Extending landscape realities

We talk with digital placemaking expert and landscape architect, Mark Jackson, to hear how the emerging world of virtual, augmented, mixed and extended realities can influence the profession.

What are the possibilities offered by XR for landscape professionals?

XR can be utilised at all scales of practice, depending on the resources available. A global firm may already have extensive resources and dedicated teams (who aren’t landscape architects) focusing exclusively on 3D visualisation and XR functionality, so it is more likely that landscape professionals in small to mid-sized companies will pick up and develop hands-on experience with XR. Meanwhile local government is ideally placed to apply XR, with its broad representation and responsibility for community in specific areas. Connections between virtual and physical places will continue to be limited with only computer screens and smartphones as the main operating devices. By working with XR technologies, landscape professionals can begin to include virtual space as a functional aspect of the physical space. There could be possibilities for using XR to enhance landscape management, education or play. There is lots of uncharted territory ahead.

Is XR an asset to the profession or a challenge. Can it be both?

It is a challenge both to the profession and local communities, but there are benefits to be gained.

A key benefit of XR is the ability to create immersive experiences. As part of the design and consultation process, 3D models set expectations from clients and the community. Where plans and photomontages can only be scrutinised as a static image, interactive 3D models provide far more detail and therefore far more opportunity for design resolution and interrogation. The exciting prospect with XR lies in the programming of the space; the intentional blend of physical and digital assets, how they interact and how the content is developed.

Practitioners could be willing to embrace XR through the adaptation of established methods if there is a business case or clear benefit to the community. The obvious challenge of new technology is the initial and ongoing investment and time spent understanding the practicalities of its use, or alternatively the expenditure of outsourcing it.

What recent advancements have we seen in these technologies?

The LI’s Digital Realities Technical Information Note¹ provides a broad spectrum of hardware and software available and referral to this is highly recommended. More recent advancements have been made with lighter, untethered, more affordable head-mounted displays (HMDs) by Apple, HTC and Meta, creating more tangible use cases. Practitioners can design, document, display, distribute and even meet in virtual settings with these HMDs. While the metaverse has received a lot of attention in recent years, it has to be more specific and organic than Meta’s vision of it. It could be used as a canvas, a digital twin, where people can collaborate on specific projects and this variant of the metaverse would be of value to landscape architects. Meanwhile, rendering packages have improved over the years, giving us the ability to age a design and overlay weather. We’ve progressed assigning a cultural narrative to spaces, both retrospectively and as part of new builds. This is especially effective when the community is a key stakeholder in the process, informing design through their knowledge of place and, for certain stakeholders, empowering them to create content for integration with the physical aspects of design. This is the true democratisation of the public realm, but it will also be crucial to filter the commercial intrusions.

The programming of the public realm with XR interactions presents a huge opportunity to empower and rejuvenate, especially where content can be created by the community through a placemaking project. With XR we are only limited by our imagination, but generating contextually relevant content is crucial and it must be continually managed to stay synced, relevant and fresh.

Basic definitions

The Landscape Institute (LI)’s Digital Realities

Technical Information Note1 uses ‘digital realities’ as a collective term for augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR) and extended reality (XR).

VR Virtual reality (VR) is an interactive experience which takes place in a simulated environment created using audio and visual stimulation, typically through use of a head-mounted display (HMD). The experience can be constrained, for example a 360-degree photo or video where the user is entirely immersed in the content but can only look around, or it can offer freedom of movement, allowing the user to explore the virtual world they are experiencing.

AR Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment, augmented by digital information overlaid in either a constructive manner (i.e. information added to the real-world environment), or in a destructive manner (i.e. used to mask the real-world environment). The digital information is seamlessly interwoven with the real-world environment so that it is perceived as an immersive aspect of that real environment.

MR Mixed reality (MR) is an interactive experience where a real-world environment is merged with a virtual environment, so physical objects and digital objects coexist and interact in real time. MR requires physical spaces to be mapped, using point cloud data, to capture associated dimensions and objects within that space. Digital models are then anchored to the space and, as users move around, physical objects positioned between the model and device camera cause the model to become occluded, as though it was physically in that space.

XR Extended reality (XR) is used to refer to all real and virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearable technology.

Mark Jackson is a digital placemaker, landscape architect and founder of Place Jam.