Facilitating Mixed Reality Public Participation for Modern Construction Projects: Guiding Project Planners with a Configurator

Digital public participation formats are an emerging and accessible way to involve diverse groups of citizens in construction projects in their local area. Particularly, mixed reality can help project initiators to visualize the planned changes to the city landscape in an easy and understandable way, enabling people to participate in a creative manner. However, this technology is challenging for most project initiators, as it requires an extensive technical and/or domain experience. Besides that, specialized hardware and experienced staff is required. An easy on-boarding process, which introduces mixed reality step-by-step and offers assistance by external service providers could promote both adoption and usage. In this paper, we present the design process and resulting concept of a configurator for a public participation platform, that aims to guide initiators with different levels of technical knowledge. Besides detailing the design and development process of the prototype, we will present the preliminary results of our evaluation. The interview partners provided positive feedback on the usage of our configurator. Moreover, different approaches are necessary for the public and private sector when configuring and purchasing their participation solution. ... mehrFinally, we highlight areas that are still in need of further work, such as the compliance with the regulations for public institutions and address further promising areas of research.