes, and urban planning, which showed its feasibility and practicality to an actual LRT project in Japan.

Abstract

To solve recent urban problems such as decline of downtown areas, aged society, congested roads, etc., light rail transit (LRT) is gaining much attention among municipal agencies and urban planners. For building consensus among stakeholders in the process of design and construction of LRT, a virtual reality (VR) system is often used. Usually, as the data size of a virtual urban model increases and more mobile objects are in the model, its presentation gives more realistic impressions. However, at the same time, this causes longer data loading time and low rate of frames per second (fps), which may hinder the actual use of VR for workshops and meetings. In this research, thus, requirements of VR systems for LRT projects were studied, and a methodology for development of VR model was proposed from the perspective of traffic, landscapes, and urban planning. This methodology was applied to an actual LRT project in Japan and showed its feasibility and practicality.