Engaging Place with Mixed Realities: Sharing Multisensory Experiences of Place Through Community-Generated Digital Content and Multimodal Interaction

This paper discusses the motivation and potential methodologies for the use of mixed reality and multimodal interaction technologies to engage communities and members of the public with participation in the active creation and use of urban data. This research has been conducted within the context of a wider research program investigating the use of data dashboard technologies and open data to more effectively communicate information to urban authorities and citizens and enable more evidence-based decision making. These technologies have drawn criticism for promoting objectifying, data-driven approaches to urban governance that have proven insensitive to the specificity of place and the contexts of citizens’ daily lives. Within the digital and spatial humanities, there has been growing interest in ‘deep mapping’ as a means for recovering the sense of place and the nuances of everyday life through the incorporation of spatial narratives and multimedia in their mapping practices. This paper considers the ways in which mixed realities can contribute to these efforts, and in particular the unique affordances of virtual reality for evoking an embodied sense of presence that contributes to the communication of a sense of place via rich multisensory experiences. The paper concludes with the discussion of a pilot study conducted with members of the public. This demonstrates the ways in which virtual environments can be created in ways that maintain contextual and affective links to the places they represent as a result of involvement in ‘hands-on’ activity of mapping through urban sensing and the capture of place-based media.