Draw Your City with AR and AI

New Realities: Der XR-Podcast

How architecture students are reimagining urban spaces through technology

There’s always that one spot in a city that feels neglected, unwelcoming, or just plain ugly. What if you could redesign it instantly — not with bricks and mortar, but with Augmented Reality and AI? In this episode of New Realities, Wolfgang Kerler talks to Ruoxi Yang, an architecture graduate from TU Munich, who co-developed Draw Your City, a project that allows citizens to reimagine urban spaces in creative and sustainable ways. The concept recently won the New Realities Competition by XR HUB Bavaria and 1E9.

Ruoxi shares the inspiration behind the project, how AR and AI can empower people to transform their neighborhoods, and why technology and architecture must go hand in hand to create better futures for our cities.

And here's what the New Realities jury had to say about the project and Ruoxi's pitch:

_The prize goes to Draw Your City by Ruoxi Yang.

This award recognises projects that meaningfully harness XR and AI for societal benefit. Among many submissions this year, Draw Your City stood out as the one with the clearest and most urgent impact potential.

At its heart, this project addresses a real and growing problem: how can we make the design of our cities more democratic, more inclusive, and truly reflective of the people who live in them? Draw Your City answers that challenge by combining AI to enable participatory, community-driven design, and AR to let people visualise and transform their urban spaces in intuitive, collaborative ways.

The presentation itself was exemplary—focused, concise, and clear. The app design is notably clean and user-friendly, avoiding unnecessary distractions and making it accessible to a wide audience.

Of course, the journey does not end here. The next step will be to bring this vision into the world: to overcome challenges of distribution, to attract people to take part and contribute their ideas, and to ensure these shared visions can shape real urban policy. This will require partnerships with municipal authorities and professional architecture firms so that the app’s outputs are not only inspiring, but actionable and impactful.

Draw Your City truly embodies the spirit of this award: ambitious, socially minded, and technologically innovative. It holds transformative potential to reshape how we think about our shared urban spaces.

Congratulations to Ruoxi Yang!_