A Virtual Reality Tool to Implement City Building Codes on Capitol View Preservation

In urban planning, the urban environment is a very complicated system with many layers of building codes cross-referenced and interacting together to guide urban growth. Especially, if a new urban design is located in a historical area, additional restrictions will be imposed upon regular zoning regulations to maintain the area’s historical characteristics. Often, urban regulations read as text are difficult to understand. A tool that generates adequate urban information and a quick visualization of the design will ease decision-making and enhance urban design processes. The goal of this research project is to develop a virtual reality (VR) tool with high resolution, speedy computation, and a userfriendly environment. This project initiates an interactive visualization tool to enforce city-planning regulations on viewing access to the state capitol building in Des Moines, Iowa. The capitol building houses the Iowa Legislature and is a symbol of state power. Maintaining the view from surrounding areas will preserve the building’s monumental and symbolic meaning. To accomplish this, the City Community Development Department and the Capitol Planning Committee developed a Capitol View Corridor Project, which sets up seven visual corridors to prevent the view toward the capitol from being blocked by any future designs. Because city regulations are not easy for the public and designers to interpret and comprehend, this project intends to develop a VR tool to create a transparent environment for visualizing the city ordinances. 1 Background An urban environment is a very complex system that has many layers of building codes interacting together to guide urban development. Particularly, if a design project sits in a zone with a unique historical context, additional regulations will be enforced over regular zoning restrictions to preserve and emphasize the area’s historical characteristics. Codes also vary between city zones. Thus, urban designers and planners expend much effort to find the right codes to meet regulations, especially considering the complexity of high-rise building designs at different geographical locations. When planners conceive concepts to solve urban issues in the planning and design process, they draw diagrams or build urban models to explore possible solutions and evaluate outcomes. Deficiencies exist in the drawings as well as physical models. For instance, it is difficult to sense the three-dimensional volume through a two-dimensional drawing, and it is impossible to accurately comprehend the proportions of urban spaces, because the scale used in physical models is too small. Thus, drawings and physical models lose details that usually embody meaning and express intentions. Less detail increases ambiguity. Therefore, these conventional presentation tools are not powerful enough to offer opportunities for perceiving interactions that may occur among inhabitants and their surroundings. A tool that automatically generates urban zoning information and provides an immediate visualization of the design will ease decision-making, enhance urban design processes, and indirectly improve the urban environment. Particularly, the three-dimensional expression of urban codes will turn the legal and technical aspects of planning regulations into transparent visual guidance. A virtual reality (VR) system can serve these purposes. Virtual reality, a highly advanced human-