Urban Story

Urban Story is an immersive urban visualization platform developed using a video game engine. It allows users to explore a project from a pedestrian's perspective with an unprecedented level of realism — including vegetation, signage, storefronts, and dynamic lighting — so that every local resident can immediately project themselves into the city of the future.

Urban Story is designed for three complementary uses: public consultation (involving local residents in development choices), institutional communication (promoting a project to elected officials, media, and investors), and decision support (simulating scenarios at all scales, from individual buildings to entire neighborhoods). It is also a true perspective factory: Urban Story generates HD photorealistic 3D images with no technical skills required, ready for use across all communication materials.

A local resident can only project themselves into a project if they recognize their existing environment: their bakery, the road signs, the trees on their street. Urban Story reproduces these everyday markers with photographic precision, something that an aerial view is unable to recreate. Pedestrian immersion triggers buy-in where abstract plans and scale models leave people indifferent.

Urban Story is particularly well-suited for architectural competitions hosted by local governments. Project owners use it to visualize and compare public facility projects — such as swimming pools, media libraries, sports complexes, schools, parking lots, public squares, and civil engineering structures — with sufficient realism to support jury evaluations and citizen consultations. Each project variant can be rendered in unlimited HD perspectives without having to hire a 3D graphic designer again.

Urban Story has been deployed on public transport projects of national scope. For the Grand Paris Express (Société du Grand Paris), it covers 67 stations and integrates more than 2 million georeferenced 3D buildings. For the INspire project in Paris, it renders 32 km of pedestrian linear pathways. Urban Story was also used for the Clermont-Ferrand BRT, illustrating its adaptability to urban mobility projects of all scales.

Urban Story is a real-time HD perspective generator: from any pedestrian viewpoint, users can capture a photorealistic view in just a few clicks, without the need for 3D software or computer graphics skills. The generated images can be used directly for competition entries, public consultation materials, presentations to officials, or communication campaigns. A single scene can produce an infinite variety of angles, eliminating the delays and costs of traditional rendering.