For over a century, engineers, architects, and planners have engaged the public through artistic renderings of planned projects. Today, interactive, immersive geospatial visualization technologies, advanced by the gaming tech revolution, are enabling active participation in climate mitigation and adaptation decision-making within community development. In this workshop, we showcase work with graduate students at the Patel College of Global Sustainability and the USF Tampa 3D Access Lab. Courses such as “Sustainable Tourism,” “Envisioning Sustainability,” and “The Sustainability Design Laboratory” involve creating “digital twins” of homes, neighborhoods, and communities, allowing collaborative exploration of sustainability scenarios.
We blend recorded videos and photos of projects like modeling Florida’s I-4 highway to demonstrate wildlife crossing tunnels and planning urban biodigesters in South America. Attendees will create a mock-up of Marrakesh using online tools, guiding them through creating a 360 “skybox” and landscape environment with Google Maps, Streetview, and Blender GIS. This mock-up is brought into Spatial.io for collaborative visit by attendees in which they put in their own digital assets, photos, notes, and memos. These techniques foster solution-oriented thinking more effectively than traditional 2D presentations. We demonstrate their use by the Florida Wildlife Corridor Curriculum team to visualize shared decision-making spaces, making them accessible through XR (extensible reality).
At USF Tampa, we utilize Blender 3D, Unity 3D, Sketchfab, drone, and cell phone photogrammetry, and platforms like Spatial.io and Gravity Sketch to create “digital twins” of significant landscapes in Florida. These interactive spaces are shared with students and stakeholders on cell phones, tablets, computers, and VR headsets, exploring infrastructure variations like bike paths, permeable paving, renewable energy, wildlife crossings, and rewilding areas. We include marginalized voices in development discussions by hosting online meet-ups in simulations with indigenous and subaltern groups worldwide. Using Gravity Sketch’s collaborative design feature, we co-create 3D models of wood gasifiers and urban biodigesters with stakeholders in Canada, Fiji, and Colombia.
Attendees will experience Gravity Sketch collaboration in the Quest 3 AR headset, creating a digital twin to visit on their devices using Spatial.io. This fosters deeper discussions on democratizing immersive geospatial planning, essential for climate mitigation and adaptation in our urbanizing world.
