Virtual Reality for Smart City

We interviewd Gunita Kulikovsky, who has an extensive background working with urban activism and participation processes in the Nordic-Baltic region. Since 2016 she has also founded an immersive technology company Vividly that works with visual communication for urban and architecture projects. Recently a new chapter Vividly Urban consultancy has launched to help urban planners with data-driven, digital, and visual urban planning decisions.

Tell us a bit about yourself, what you do and what is your background?

I’m Gunita Kulikovska, I’m trained as an architect, but I practiced as an urban strategist/urbanist. I’ve been curious about Architecture and built and unbuilt environment since childhood. I loved to build tree houses and i thought “this should be architecture” - not only the story of the house, but the surrounding and details. However, when I got into architecture, I realised it is not what I expected. I was involved in student organisations and NGOs, that led me to connect with various interesting people working with early participatory methodologies, at the time when we were just wrapping our heads around the idea. It eventually became a new normal for urban planning. Nowadays we speak about participation at every and each step of city planning. For a young architect, it seemed like there must be something beyond blueprints, drawings and layouts. Something that we would describe as space in between - the social and economic relationship that happens in space, how space sup- ports the interaction, community creation and innovation.

All in all, that’s when I met some other architects at first Alternative Urbanisation event of CDN, after which Working Group was established. We wanted to embrace the importance of the urban spaces, in particular public spaces as a social realm for democracy and re-define it; the spatial conditions, how they can empower people to take part in their social and political live, how to make the politics and policies care more. This is nothing new - of course, things that you see in front of your nose or in your backyard are the things you are most involved with. This is also how I approach my work, we always base the engagement through the issues the locals are most concerned with. If politics seems so far distant, than something that happens in your courtyard feels quite close and personal. This is how we can get social activism and democracy more personal, more engaging. I was part of a team, that was pioneer of experimenting with this participatory methodologies in Riga, Latvia, capital of culture 2014.

So, we also advocated that culture, as such, isn’t just traditional culture, but culture in Europe is also participatory culture, citizen-engagement culture, urban planing culture - they’re all cultures that shall be part of this curriculum, celebrating Riga as capital of culture in Europe. That’s where it started, the work took off. Eventually, the project after project and having curiosity towards processes, communication, visualisation and engagement because the usual methodologies, tools and approaches that architects use weren’t really working with people and neighbourhoods or getting them on board. That’s how in end of 2014 I was introduced with virtual reality and immersive media which blew my mind from the first point. We were the first ones to bring virtual glasses to Baltics not just for scientific purpose. I saw a lot of opportunity in this medium, how we can talk architecture, how we can be transparent between the professionals and non-professionals, the experience of architecture, in it’s purest and finest way - spatially. So if before we were limited with, blueprints, drawings, renderings - now, there was a portal to enter the space and really feel it as it is. Then Vividly was created this way. To be pure, transparent with the spacial communication, we say: we speak vividly, to do vividly, to actually show architecture and cities, vividly. We live in a photo-realistic decade.

We knew that there is a gap between our expectations towards projects and the result. We wanted to eliminate this by bridging this gap between the professionals and non-professionals, to create common ground and spacial language, so that everyone understands the project and how it feels. In the same time it serves as a roundabout for different stakeholders - people by engaging, by understanding, by discussing - they are empowered and they co-create, they are not put in front of the fact. They are engaged in the process. Municipality and developers get the long term involvement and their hands sort of more free to discuss the solutions and engage the community and to advocate for that. Relationships established are always most important.

To sum up: in Vividly we turn the space into experience. Every project starts with a questions: Why? Who is your user? What is the behaviour of the Target Group? I do not believe in technology for the sake of technology. We have changed our model of working a lot and the most value we can add is in having strategic approach. The technology is a final step.

Tell us more about the projects that you do.

It’s less about what we do, it’s about why we do it. We really try to create common ground of communication. There’re always different ways and different audiences to address, thereafter also the tools that we use, which technology do we pick. I constantly keep on repeating that it is very important to place the questions in the right order. Firstly asking what is the story, what is the call for action, secondly, understanding to whom we’re trying to explain that, and just thirdly, to pick the right technology or the right medium. Therefore, we work with the landscape technologies and tools, starting from different mobile web solutions to the virtual reality experiences. When it comes to urban planning and engaging the stakeholders, it is very important to address it in the right way. We have been building a composition of elements to address this user journey.

For example because of COVID crisis, world has shifted very quickly towards digital realm; that means also citizen participation has moved to the digital environment. We try to use 3D data, spatial data that we have and turn it into interactive web experience so that everyone can quickly open e.g. 3D.Belgrade.com and be able to understand what’s going on in the city and what are particular development projects or ideas that are brought to public. We call it virtual teleport in a way, because we combine 3D data with 360 images, so that you’re able to see the terrain and 360 environment. This way people can already see the plans and visuals and given the information straight away. In lot of this participatory projects we would ask open questions: What would you like here? How would you see that? Although they already know there’re some planning limitations, there’re always some ideas. Don’t ask that question if you already know more or less what’s going to happen there, ask more nuanced questions, How would you use it? or Would you take part in this? We received feedback through Telegram bots - a virtual planner assistant that gives you a bit of information about planning process or about idea and therefore, you are able to answer or to share your ideas about question that is addressed. It is possible to quickly shift between one or another project, but it is nothing that hard core gamers or modellers do, it is just a simpler, lighter data - laser point cloud model that is turned into the 3D model. In the first stage website was empty and the virtual assistant was giving you bits of information and background and asks you: ‘How would you see this area developing? Once you answer, professionals can imagine it but others not always. So when the professionals draw over the actual pictures of location the proposals from the bot chat, you’re able to discuss the proposal. Then, people can visualize a lot better, how their ideas turn into tangible results. If you look for example from bird’s eye, you see how does the development look overall. You could be sitting in any city and could teleport into this question, this planning issue and take part. We are not anymore limited with our physical presence, we can share ideas of development. There’s a lot of re-immigration, people are returning back to the country side and many interested to take part in planning of the area, but they physically can- not attend this. So, it becomes a quite inclusive, engaging, digital platform where city is able to navigate the information and look at the information spatially, unlike on flat maps and plans, we’re able to see how the terrain and geography is created. It gives us some extra layer of information about the area. What is important, it’s not how complicated the solution is, it’s about does the solution fit the right scenario, the right user story. We always say create the user story before you create the solution or a prototype. We use the technology to boost the engagement. We sometimes say ‘to lift the planning culture’. So, you as an inhabitant, or as entrepreneur, you’re able to understand where the city is going so that means, you could expand your operation and host more people for example in the area, or how you can be resilient with the business and be in relation with natural resources that exist in the area. So therefore, it becomes not just a platform to ask for an opinion, but also to create a sense of belonging and endorse the presence in the city.

Do you have to collaborate with different levels of governing and how is it working with them?

There’re different levels of participation. The official participation is embedded in planing procedures in most of the cases. But, from developer’s perspective, including the City as a developer, they can use power of engagement, ask opinions, involve people it is an in- vestment for future communication and marketing. So think about the school or kindergarten, there’s plenty of groups of people that are interested in this object: parents of kids, kids, teachers and of course the rest of the people in the city. It is also an endorsement for the political power, or people that are at that point in power, position in municipality, it’s in their interests to spread this message to the people, because that allows to retain their position. This is about communication and it has been so far in the cities we have been working with. Also the European Union funds have been enabling this kind of experiments and prototypes. You have a big topics in one project, urban planning and engagement and then huge and unknown topic of XR, including all these immersive tools. This is the first project that proves the concept of how XR can be applied in urban planning for wider public. I can understand planners that are just sitting in front of this pool of technologies that all of them are like ‘pick me pick me’, however, planners have to have high digital literacy, in order to be able to select and understand how they can put it together. That’s where we step in and become a power team for the city to understand better and landscape of digitalisation, technology and actually simplify it to the point who is your customer, from the point of municipality, which planning/operations or planning subjects are you trying to solve and not trying to focus on technology as such and that’s when the bureaucracy becomes a little bit more easier to handle. Municipalities are already burdened with a lot of stuff, they don’t have enough time to spend on participation. But, perhaps there’s there is one kindergarten, one area where you can apply it and then it becomes a pilot case, a test for the methodology and then others can learn from that and adopt.

Thank you. How long are you doing this and how big is your team? How do you work?

We decided to create a company from ground up in a space where nothing is defined. It’s redefining the processes, constantly asking new questions and trying to be updated because in digital space everything is changing fast. Many strategic questions. In fact, business is such a dynamic space and being an entrepreneur is just constant self-development and self-growth and without developing these learning mechanisms yourself, it’s impossible to keep the head above the water. Therefore, there’s been so many trials and errors on defining what exactly are we doing. I started establishing a company in 2016 and in fact. We started as a start up in Helsinki and from there we moved to London and then to lots of places around. We built international collaborations with organisations that represent architects. We were building a particular product for solo and small scale architecture offices who accessed virtual reality without any burden or excessive downloads and extra set up, because back in 2015-2017 it was still seen as quite inaccessible. We wanted with Vividly App in particular to give access to creative medium and allow architects to speak about their space creatively and express it in the best way. As it happens in technology business, and in business in general, things change also technology we based our product on was changing dramatically. So, when you become bigger, you have more users and bigger community, it’s getting hard to maintain. The first three years it’s just about defining what is your added value - is it a product or is it your time, your effort, your knowledge, consultancy or it’s mixed.

For two years we’ve been more of a service company trying to focus on adding the value to what we do. There’s always a choice and it’s not the easiest decision to step out of the start up bubble. Rail Baltica the biggest rail infrastructure project that connects all over from Helsinki to Warsaw, started to activate and I found their hearing ears to discuss the progress, innovation, digitalisation across planning and construction and that gave me quite enough reason to return back here to Riga. Now we are 6 to 8 people, that work remotely, we meet and we work shoulder to shoulder. Flexible work allows new interesting collaborations - this is how some new projects or satellite companies have started on Vividly ecosystem. One of it was the Museum from home, which is also initiative we started in Covid times and we got quite recognised for it in the world, being able to bring the museum to people. We created this initiative to support Museums. With Invi from USA we created this to bring their contents to the world without any physical borders.

Vividly gets very interesting requests from different partners, different potential projects, like recently we started to work a little bit with hiring and training using Virtual Reality which allows us to real- ly deploy psychological and scientific aspect on how people react in space which you can’t get from a regular interview even face to face. People may know the right answers and things they say might not always fit to how they act, do or feel. It is also useful for trainings to be able to step into the other shoes, hearing one from the distance, looking at how one communicates. These kind of trainings of soft skills are quite crucial and usually quite expensive for companies to handle, but, with the VR you’re able to multiply this value.

Also, after this project that I mentioned earlier we understood that the visualization, engagement, chatbox, everything works well, but needs some base, some input, the data must be somehow organised. So we started to work with data driven urban planning approach and helping municipalities to make smarter and not emotional decisions. We are working to package it up for the cities, to help them to understand the idea better, to give right expertise be- cause data is data, you can visualise it but can it help you to make a decision? Decision comes from what is the call for that decision like where to build the kindergarten, what is the criteria, how it’s going to affect the local community for example, or taxation and income, livability standard and attractiveness of the space because of those factors. Therefore, we can create a program for that kindergarten or public space - what do we want to invest in this area in order to get the outputs that’s we’re looking for. These kind of approaches would really help cities be more rational and use the power of the data. Cities talk a lot about being smart, but at the end nothing is really connected smartly. Again, I under- stand the position of city officials - for them, this data is all there, you just have to organise it, collect it and you would have that answer. But, to become data literate, to learn how to analyse, how to show or how to pick the right criteria it could be another load for their already full schedule so it’s fine not to know everything but to have these tools in a way, packed for them in a much better, much user-friendly and digital manner. Outputs are PDFs, printed mate- rials and it means that you flatten the huge amount of quality data and depths of data that you have, into PDF or JPG of maps for ex- ample – even though you could have these maps interactive.

How are we as humanity catching up with technology?

We say that technology is moving fast and developing so quickly and being so dynamic, but what have been innovations’ progress or development in e.g. political systems or social systems? How much we have innovated democracy, meaning making it better. What technology does? Makes something faster or effective, more accessible. Have we created mechanisms, methodologies, new concepts of what are the social structures, political structures? We still keep on repeating the same political divisions, social democrats are those, centric are those, rights are those. However, it’s been already redefined, perhaps those names are not anymore legit, if people form the past, from 50 years ago would be asked on what do they mean, than you wouldn’t fit the values that are nowadays. We haven’t been innovating at that, therefore my answer to this is, I think we are growing even bigger gap between these two innovations. As a society we are not innovating the social systems, we are not moving on and therefore the technology is much further and we have to somehow catch up. Technology can organise itself much better than humans can, sometimes technology is already there but we are not just yet grown to exploit it in a best way. This is topic we should be discussing - it’s all there but we’re not allowing the participation to be fully open, because we are scared and our systems are based on political agendas and even projects, so we are limiting the openness and the democracy what technology could give us.

That’s also interesting to imagine, what would be the technology like or what would we be now discussing if technology would be more accessible for everyone for all these years or if our democracy was developing as fast as technology is.

A good example is a sci-fi movie scene. In almost all sci-fi movies you can see how technology overrules the humanity. There’s been no scenarios where it’s the opposite, where humans evolve along the tech . Not because of technology, chips and super AI. How can we be more developed so that we can communicate better and clearer. Technology should be a booster and not opposite. This is a provocative thought of course and up for discussion, but there is a different way to look at this!

This article was initially published by Cooperation and Development Network. You can read the full publication at https://www.cdnee.org/publications