Bridging Realities: Exploring Enablement Factors for XR Participatory Urban Planning

Citizen involvement in urban planning is crucial to develop sustainable solutions that account for their needs. In this context, the challenge of enabling participation by making planning data comprehensible is increasingly tackled with XReality (XR) tools. While the introduction of the Metaverse has contributed to an XR hype, the effectiveness of XR to support citizens’ literacy in urban planning is yet to be verified and could depend on multiple factors. In this short paper, we analyze current studies on this topic, highlighting structural differences between them. Based on these findings we conduct a preliminary experiment to explore, how the effects of two design factors on a set of literacies can be measured. By presenting our work, we highlight the need for a differentiated evaluation of XR tools to enable informed participation in urban planning thereby contributing to the creation of more sustainable urban areas.