CityHeat: Interactive Visualisation System of Simulated Urban Traffic Heat Propagation

Abstract

The advent of new interactive game engine tools such as Unity3D, Unreal or Crysis and their usage in wider research, urban and architectural visualisations as well as their ability to observe and visualise selected urban dynamics and energy distribution within the built environment yields new insight into various urban processes which are hardly possible to explore by traditional and conventional CAD or analytical software platforms. By means of computed physical simulation together with the interactive visualisation the observer is enabled to unveil characteristics of the environment which have been hidden up to now and obtain more precise information about various properties of the outdoor environmental quality in a visually understandable way. One of the investigated issues within the contemporary cities is the problem of traffic’s heat propagation with direct influence onto the quality and comfort of the liveability in the built environment. In order to visualise, explore and analyse the traffic heat propagation in a local scale within the selected urban environment, we established a custom-made visualisation and interactive tool called CityHeat, currently focused on the city of Singapore based on Unity3D game engine platform. As such, it is possible to better understand the spatial impact of the traffic’s heat. Therefore, the CityHeat visualisation system can serve as an interactive decision-making tool during the urban planning or policy making processes for interdisciplinary stakeholder groups.