Cities often struggle to meet the challenges of climate change and promote sustainable and active mobility due to their complex and rigid infrastructure. Urban planning tends to rely on static designs and graphical representations that often depict perfect, sunny conditions. Furthermore, these approaches do not necessarily consider the mobility needs of different social groups.
The XR MoveScape project will create an immersive, participatory planning ecosystem that seamlessly blends the physical and digital worlds. In collaboration with partners from the fields of research, urban planning, and mobility, we will select urban planning projects and, through a co-creative process involving citizens and stakeholders, develop an Augmented Reality (XR) environment that enables users to experience anticipated adaptations to public spaces in motion. Users will be able to explore real urban spaces dynamically while walking and critically evaluate the effectiveness of planned urban interventions, such as green corridors and shaded walkways, as well as extended cycling infrastructure.
In addition to the technical innovation, citizens will engage with the project through a two-year Social Lab co-creation process, during which they will develop and adapt urban interventions with the project team based on their XR experiences. They will experience the adaptations to urban spaces through XR glasses while walking through the area and will be able to experience them in motion based on their own unique movement patterns. The possibilities for market implementation and the feasibility of integrating dynamic traffic flows into XR will be explored. We will also investigate how this approach can be integrated into the urban planning projects of small and large companies. The prototype will be developed through an iterative process involving technical and organisational adaptations, culminating in a final experimental test to provide proof of concept.