Urban Traffic Planning Simulation with Time and Weather Dynamics

Urban traffic planning ensures the efficient design and management of traffic systems, reducing congestion, and improving the safety. Applying virtual reality for urban traffic planning helps city planners visualize and interact with complex traffic systems in a realistic, immersive environment, resulting in an improvement of the decision making process. In this paper, we investigate the integration of the time and weather dynamics into the immersive urban planning system. In particular, we implement the lighting mechanism for rendering the urban simulation scenes in both daytime and nighttime sessions. In addition, we integrate the weather dynamics into the simulator to improve the realism. The user study demonstrates the realism and the engagement of our proposed system.