Participated Planning of Large Water Infrastructures through Virtual Prototyping Technologies

The design of large dams is a collaborative activity with relevant social and political implications. Planning such large infrastructures requires involving all the interested stakeholders, making shared decisions, tracing the design process. There are currently not many Virtual Prototyping tools to support this collaborative design process. In this paper, we propose a participated planning support system based on mobile and Augmented Reality technologies which allows different stakeholders to take part in the review of a large dam project through an application that automatically acquires information available online, allows all stakeholders to share information, and finally records everything for a subsequent analysis. The development of the application, as well as its use in two case studies and a user study, are described in the paper.