Virtual Reality for Spatial Planning and Emergency Situations: Challenges and Solution Directions

The notion of the smart city involves embedding Industry 4.0 technologies to improve the lives of inhabitants in urban environments. Within this context, smart city data layers (SCDLs) concern the integration of extra tiers of information for the purposes of improving communication potential. Under the Industry 4.0 technology grouping, advanced communication technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), further the opportunities to model, recreate, evaluate and communicate scenarios that potentially improve citizens lives at multiple SCDL scales in a smart cities context. The use of added contextual information in SCDLs is of special interest for emergency planning situations at the building scale. In this research, a literature review to understand the current approaches for the use, development and evaluation of VR applications in the context of emergency planning was conducted. The results indicated four main categories of relevant challenges for these types of applications, for which recommendations and a roadmap for VR development are presented. In total, the study identified 10 commonly occurring challenges (e.g., optimization and discomfort) and 19 solution directions (e.g., model construction and spatial directions) in related articles when considering the development of VR for spatial planning and emergency situations.