I Want To Ride My Bicycle – I Want To Ride My Bike: Using low cost interfaces for Virtual reality

The paper will give an overview of our experiments in the past years indeveloping different interfaces and workflows for the use of low cost HeadMounted Displays (HMD) for Virtual Reality solution. We are mainly interestedin using VR tools for designers in the early phases of their design. In our opinionVR tools can help to bring back a better understanding of space and scale whichhave been lost a little bit in the last century with the change from analogue todigital tools. After teaching architectural and urban design for many years wecan clearly say that this effect is still ongoing and it is time that we develop digitaltools that try to reverses thi effect. We will then concentrate within this paper ondiscussing some aspects of data reduction that are important to be able to usethese tools in the design process. We are also showing how we use our interfacespresenting some results of student projects for a design in Hong Kong and thestrategies and methods for using VR for a ongoing work on a project about theestablishment of a so called ``bicycle highway'' in the city of Graz in Austria