Interactive Immersive Public Displays as Facilitators for Deeper Participation in Urban Planning

Citizen participation is an important part of urban planning but few people participate, and most frequently they can do so only passively. This can result in excluding many people and to urban designs not reflecting people's wishes. In this paper, we explore the use of interactive, immersive public displays as facilitators for deeper participation in urban planning. We propose a novel approach that combines panoramic videos of locations with overlays depicting planned buildings. We evaluated it in a lab-based user study (N = 21), where participants used a simple mobile client for interacting with a prototypical implementation to vote/comment on urban planning proposals. Usefulness, ease of use, ease of learning and user satisfaction were all rated highly by the participants. The pros and cons of the approach were further identified based on the analysis of the interview data. Overall, the results provide initial evidence that the approach succeeded in facilitating deeper participation.