In May, Oliver Dawkins wowed the crowds at an architecture exhibition in east London. The UCL student had designed a 3D rollercoaster ride for the Oculus Rift headset – mimicking the acceleration, sharp turns and vertiginous drops of a real ride in immersive virtual reality. (Try it yourself above, maybe with a black sheet to cover your head and the screen if you don’t happen to have a VR headset kicking about.)
The ride wasn’t just for fun. The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (Casa) at UCL in London, where Dawkins studies, had set out to show how a virtual rollercoaster could demonstrate to the Grand Designs Live exhibition’s 100,000 visitors a more tangible example of how VR can be linked to city design.
The key to this, they think, is the latest generation of virtual-reality headsets, including the Oculus Rift, which tracks head movement to show a 360-degree view. Its gaming potential has been much discussed, but Casa believes it also has the potential to do no less than democratise urban design.
“You can always show the static models of planned developments to architects, planners and city mayors,” said Martin Zaltz Austwick, who lectures in visualisation at Casa. “But with virtual reality, you can take dynamic models out to community groups, allowing for participation. What is interesting about Oculus Rift is that it is very immersive – it’s very compelling. It represents a quantum leap in virtual reality.
“And for young people – who are more familiar with the technology – using products like Oculus Rift can allow them to go into an interactive environment in a very tangible way, potentially giving them more of a voice about what works.”
Dawkins designed the rollercoaster ride using an array of existing programmes, notably a gaming engine called Unity. “Unity provides a simple way to integrate the Oculus Rift headset into a real-time 3D experience,” he explained in a recent interview. He downloaded a ready-made rollercoaster model from Unity, then generated the urban environment. “Rather than simply place that roller coaster in an urban setting, I wanted to create a track that would feel like it might have been part of the urban infrastructure,” he said. “I generated the city scene, modelled the roller coaster track, and animated the path of the ride, all in the software.” One challenge was avoiding virtual motion sickness. “So it was agreed to exclude loop-the-loops – on this occasion.”
The rollercoaster wasn’t the only Casa interactive. Another virtual-reality experience allowed visitors to “fly like a pigeon” over London, and the team also exhibited a 3D-printer, creating physical models of landscapes that had been mapped by aerial drones.
Austwick said the exhibit’s popularity showed how virtual-reality headsets could be used to inform communities about design plans for cities. “A stage further is that you can use the technology to allow communities and groups to create their own design models,” he added. “For example, you can use Google SketchUp software to design buildings, and then take them into Unity, the games engine, and create your own virtual reality cityscape to show to others.”
Dawkins is currently running workshops in Stratford library, east London, where teenagers can come along and build virtual city designs, then share them on the Oculus Rift platform. “Young people raised on Xbox and PlayStation immediately understand this way of interacting with virtual spaces – giving a voice to a different group of people,” Austwick said.
• Why ‘video games are going to reshape our cities’
