Hi, my name is Sam van der Horst and today I will tell you about
the What's going Ön? experience and the accompanying research
into participation in the urban planning process through the use
of virtual reality. In the past decades, citizen participation
in urban planning has become more important. In recent years,
the practice of co-creation has become a popular tool to include
citizens in the process. We know co-creation as a process in
which stakeholders are involved in coöperatively sharing and
developing opinions and perspectives towards an outcome
that contributes to the overall development of a project. What
we see is that in large and slow processes such as urban
planning, there's a risk that co-creation becomes too abstract
and will be difficult to engage with for the stakeholders. So
with what's going on experience, we tried to explore new ways of
including citizens in the urban planning process of the Ön
island in the Swedish city of Umeå. What's going Ön? is a
virtual reality experience that presents the users with
different perspectives on the to be developed area. The aim of
the experience is to provide users with the confidence to
think in a freer creative way about the possibilities the
development might have for the area. This approach emphasizes
the experiential and emotional skills of participants over the
more traditional ways of citizen participation. The designed
experience tries to build on embodiment to engage
participants both physically and expressively. So for our
research, the What's going Ön? experience was used as a
discussion to in eight expert interviews, the people
interviewed all worked in the field of design and urban
planning, and we're familiar with the city of Umeå. In these
semi structured interviews, we asked them to reflect on the
experience, impact it had on their perspective, and the
interactive qualities that are part of the design. The
experience consists of two parts, named the gallery, and
perspectives. I will now explain how the participants were taken
through these two parts of the experience. And we'll go into
the outcomes of the interviews. Before the experience started,
the participants were asked to complete this coloring page, the
coloring page derived from a 360 photo that was taken on the city
side of the Ume river. This location will have a view on the
new development once completed, the participants were given
complete creative freedom to complete this coloring page.
After completing the coloring page, it was digitized and the
participants were introduced to the context of the development
and asked about their current perspectives on the development.
They were given a VR headset to be immersed in the first part of
the experience called the gallery. The gallery is a
virtual space in which multiple images appear. Using gaze based
interaction user can enlarge the images by looking at them. Using
the same interaction, participants are able to move
through the space to previously designated areas. The images in
this first virtual space portrayed historical scenes of
the Ume river, and the Ön island, as well as maps and
aerial photos with information on the planned development. To
enhance the engagement with the images soundscapes that fit the
content of the images are played when the corresponding images
are enlarged by the participant. Just as you can see now, the
participants were given as much time as they wanted to look
around in the gallery.
After completing this step, they were asked a few questions and
the second part of the experience was prepared. After
the questions, the participants were asked to once again put on
the VR headset for part two of the experience called
perspectives. So when starting part two of the experience the
user is placed on the banks of the Ume river. The virtual space
exists of the 360 images taken at two locations. One giving you
the perspective from the riverbanks on the city side, and
the other, placing the participant on the riverbanks of
the island. Starting from the city side, the environment
slowly fades into edited versions of the 360 images and
drawings of users of the previously mentioned coloring
pages. With every fade the user is placed in a different
environment and perspectives are merged. The Loop ends on the
banks of the island. In the experience the fading and
merging of scenery builds on two effects, first there is the
fading of different 360 images through the use of an animated
capacity. The placement of opaque pink areas is an element
that gives the user control of what is displayed. when looking
at them with the cursor to pink areas change the 360 image.
Secondly, a more complex effect is used to create the merging of
perspectives. We call this the stereo effect. Here there are
two different images projected for the left and right eye
creating a merging of two perspectives when experienced
through VR. This effect is an extreme version of stereoscopy,
where there are two slightly different images displayed to
each eye to create a perception of depth in the What's going Ön?
experience. The stereo effect does not only create depth, but
also creates a merging of perspectives and elicits a
physical embodied engagement. Once dominant eye has the effect
that one image becomes more visible than the other, but a
change of focal point or the closing of an eye can change
one's perception. So after being taken through the second part,
we had a deeper discussion with the participants on the
experience. From a thematic analysis of the transcribed
interviews, we found three main design qualities that came
forward. These three qualities were titled creative freedom,
ambiguity and immersion. The analysis also showed us that the
design had a positive impact on the participants openness to
other perspectives, as well as on their creativity. I will now
go a bit deeper into the findings. So when designing for
perspective, taking in VR for participation, there should be a
degree of creative freedom. with what's going on experienced the
lack of contextualization, during the creative task allows
participants to stay in their creative comfort zone. It
engages the creative process differently because there are no
preset requirements or goals. So for creative freedom, the
framing of the drawing task, a lack of contextualization during
the creative task, and the merging of their personal
creation with other people's creations helped with the design
quality of creative freedom. ambiguity can be used as a tool
to trigger exploration in virtual space. through creating
ambiguous environments and ambiguous interactions that
increase the ambiguity of the virtual environment. You allow
the interpretive abilities of users to contribute to the sense
making of these virtual environments, within What's
going Ön? experience, the toggle effect the visual manipulation
of the original footage, the stereo effect, the continuous
merging through fading, and the continuous loop of the
experience, all contributed to the design quality of ambiguity.
Finally, immersion, the immersiveness of the experience
plays an important role in the effectiveness of the tool for
participation. There are a lot of elements that play a role in
creating an immersive experience, in the What's going
Ön? experience. The things that contribute most to the
immersiveness were the added soundscapes, the balancing of
stimulation, the smooth transitions of images and
natural horizons and the sense of control or the lack thereof.
So I would like to conclude with saying that the outcome suggests
that these qualities may offer guidance when designing for
perspective taking in VR, in the context of urban planning. Apart
from these qualities, we observed two important effects
of the experience on the users. The users expressed that it
stimulated their creativity and gave them a more open mindset to
the future urban developments. It is also important to mention
that to test the actual effectiveness of this design and
the use of VR for perspective taking urban planning, a larger
scale study needs to be conducted. This follow up study
needs to include participants that properly represented to be
effective citizens of the urban development. Following such a
large scale study is the need to verify the effectiveness of VR
in urban planning compared to other participation tools and
methods such as co-creation. Thank you all very much for
listening.