Abstract
There are a wide range of professional disciplines applying CPTED concepts and principles in their own context. Regardless of the professional discipline, the goal to reduce the fear and incidence of crime is a constant issue. The Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is a concept, which by its very nature invites multi-disciplinary approaches to crime prevention. The CPTED approach allows the consideration of the role of place in crime (Brantingham & Brantingham 1991). According to the definitions of USA General Accounting Office (GAO), Risk is the probability of suffering a degree of harm from one or more hazards; and Risk Assessment is the overall process of identifying and analyzing risks (Decker 2001). This includes characterizing the risks by their frequency (probability), consequence, and sensitivity to change by risk management. Various strategies, particularly safety audits, have been used worldwide in attempting to tap how members of the community might perceive particular locations (e.g., McCamley 2000). Risk assessment processes (which work from past incident rates), in terms of asset management, although not usually associated with safety audits, are also commonplace (using AS/NZS 4360:1999). While the software to support the development of a virtual CPTED kit is available in the public domain, no virtual environment of the sort envisaged in this paper has yet been developed. In this paper, our aims are: To create a virtual environment to assess the crime risk factors and To provide an interface for training novices in such an assessment process. This paper addresses a significant portion of the Virtual CPTED project we are currently working on. Virtual Environments currently lack a support infrastructure to connect people, datasets and virtual worlds. The Virtual CPTED environment is expected to support a range of different data and media types, virtual reality applications, and graphics hardware. In Virtual CPTED project, our purpose is to: