People at a planning consultation point their smartphones at a proposed building site and see a 3D model of the new development overlaid on the real street, then sketch changes that appear live on screen. The problem is that standard planning consultations—2D drawings pinned to boards in a community hall—make it hard for non-experts to picture what a new building or estate will actually look like. Online feedback forms collect opinions but remove people from the place itself. This toolkit lets residents stand on the pavement where a development is planned, view it in augmented reality, and offer feedback rendered instantly through their phones. If the toolkit scales, councils and developers could run consultations that are more inclusive and less abstract. People would understand proposals better and shape them before final designs are locked in, potentially reducing opposition and producing developments that better match local needs. The project is now moving beyond its initial work with Bristol City Council, aiming to market the service nationally and eventually license the software to other organisations.
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Future Places Toolkit is an Augmented Reality planning consultation and community engagement tool for councils, architects, and developers. Using guided conversation, live Virtual Reality sketching, and AR viewed on smartphones, people see plans and their ideas for a building project visualised immediately in 3D in the context where a development is proposed. Future Places Toolkit (FPT) provides a novel solution to the problem faced by council planners, regen teams, architects and their clients of engaging a wider range of people meaningfully with planning consultation. Planning processes can be perceived as dry and complex, so FPT aims to involve communities in a more imaginative, accessible and inclusive way in consultation around neighbourhood redevelopment. Consultation often involves 2D images displayed on boards in a hall, away from the development site itself: it is hard for non-professionals to visualise or imagine what plans would look like in their surroundings. Digital planning tools are being applied in consultation, but these tend to be online forms that gather ideas/feedback from local people individually and not in the place. FPT has two distinctive aspects (1) visualisation offered at the development site itself and (2) an engaging opportunity for residents to provide feedback rendered live through mobile devices in-situ. Such engagement is necessary to satisfy the requirements of the Statement of Community Involvement, which is part of the planning application process. But it also benefits communities, who are able to understand plans better and get involved in conversations that shape these: our service aims to lead to developments people can buy into, rather than oppose and that are more aligned with local needs. We are successfully getting our solution to local customers/users and have been applying the AR tool with Bristol City Council, but ARC Accelerate will give us the capacity we need to engage with new places and clients nationally. In addition to marketing the consultation service that we deliver, the partners will explore scaling FPT as a software as a service (SaaS). Our objectives for the ARC Accelerate programme are: 1. Further market research and competitor analysis around the current AR planning consultation and engagement service provided by the team, to position this effectively in the sector, to confirm pricing and the uniqueness of the offer. 2. Commercialisation development for the software as a service, which would enable others to use the software, scaling up and out to other sectors that could benefit from AR tools for co-design. 3. Develop the business case for a spin-out company, to make impact at scale possible, and business modelling to determine sustainable price points for both our service offer and the planned SaaS. 4. Marketing: produce strong visual promotional material that differentiates FPT and publish a prototype web page. 5. Showcasing, promotion and new customer engagement; raising our profile, growing our network and client base in the architecture and planning sector and potentially beyond. Future Places Toolkit has been developed collaboratively by Uninvited Guests, a theatre company that specialises in participation, Zubr.co, a leading AR and VR studio, sound designer Duncan Speakman, and Paul Clarke of the University of Bristol's Centre for Sociodigital Futures and Centre for Creative Technologies. For further info see: https://www.uninvited-guests.net/projects/future-places-toolkit And these demo videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxToBfDsWqs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SebjE04olEQ, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4BYzA44yc
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