A digital support system for gardening design

Nowadays, gardening becomes popular hobby in Japan. However, a plenty of knowledge and several techniques are required to design, to construct, and to maintain gardens. Thus gardening is not easy for ordinary people. In this study, we developed application software to support people who want to do gardening. Many numbers of application software related to gardening are proposed and sold, however, the main topic of these applications is a kind of simulation of growing plants or a game. We try to develop practical software to design our garden. The concepts of the developed software are as follows: 1) easy to use for gardening beginners, 2) does not require any special knowledge and techniques of Computer Aided Design (CAD) software operation, 3) easy to design a garden using a painting application software like drawing a sketch, 4) easy to confirm the designed garden using a three-dimensional(3-D) computer graphic tool (Virtual Reality Making Language: VRML). The user can walk through the virtual 3-D space, 5) easy to learn knowledge of gardening by the software. We carried out an evaluation experiment of the developed digital gardening system (DGS). A comparison experiment was made between our DGS and software developed by the other company. Subjects are one student and 16 1st class registered architects. The experimental results showed several advantages of the prepared software.