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As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, digital technologies impact the way humans experience places and spaces in (smart) cities. To some extent, these smart technologies are intertwined with the urban living enabling the augmentation of the city's space and creating new opportunities for playful urban engagement. Moreover, touristic cities are becoming the arena of novel hospitality services, emerging from the widespread use of digital technologies and internet-based platforms. At the same time, visitors look for increasingly "authentic" travel experiences that provide meaningful interactions with locals. New business models, such as those emerging from the sharing economy, flourished in response to these fresh needs and opportunities. However, establishing points of dialogue that bring benefits to both residents and tourists is a complex task that still needs inquiry. Here we extend on previous efforts by proposing a playful immersive experience that focuses on creating an esthetically engaging environment for direct information exchange between locals and visitors. We investigate how technology can mediate and augment such information sharing, engaging tourists in a playful and immersive experience. Results of an experiment with 15 users are analyzed and presented to provide new insights to the HCI community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a universal call to action addressed not only to governments but also to businesses and civil society. In this scenario, Universities play a key role in achieving the SDGs and, also, in creating awareness about these global issues. As an example, the University of Bologna is carrying out several initiatives related to sustainability matters. Considering, in particular, the environmental dimension, the University undertook different strategies to reduce the waste of paper, embracing the dematerialization and paperless movements. To make these initiatives visible to the University community and to increase awareness about these issues, we designed a system that intends to provide data related to the implications of such initiatives in terms of paper waste avoided and benefits for the environment, to be exploited using different devices. In particular, this study focuses on the design and the evaluation of two infographics, conceived by two different groups of experts and researchers: one "animated" and one "aesthetic". The evaluation intends to present the differences in terms of perceived design and informative dimensions, with the final aim to present insights on the design of infographics able to foster awareness, targeting specific communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interconnected computational devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) context make possible to collect real-time data about a specific environment. The IoT paradigm can be exploited together with data visualization techniques to put into effect intelligent environments, where pervasive technologies enable people to experience and interact with the generated data. In this paper, we present a case study where these emerging areas and related technologies have been explored to benefit communities, making their members actively involved as central players of such an intelligent environment. To give practical effect to our approach, we designed and developed a system, named Smart Campus, composed of: i) an infrastructure made of sensors to collect real-time data in a University Campus, and ii) a rich web-based application to interact with spatio-temporal data, available in a public interactive touch monitor. To validate the system and grasp insights, we involved 135 students through a survey, and we extracted meaningful data from the interactive sessions with the public display. Results show that this Campus community understood the potential of the system and students are willing to actively contribute to it, pushing us to better investigate future scenarios where students can participate with ideas, visualizations/services to integrate into the web-based system, as well as sensors to plug into the infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]