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An engaged community that reflects a diverse set of experiences is key to an equitable and livable city. However, maximizing engagement activities is often difficult when competing with residents’ busy schedules and hectic daily lives. To explore new opportunities in this space, we developed four augmented reality experiences to learn more about the potential for this technology to transform community engagement practices in the context of City 4.0. City 4.0 utilizes digital technologies to transform public services and the local economy. Its goal is to produce more sustainable urban and societal outcomes. Our findings suggest that augmented reality is least successful when used to recreate existing engagement practices, such as surveys or questionnaires, and more successful when it empowers a sense of agency and ownership over the process in its users. The way augmented reality situates information can aid in making public space feel personal to the individual. In this way, augmented reality’s affordances are less about over-laying digital information in physical space, and more about how this can enable individuals to reclaim a sense of control and relevance in the relationship between citizens and council. We aim to contribute: (a) novel interaction paradigms and an evaluation of their effectiveness and limitation, and; (b) new insights into how to support citizens’ sense of agency in public discourse with augmented reality. This paper highlights the value of augmented reality’s affordances to bring to light new interactions between community engagement stakeholders.

Industrial organisations spend considerable resources on training employees with respect to the organisations’ business processes. These resources include business process models, diagrams depicting vital activities, workflows, roles, systems, and data within these processes. However, these models are difficult to comprehend, partly because they possess minimal connection to real-world concepts. Alternately, 3D environments allow greater learning opportunities for process-related knowledge. To this end, we designed a non-interactive 3D environment for process training purposes that allows learners to apply the method of loci, which has been shown to improve learning by helping associate visuospatial elements with learning material. The prototype environment, which was developed using simple visualisations, can be adapted across industrial organisations and domains. In order to test the effectiveness of the 3D environments in comparison with 2D environments, we conducted a between-subjects experiment with two conditions. The results show that 3D environments result in more accurate and faster recall of process knowledge, suggesting that such an environment can provide a better affective learning experience. These findings have important implications for how organisations can train their employees with the aim of improving the acquisition of process knowledge.

The large demand for simulated data has made the reality gap a problem on the forefront of robotics. We propose a method to traverse the gap by tuning available simulation parameters. Through the optimisation of physics engine parameters, we show that we are able to narrow the gap between simulated solutions and a real world dataset, and thus allow more ready transfer of learned behaviours between the two. We subsequently gain understanding as to the importance of specific simulator parameters, which is of broad interest to the robotic machine learning community. We find that even optimised for different tasks that different physics engine perform better in certain scenarios and that friction and maximum actuator velocity are tightly bounded parameters that greatly impact the transference of simulated solutions.

This paper presents a perspective on the role immersive technologies can play in the future of urban transformation. Specifically, this paper looks to answer the following questions – How can Augmented Reality be implemented as an enabler of civic participation in the urban transformation process? What specific and novel affordances does Augmented Reality present in this context? And how do these affordances demonstrate a unique interaction paradigm between citizens and cities? We review the current literature on future cities, urban transformation, digital civic participation and augmented reality usage to determine the current state of digitally enhanced urban transformation processes. As a result, we identify an opportunity in which recent developments in Augmented Reality technologies afford entirely new ways of approaching civic participation.We suggest new Augmented Reality technologies can be considered as a novel way to engage citizens in decision making processes and as a result improve the resilience, adaptability and sustainability of future cities. Augmented Reality can allow citizens and other stakeholders to visualise and imagine possible urban transformations, to contribute to an ongoing discussion between citizens and with city councils, and to participate in a feedback loop in which ideas are refined, analysed, and iterated in a collaborative process. We finally discuss challenges, tensions, and open issues of a research agenda aimed at developing immersive technologies for participatory urban transformation.

An ecosystem services (ES) approach to chemical risk assessment has many potential advantages, but there are also substantial challenges regarding its implementation. We report the findings of a multi-stakeholder workshop that evaluated the feasibility of adopting an ES approach to chemical risk assessment using currently available tools and data. Also evaluated is the added value such an approach would bring to environmental decision making. The aim was to build consensus across disparate stakeholders and to co-produce a common understanding of the regulatory benefits and feasibility of implementing an ES approach in European chemicals regulation. Workshop discussions were informed by proof of concept studies and resulted in the development of a novel tiered framework for assessing chemical risk to ES delivery. There was consensus on the substantial added value of adopting an ES-based approach for regulatory decision making. Ecosystem services provide a common currency and a ‘unifying approach’ across environmental compartments, stressors and regulatory frameworks. The ES approach informs prioritisation of risk and remedial action and aids risk communication and risk management. It facilitates a more holistic assessment, enables ES trade-offs to be compared across alternative interventions, and supports comparative risk assessments and a socio-economic analysis of management options and decisions. Key to realising this added value is a shift away from using a single threshold value to categorise risk, towards a consideration of the exposure-effect distribution for individual ES of interest. Also required is the development of an integrated systems-level approach across regulatory frameworks and agreement on specific protection goals and scenarios for framing environmental risk assessments. The need to further develop tools for extrapolating toxicity data to service providers and ES delivery, including logic chains and ecological production functions, was highlighte