Harnessing Virtual Reality for e-Participation: Defining VR-Participation Domain as extension to e-Participation

The mainstream text-based e-Participation employing blogs, forums, chats and social media enables mass communication and is easy to use and content generated is machine-processable. Nevertheless, the literature points to inherent, significant lack of expressivity in text-based solutions that leads to often distorted or biased communication and misunderstandings. That is particularly evident in widespread hate speech and fake information propagated on social media as part of political discussions. Despite the proliferation of rather-small scale video-teleconferencing online meetings the contemporary digital communication systems still straggle to deliver close to face-to-face group communication experience. Therefore, major government and citizen meetings and hearings have to be held in person if quality results are expected. In fact, our past research showed that decision makers are reluctant to use the social-media-based e-Participation due to lack of meaningful interaction. In our previous work we also showed that leveraging the emerging, affordable and accessible VR technologies for e-Participation creates an opportunity to integrate mainstream channels into more engaged, trusted and more constructive e-Participation experience -VR-Participation. In this paper, we define the domain of VR-Participation as a multi-modal, convergent, immersive communication extending existing e- Participation paradigm. We investigate the current literature coverage relating to the use of Virtual Reality for e-Participation and provide recommendations for further research in the domain.