The opportunities provided by adopting digitally-generated visual tools in urban participatory planning are compelling. These visual tools can promote interactions between authorities and citizens and among citizens. However, the urban participatory practices of these tools are often described from an academic perspective, which leads to a lack of knowledge from the practitioner's outlook. This study investigates practices of 3D visual tools in applied urban projects. The applied projects were recovered from media coverage. The objective is to describe participatory projects and their adopted 3D tools with a contextual and technical lens. The findings demonstrate that 3D visuals are mostly adopted for communication with a realistic representation and limited interaction in the later stage of the project where negotiation margins are insufficient at a small and medium urban scale. A better understanding of applied practices can help to introduce guidelines that support practitioners in designing approaches that benefit from the full potential of 3D visual tools.