Augmenting Cities and Architecture with immersive Technologies: Conference Workshop Proceedings

Augmented reality (AR) has many domains it can be applied to, such as collaboration, heads up display navigation and operating heavy machinery. Recently, AR has shown promise at engaging communities and enhancingindividual experiences within cities. While science fiction has depicted future cities imbued with holograms, recent work has shown that AR can have more engaging applications, in areas like community engagement, personalised digital signage, and visualisation. On a consumer level, AR is most common on smartphones, particularly after the release of ARKit and ARCore - improving the functionality. Smartphone AR apps have primarily consisted of location-aware smartphone augmented reality (AR) apps, like Pokemon Go – bringing people outside and having ripple effects on the physical space through physical signage. Smart glasses are also becoming more accessible and enable the possibility to naturally integrate virtual content into our daily lives. While immersive technologies are advancing and gradually becoming accessible, further understanding is needed of their application and the potential benefits they bring to cities, communities, and individuals. This also brings up the question of how the virtual and physical spaces co-exist creating an augmented space.This year we narrowed the focus from the broader cities to how such immersive technologies (like AR and VR) can be used to improve people’s wellbeing within a city environment (such as taking someone to another world, gamifying the city, or playfully reminding people to take the stairs). For this workshop it was more important than ever to consider people’s wellbeing in cities as global pandemics and environmental issues change the way people operate in cities. This workshophas been run at MAB 2018 and ISMAR 2019, where it has received attendees from a range of different backgrounds. Many interesting insights have been brought up during the workshop around security, privacy, and use cases. After ISMAR, we guest edited a focus section in a special issue of IxDA (Interaction Design and Architectures Journal)