The VR Centre for the Built Environment, a winner of an Office of Science & TechnologyForesight Challenge Award, was established in June 1997 at University College London andImperial College London. This is an interdisciplinary initiative involving the Bartlett,Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, Centre for Transport Studies and the Departments ofComputer Science, Geography and Geomatic Engineering at UCL and IC-Parc at Imperial Collegealong with a consortium of 16 industrial partners. It aims to research, develop anddisseminate ways of designing, producing and operating buildings and urban areas usingvirtual reality techniques.The VR Centre`s role is to bring the full range of computer graphics, interactionand digital data to the virtual building that currently drives thedesign-development-operation cycle. Information, analysis and simulations are beingsynthesised to allow design teams and their clients to predict the performance ofproposals at both the urban and building scale. Virtual models are being developedto capture information on performance during the operational life of the buildingso that this can be fed back into future projects.The Centre is focusing on three key generic technologies:Technologies to help clients and end users understand the consequences of decisions;Technologies to allow better visualisation and interaction with design proposals;Technologies to capture information about the operation of thebuilt environment and to feed that information back into the design,construction and operation process.
www.vr.ucl.ac.uk/