Virtual city, virtual landscape. Enhanced tool for design and planning

The application of virtual reality for cultural heritage, environment, and landscape planning could be very useful to experiment scenarios that couldn’t be accessed in the real world, both for educating, design, and research purposes. The aim of the work is to demonstrate how 3D representations can be utilized as a valid support for urban planners and designers in order to verify beforehand a variety of interventions or modifications for a particular area, a building or a cultural heritage in general, and to establish the best strategy in order for the later to be reclaimed, restored, or redesigned. We summarize different project held by our research group. The first research project concerns the colour planning in urban environment; the main goal was to collect the chromatic data of urban furniture inside a sample area in the historical centre of Milan and to use virtual reality to evaluate the proposed actions, in order to identify the best result. The second experience concerns the integration of 3D models in a GIS environment for urban planning. The last refers to the virtualization of Villa Arconati as a part of a vast project of valorisation of noble villas in the northern Milan area. The main objective of the project was to create a virtual model, with high level of realism, of a portion of the house and adjoining garden that allows different uses: web browsing, real time rendering and augmented reality.