Exploring the Appropriateness of Different Immersive Environments in the Context of an Innovation Process for Smart-Cities

This paper presents an explorative study dedicated to the evaluation of Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) platforms immersing different stakeholders that have to collaborate within an innovation process in the area of smart cities. A previous study has unveiled the great potential of close-to-real-life immersion perceived by users/citizens in realistic environments that not only fulfil the “realism” principle of a Living Lab but also greatly contribute to both phenomena of technology acceptance and adoption of the proposed solution. Scholars have previously identified three main factors characterizing an immersive environment: the degree of immersiveness, presence and engagement perceived by users. However, creating close to real-life simulated city environments that provide an appropriate degree of immersiveness, presence and engagement for potential users in the context of urban projects remains a challenge. The traditional working habits of smart cities stakeholders, such as: territorial engineers, town-planners and policy makers, are not prepared for behaving properly in immersive environments. Several experiments were carried out during different events that provided both quantitative and qualitative data through the use of surveys, interviews and observations. For each experiment several VR/AR equipment were used. The findings highlight the complementarity between physical and digital technologies supporting co-creation for smart city projects, and the advantage of enabling experts in a field to discover new technologies. Finally, this study provides valuable elements on how to better support close to real-life simulated city environments while providing a higher level of stakeholders' engagement during the ideation of the co-creation stage of the innovation process towards the realization of smart-cities.