Developing an online Virtual Reality application for e-participation in urban sound planning

Effective involvement of the public in local governance and decision-making via e-participation is one of the key characteristics of smart cities. Use of Virtual Reality (VR) for multisensory environmental evaluation is one of the innovations in planning process to support the involvement of local population in shaping their living environment. It allows the locals to experience the proposed developments in a realistic virtual environment powered with multisensory output. The power of VR in public participation is further enhanced by its application online. However, current online VR applications in e-participation is mostly restricted as visualisation tools, evaluation of the virtual sound environment is hardly supported. This study is to develop an online VR application for e-participation in urban sound planning, following the concepts of gamification, easy accessibility, and real-time auralisation. Based on a case site, audio-visual scenarios of urban developments, including different traffic control actions and street designs, are built in game engine, and will be published online in the form of a WebGL game. The application will then be tested in trial e-participation in urban sound planning, to discuss the advantages and limitations of such applications, as well as possible solutions to improve.