A computer support tool for the early stages of architectural design

Even in the current computer age, there are still many important application areas, such as early architectural design, where traditional tools like sketching on paper continue to be preferred by many professionals over computer-based tools. There is a growing awareness that there are often very good grounds for this preference. Hence, instead of trying to replace such traditional ways of working, it is now often considered more opportune to try and preserve the strengths of these traditional ways of working, while at the same time improving them by providing access to new media. This is one of the main objectives of the augmented reality approach that we adopt here. In this paper, we specifically discuss the realization of a tool for early architectural design on an existing augmented reality system, called the Visual Interaction Platform. We describe the development process, the resulting tool and its performance for elementary tasks such as positioning and overdrawing. We also identify directions for future research and applications.