IP City: A Research Project on the Use of Mixed-Reality Technology in Representations of Urban Environments

This paper presents the research developed under IP City, an integrated project funded by the 6th FPRD (Framework Program of Research and Development) of the European Union as an application to the call “Presence and Interaction in Mixed Reality Environments.” Its objective was to explore the conditions in which Mixed Reality (MR) technologies can be used in urban environments. Mixed Reality combines real-life scenes to digital elements digitally generated, in order to “increase” the reality. One of the issues of the project was to develop some mobile and light technologies in order to empower the stakeholders of an urban project to communicate and debate collectively and in situ about the past and the future of their town or district. Therefore, the first tasks of the project consisted in identifying the prototypes in progress in the laboratories of IP City consortium, and to test them in real situations on operational sites. The contribution of the French team consisted more specifically in participating to the specifications of these tools and questioning their capacity for representing an urban situation in action, then in checking their pertinence through experimentations in real scale in on-going urban projects.