Connecting citizens with urban environments through an augmented reality pervasive game

The concept of Playable City situates games in public spaces to create connections between the citizens and the urban environment. To this end, Augmented Reality (AR) and pervasive technologies can provide additional information about urban objects or places and support innovative and engaging experiences to increase the user interest in the surrounding area. Understanding how these experiences affect the user interest is crucial for reaching a well-established connection between the people and the spaces around them. Our contribution is a preliminary framework to evaluate how being engaged in a playful activity improves interest and awareness in a specific urban area. The framework is based on the situated motivational affordances to establish a correlation among the users' motivations, the situation, and the employed technological artifact. We use an AR pervasive game to evaluate a playful historical experience as a technology probe. The results suggest that while playing the game, the citizens started to show a growing interest in the historical facts around them. At the same time, they began to raise concerns about other issues like sustainability, socio-environmental, and socioeconomic development.This work is supported by the project sense2MakeSense grant funded by the Spanish State Agency of Research (PID2019-109388GB-I00) and the Madrid Government (Comunidad de Madrid - Spain) under the Multiannual Agreement with UC3M in the line of Excellence of University Professors (Grant Number: EPUC3M17) context of the V PRICIT (Regional Programme of Research and Technological Innovation

Resonating Experiences of Self and Others enabled by a Tangible Somaesthetic Design

Digitalization is penetrating every aspect of everyday life including a human's heart beating, which can easily be sensed by wearable sensors and displayed for others to see, feel, and potentially "bodily resonate" with. Previous work in studying human interactions and interaction designs with physiological data, such as a heart's pulse rate, have argued that feeding it back to the users may, for example support users' mindfulness and self-awareness during various everyday activities and ultimately support their wellbeing. Inspired by Somaesthetics as a discipline, which focuses on an appreciation of the living body's role in all our experiences, we designed and explored mobile tangible heart beat displays, which enable rich forms of bodily experiencing oneself and others in social proximity. In this paper, we first report on the design process of tangible heart displays and then present results of a field study with 30 pairs of participants. Participants were asked to use the tangible heart displays during watching movies together and report their experience in three different heart display conditions (i.e., displaying their own heart beat, their partner's heart beat, and watching a movie without a heart display). We found, for example that participants reported significant effects in experiencing sensory immersion when they felt their own heart beats compared to the condition without any heart beat display, and that feeling their partner's heart beats resulted in significant effects on social experience. We refer to resonance theory to discuss the results, highlighting the potential of how ubiquitous technology could utilize physiological data to provide resonance in a modern society facing social acceleration.Comment: 18 page

A New Framework of Urban Serious Game to Empower the Smartness of Citizens

With the Smart City concept gaining momentum around the world in recent years, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become increasingly popular and indispensable. However, existing criticisms claim that, in addition to Technology, the smartness of citizens should also be emphasized. In other words, it is essential to enable citizens to become involved in their cities as stakeholders. In this paper, a game-based approach to facilitate the involvement of citizens in civic life is taken. By analyzing some popular digital video games, Augmented Reality (AR) and theories from socialists and psychologists, a new Urban-gaming framework is built, which could be used for data collection, decision-making and other urban issues

Gamification in urban design for upgrading the informal settlements (open public space) in African neighborhoods

The city and architecture of today and the future will face and are facing the challenge of innovation. Simultaneously, Informal African neighborhoods; present challenges to human sustainable development and equity, safety, environmental quality, and resiliency issues. As ICT becomes pervasive, architects have to rethink rules for communication between the citizen and physical urban space. Accordingly, the digital participation integration in specific Serious Games can be a tool to empower slum residents and engage communities to participate in settlement upgrading design based on SDG 11. Thus, the proposed paper will present an overview of the participatory gamification technology involved in civic engagement in informal African neighborhoods that fosters engagement and democratization. The research reaches from Literature review on some Gaming tools and participatory process Articles. Moreover, to achieve the goals, a detailed study on; authors and the extensive research of HABITAT on informal settlements and the United Nations, qualitative data analysis methods to organize and interpret the collected research findings. This analysis showed that Gaming tools and Gamification as a methodology; helps to; empower any residents with different knowledge to participate in settlement upgrading design in specific Minecraft can foster engagement, make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable with communities of different ages and specifically women and children without any expertise and knowledge.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

AUGMENTED REALITY AND GAMIFICATION APPROACH WITHIN THE DIMMER PROJECT

Innovative learning methods as well as research projects dissemination can be achieved by digital technology. AR (Augmented Reality) can play a key role in the education field in order to transmit knowledge to young generations. AR is used to develop a playing cards game for children based on energy saving topics within the DIMMER (District Information Modelling and Management for Energy Reduction) European Project, where energy consumption awareness is one of its main aims. The DIMMER system enables the integration of BIM (Building Information Modelling), distribution network models, real-time data from sensors and user feedback through QR Codes and web portals. The energy performance of buildings is analysed from their actual utilization and especially from users’ feedback. Despite pervasive sensors implementation is a necessary tool to monitor buildings, the more effective way to reach real energy saving is to pursue user awareness and promote good practices in energy using. In fact, energy information sharing has been intended as the main focus in the DIMMER game, since children can adopt good habits that will be reflected on adults behaviour. The game conception has been reached by the collaboration between Politecnico di Torino and Primo Liceo Artistico Statale, as well as the staging of a theatrical show about these issues. In this way a connection between University and High School has been established about current research topics and the uses of new technologies for pedagogical purposes. AR is investigated in order to promote an interactive game for children in which the differences between good and bad practices in terms of sustainability and energy efficiency are discussed. It indeed turns out to be an effective means of communication with immediate impact on children learning. Cards are characterized by markers which are linked to 3D models through a specific software that enables their visualization on personal devices in AR. In the game, natural elements that are capable to generate energy (sun, fire, earth, water and wind) define the seed of every card. Attractive and colourful figures are used to represent renewable energy sources and their applications, while dark images represent the most polluting solutions. The DIMMER game purpose is not to pick up the higher number of cards, but saving energy through positive figures, avoiding those that involve pollution generation. This kind of approach establishes an interaction between children and the energy problem by encouraging active learning through the game and raising their awareness. Children are stimulated by AR multimedia elements that make learning more interesting and entertaining

Serious pervasive games

Serious Pervasive Games extend themagic circle (Huizinga, 1938) to the players’ context and surrounding environment. The blend of both physical and fictive game worlds provides a push in player engagement and promotes situated learning approaches. Space and time, as well as social context, acquire a more meaningful impact on the gameplay. From pervasive learning towards science communication with location-based games, this article presents research and case studies that exemplify their benefits and related problems. Pervasive learning can be defined as “learning at the speed of need through formal, informal and social learning modalities” (Pontefract, 2013). The first case study—the BEACONING project—aims to contextualize the teaching and learning process, connecting it with problem-based game mechanics within STEM. The main goal of this project is to provide the missing connection between STEM subjects and real-world interactions and applications. The pedagogical foundation is supported on problem-based learning (PBL), in which active learning is in the center, and learners have to work with different tools and resources in order to solve problems (quests). Teachers create, facilitate, and assess pervasive and gamified learning activities (missions). Furthermore, these quests are gamified in order to provide non-linear game plots. In a second case study, we demonstrate and evaluate how natural heritage can benefit from pervasive games. This study is based on a set of location-based games for an existing natural park, which have been developed in order to provide enhanced experiences, as well as additional information about some species that are more difficult to observe or that are seasonal. Throughout the research and development of these projects, we have encountered and identified several problems, of different nature, present in pervasive games.This work was financed by the ERDF - European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-030740 - PTDC/CCICOM/30740/2017. Part of this work has also been supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 - The EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation 2014–2020, under grant agreement No. 687676. We would also acknowledge the research grant from the Operation NORTE-08-5369-FSE-000049 supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Social Fund (ESF), and also the FCT-Austin grant Ref. PD/BD/142893/2018.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Digitalization within the informal settlements. Participatory technologies in design for upgrading the informality in Maputo, Mozambique

Participatory Technologies in design offers an opportunity for architects to re-design cities and find new opportunities, in different scales, with their citizens, to create new economic, social, environmental values and provide better public realms and empowering the community by engaging them in participatory actions, aiming at the sustainability of urban public space and rapidly suppress its insufficiencies. Accordingly, the city and architecture of the future face the challenge of innovation in an evolution that involves society, economy, environment, etc. But what about the informal settlements which are dealing with socio-economic and environmental issues? These neighborhoods present the greatest challenges to human sustainable development and equity, safety, environmental quality, and resiliency central to the New Urban Agenda. As information and communication technology (ICT) becomes pervasive, the architect has to rethink the rules for communication between the citizen and physical urban space for adapting to the period in which we are living in. Over the last few decades, an increasingly collaborative work developed among spatial practitioners such as architects, urban planners, artists and, media designers; has produced a particular landscape of projects that engage information technology as a catalytic tool for interactions in the physical urban space. ICT, mobiles, applications, and digital technologies are tools to empower slum residents and their youth to have greater control over their lives. Communities and prosperity through access to information and knowledge are going to be more engaged and empowered. Basically, to develop a public realm or neighborhood or a barrio, the first tool is data. Architects and decision-makers will be the data users. Moreover, citizens will be the Data collectors and, in this system, they can get aware of individual impacts on themselves and the whole. Enabling communities to participate in settlement planning and upgrading including, the management of new infrastructure undoubtedly, requires action at the political level but, we cannot hesitate architect’s role to society aim to provide lasting solutions to specific needs and, the active participation of the community lends these additional values. In this context, the proposed paper will present an overview of the participatory digital technologies involved in civic engagement in informal cities in Africa. This analysis is essential to define the application of spatial acupunctures or plug-ins in the public realm and urban environment to upgrade the informality in Maputo, Mozambique.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio