Informative city modeling and augmented reality: the City Augmented Reality for the Environment-CARE project

Abstract

New technologies, applied to urban planning processes, are increasingly assuming a central role as a tool to support planners in decision-making processes, orienting design choices towards sustainable solutions that are compatible with the available resources. The phenomena triggered by the relationship between planning processes and new technologies are able to able, among other things, to enable new experiential modes capable of creating alternative levels of knowledge of the city to the traditional ones. In particular, information digitizing processes, necessary for the development of the city information model, better known as Urban Digital Twin (UDT), and Augmented Reality (AR) tools represent an innovative resource at the service of territorial governance policies (Fistola & Zingariello, 2024). Starting from these reflections, the project City Augmented Reality for the Environment-CARE, developed by the AURUS research group, was created with the aim of simulating new design choices and test them in terms of economic, environmental and social sustainability.