London Boulevard

The “London Boulevard” is a run of roads in London from Old Street to Tottenham Court Road.

The route already sees as many people cycling as the Cycle Superhighways, yet the walking and cycling environment is overwhelmingly hostile – polluted, noisy, narrow pavements, and some of the worst junctions for collisions in central London. It’s long overdue improvement.

We collaborated with the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) to create a realistic junction and route designs, taking into account current transport usage and traffic conditions, and have rendered one of the designs in virtual reality. People will have the chance to put on the cutting-edge Oculus Rift headset and experience this key junction on the London Boulevard as it could be in the future.

We presented our VR-model of the London Boulevard on the Clerkenwell Design Week. This is a very popular design festival in London which attracts a wide variety of companies to show their innovations/creations. All kinds of visitors could experience the London Boulevard and walk through the model with the use of an Xbox controller.

The response was very positive and constructive. People came with suggestions that we could actually use to optimize our design. As an extra reward for our hard work we noticed that our VR-model of the London Boulevard has been nominated for the Healthy Streets Best Innovation Award.