This project aims to accelerate urban energy transitions by developing an interactive, playful city-level mixed reality platform in Umeå—in collaboration with the CURIOSUM Science Center—that allows residents to test building energy-efficiency technologies and visualize future outcomes to boost public adoption and community-wide building renovation.

About the Project

A range of technologies and social policies are available to drive urban energy transitions. However, state-of-the-art solutions and policy initiatives have not yet to accelerate these transitions as expected. The still slow renovation of existing energy-inefficient buildings highlights the need to enhance public adoption of sustainable innovations.
In this light, emerging visualization techniques such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality (MR) could enhance resident awareness, engagement, and eventually adoption by enabling them to envision and imagine the outcomes of urban energy transitions.
Therefore, this project aims to engage the public in the urban energy transition by creating an interactive, playful city-level mixed reality platform, allowing residents to test various energy-efficient building technologies and envision related changes. This engagement initiative will be implemented in Umeå, in collaboration with the Umeå CURIOSUM Science Center. It enables the local residents to (1) envision historical, current, and future urban energy transitions, (2) test various energy-efficient technologies, and (3) encourage personal building renovation adoption, potentially offering sustained benefits to local communities for their energy transitions.