Virtual Cities for Simulating Smart Urban Public Spaces

Many research projects have studied various aspects of smart environments including smart rooms, home, and offices. Few projects, however, have studied smart urban public spaces such as smart railway stations and airports due to the lack of an experimental environment. We propose virtual cities as a testbed for examining the design of smart urban public spaces. We developed an intelligent emergency guidance system for subway stations and used the virtual subway station platform to analyze the effects of the system. This experience allows us to argue that simulations in virtual cities are useful to pre-test the design of smart urban public spaces and estimate the possible outcome of real-life scenarios.