English to Greek Tech/Engineering Computers: Software urban planning, modelling

HUNGARY
The educational materials used for the planners’ and inhabitants’ sessions in Hungary, were developed by the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. To facilitate the interaction between planners and the public, and to better disseminate the results of the project, a local website www.pict.hu was set up at an early stage of the project. This site featured an automatic language selector, two- and three-dimensional plans of the marketplace and an on-line forum for placing the inhabitants’ comments on the marketplace plans. This forum made possible for the local inhabitants to send text-based contributions to the debate and also allowed, as a special feature, to place links that point to a marked area of a picture on the website. This picture could be a plan, a view of a 3D model or even the town map; the tool enabled the depiction of text comments on map. The overall aim was to enable local inhabitants to explore the possibilities provided by web-based communication to access maps and architectural plans. Plans designed for the public and published on the web were created using CAAD (Computer Aided Architectural Design), a software application designed specifically for architects.
The following ICT tools were developed by the PICT project team and made available to all interested parties to facilitate public participation:
- Use of digital maps comparing to paper-based maps (higher accuracy, reproducibility, attaching non-geometrical data, layers, external references),
- Publishing digital plans on the web: image formats, animations, interactive 3D panoramas (Quicktime movie), and virtual reality models (VRML),
- Creating a website with static and dynamic content using a *preconfigured portal system*.