Virtual reality for the Smart City

We interviewed Gunita Kulikovsky, who has an extensive background in urban activism and participation processes in the Nordic-Baltic region. Since 2016 she has also founded the immersive technology company Vividly, working on visual communication for urban and architecture projects. Recently they have branched out 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 practise as an urban strategist/urbanist. I’ve been curious about architecture and the built and unbuilt environment since childhood. I loved building tree houses and I thought “this should be architecture” – not only the story of the house, but the surroundings and details. However, when I got into architecture, it was not what I expected. I was involved in student organisations and NGOs, and that led me to connect with various interesting people working with early participatory methodologies. At the time we were just wrapping our heads around the idea, but it eventually became the new normal for urban planning. Nowadays we speak about participation at each and every step of city planning. For a young architect, it seemed there must be something beyond blueprints, drawings and layouts. Something that we would describe as a space in between – the social and economic relationships that happen in space, how space supports these interactions, how communities create and innovate.

That’s when I met some other architects at the first Alternative Urbanisation event of CDN, after which the working group on the topic was established. We wanted to embrace the importance of 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 lives, how to make 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 engagement on the issues locals are most concerned with. If politics seems so distant, then something that happens in your courtyard feels quite close and personal. This is how we can make social activism and democracy more personal, more engaging. I was part of a team that pioneered experimenting with participatory methodologies in Riga, Latvia, Capital of Culture 2014.

So we also argued that culture, as such, isn’t just traditional culture – culture in Europe is also participatory culture, citizen-engagement culture, urban planning culture. They’re all cultures that should be part of this story, celebrating Riga as Capital of Culture in Europe. That’s where it started, the work took off. Project after project, and with a growing curiosity towards processes, communication, visualisation and engagement, I found that 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, at the end of 2014, I was introduced to virtual reality and immersive media, which blew my mind from the very first moment. We were the first to bring virtual glasses to the Baltics, not just for scientific purposes. I saw a lot of opportunity in this medium – how we can talk about architecture, how we can be transparent between professionals and non-professionals, how we can convey the experience of architecture in its purest and finest way: spatially. So where before we were limited to blueprints, drawings, renderings – now, there was a portal to enter the space and really feel it as it is. That’s how Vividly was created. To be clear and transparent in spatial communication, we say: we speak vividly, we work vividly, we show architecture and cities, vividly. We live in a photo-realistic decade.

We knew that there is a gap between expectations of a project and the result. We wanted to close this gap between professionals and non-professionals, to create common ground and a shared spatial language, so that everyone understands a project and how it feels. At the same time it serves as a meeting point for different stakeholders – people engage, understand, discuss, co-create; they are not confronted with a fait accompli. They are part of the process. Municipalities and developers get long-term involvement and more room to discuss solutions, engage communities and advocate for them. The relationships you build are always the most important thing.

To sum up: at Vividly we turn space into experience. Every project starts with questions: Why? Who is your user? What does the target group actually do? I do not believe in technology for its own sake. We have changed our way of working a great deal, and the most value we can add comes from a strategic approach. The technology is the final step.

Tell us more about the projects that you do.

It’s less about what we do and more about why we do it. We really try to create common ground for communication. There are always different approaches and different audiences to address, and that shapes the tools we use and which technology we pick. I keep repeating that it is very important to ask questions in the right order. First, what is the story and what is the call to action; second, who are we trying to reach; and only third, which technology or medium fits. We therefore work across a range of technologies and tools, from mobile web solutions to virtual reality experiences. When it comes to urban planning and engaging stakeholders, getting the approach right matters enormously. We have been building a composition of elements to address this user journey.

For example, because of the COVID crisis, the world shifted very quickly towards the digital realm, which meant that citizen participation also moved online. We take the 3D and spatial data we have and turn it into interactive web experiences so that anyone can quickly open, say, 3D.Belgrade.com and understand what’s going on in the city – which development projects or ideas have been put to the public. We call it a virtual teleport, because we combine 3D data with 360 images so that you can see the terrain and the surrounding environment. People can already see the plans and visuals and get the information straight away. In many of these participatory projects we ask open questions: What would you like here? How would you see this? Even where planning constraints already exist, there are always ideas. But don’t ask that question if you already know roughly what’s going to happen – ask something more nuanced: How would you use it? or Would you take part in this? We gathered feedback through Telegram bots – a virtual planning assistant that gives you some background on the planning process or a particular idea, and then invites you to answer or share your thoughts on the question at hand. It’s easy to move between one project and another, and it’s nothing like what hardcore gamers or modellers do – it’s simply a lighter dataset, a laser point cloud turned into a 3D model. In the first stage the website was empty and the virtual assistant gave you background information and asked: ‘How would you see this area developing?’ Once people answer, professionals can picture it, but others often can’t. So when professionals sketch over actual photos of the location using proposals from the bot chat, people can discuss the idea much more easily and visualise how their input becomes something tangible. From a bird’s-eye view, you can see how a development looks overall. You could be sitting anywhere and teleport into that planning question and take part. We are no longer limited by physical presence – we can share ideas about development from anywhere. There is also a lot of re-immigration happening, with people returning to the countryside and wanting to take part in planning their area but unable to attend in person. So it becomes a genuinely inclusive digital platform where a city can share and explore information spatially, rather than on flat maps – you can see how the terrain and geography are shaped, which adds an extra layer of understanding. What matters is not how complex the solution is, but whether it fits the right scenario and the right user story. We always say: create the user story before you create the solution or a prototype. We use technology to lift engagement. We sometimes put it as ‘raising the planning culture’ – so that you, as a resident or entrepreneur, can understand where the city is heading, meaning you can expand your operation, welcome more people to an area, or think about how to be resilient in relation to the natural resources around you. In that way it becomes not just a platform for opinions, but a way to build a sense of belonging and strengthen people’s presence in the city.

Do you have to collaborate with different levels of government and how does that work?

There are different levels of participation. Official participation is embedded in planning procedures in most cases. But from a developer’s perspective – including the city as a developer – they can harness the power of engagement, invite opinions and involve people as an investment in future communication. Think about a school or kindergarten: there are many groups with a stake in it – parents, children, teachers and the wider community. It is also an endorsement for whoever holds political power at that point; it is in their interest to carry this message to people, because that helps them retain their position. This is about communication, and that has been our experience in the cities we have worked with. European Union funds have also enabled this kind of experimentation and prototyping. You have a big topic like urban planning and engagement, and then a large, still-unfamiliar area like XR with all its immersive tools. This is among the first projects to prove the concept of how XR can be applied in urban planning for a wider public. I understand planners who find themselves sitting in front of a pool of technologies, each one saying ‘pick me, pick me’ – planners need strong digital literacy to select and understand how to put it all together. That’s where we step in and become a working partner for the city, helping them navigate the landscape of digitalisation and technology and simplify it down to: who is your user, from the municipality’s point of view, and which planning challenges are you actually trying to solve – rather than focusing on the technology itself. That’s when the bureaucracy becomes a little easier to handle. Municipalities are already under enormous pressure and don’t have the time to spend on participation. But perhaps there’s one kindergarten, one area where you can try it, and it becomes a pilot – a test of the methodology that others can learn from and adopt.

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

We decided to build a company from the ground up in a space where nothing was defined. It means constantly redefining processes, asking new questions and trying to stay current, because in the digital space everything changes fast. Many strategic questions arise. Business is such a dynamic space, and being an entrepreneur is constant self-development – without building those learning mechanisms yourself, it’s impossible to keep your head above water. There have been so many trials and errors in defining exactly what we do. I started the company in 2016. We launched as a start-up in Helsinki, then moved to London and then to various other places. We built international collaborations with organisations representing architects. We were developing a specific product for small and solo architecture offices that gave them access to virtual reality without unnecessary downloads or complex set-up – because back in 2015–2017 it was still seen as quite inaccessible. With the Vividly App in particular, we wanted to give architects access to a creative medium and let them speak about their work and express it in the best way. As happens in technology – and in business generally – things change, and the technology we had built our product on was shifting dramatically. As you grow, with more users and a larger community, maintenance becomes harder. The first three years are really just about defining where your value lies – is it a product, or is it your time, your knowledge, your consultancy, or some combination?

For two years we were more of a service company, focusing on adding value through what we do. There’s always a choice, and stepping out of the start-up bubble is not the easiest decision. Rail Baltica – the biggest rail infrastructure project connecting Helsinki to Warsaw – started to move forward, and I found people there willing to discuss innovation and digitalisation across planning and construction. That gave me good reason to return to Riga. We are now six to eight people, working remotely but also shoulder to shoulder when we meet. Flexible working opens the door to new collaborations – that’s how some new projects and satellite companies have grown within the Vividly ecosystem. One of them was Museum from Home, an initiative we launched during COVID that earned us recognition worldwide for bringing museums to people. We created it to support museums and, together with Invi from the USA, built something that could bring their content to the world without physical borders.

Vividly receives very interesting requests from different partners, including some recent work around hiring and training using virtual reality, which lets us draw on psychological and scientific insights into how people react in space – something you can’t get from a standard interview, even face to face. People may know the right answers, but what they say doesn’t always reflect how they act or feel. VR is also useful for training: stepping into someone else’s shoes, observing how people communicate from a distance, understanding soft skills. These kinds of training programmes are usually quite expensive for companies, but with VR you can multiply that value.

Also, after the project I mentioned earlier, we understood that the visualisation, engagement and chatbot all work well, but they need a foundation – data must be organised somehow. So we began working with a data-driven urban planning approach, helping municipalities make smarter, less emotional decisions. We are packaging this for cities – helping them understand ideas better and giving them the right expertise, because data is data: you can visualise it, but can it actually drive a decision? A decision comes from what is prompting it – where to build the kindergarten, what the criteria are, how it will affect the local community, taxation and income, liveability and the attractiveness of the area. From there, we can shape a programme for that kindergarten or public space – what we want to invest in an area in order to get the outcomes we’re looking for. These kinds of approaches really help cities be more rational and make better use of their data. Cities talk a lot about being smart, but in the end very little is actually connected smartly. I understand the position of city officials – the data is all there, you just need to organise and collect it to find the answer. But becoming data-literate, learning how to analyse, how to present findings, how to choose the right criteria – that’s another burden on an already full schedule. It’s fine not to know everything, but these tools should be packaged for cities in a far more user-friendly and digital way. Right now, outputs are PDFs and printed materials, which means you flatten an enormous amount of rich data into a PDF or a JPG of a map – even though those maps could be interactive.

How are we as humanity catching up with technology?

We say technology is moving fast and developing quickly, but what has been the pace of innovation in, say, political systems or social systems? How much have we actually innovated democracy – meaning made it better? What does technology do? It makes things faster, more effective, more accessible. Have we created new mechanisms, methodologies, new concepts of what social and political structures should look like? We keep repeating the same political divisions – social democrats are this, centrists are that, the right is this. Yet those categories have already been redefined; perhaps the names are no longer valid. If you asked someone from fifty years ago what they meant by those terms, the values wouldn’t match what people hold today. We haven’t been innovating in that space. So my answer is this: I think we are widening the gap between these two kinds of innovation. As a society we are not rethinking our social systems, we are not moving forward, and so technology pulls further ahead. We have to somehow catch up. Technology can organise itself far more efficiently than humans can; sometimes technology is already there but we haven’t grown into it enough to use it well. This is the conversation we should be having – everything is in place, but we’re not allowing participation to be fully open, because we are afraid, and our systems are shaped by political agendas. So we are limiting the openness and the democracy that technology could actually give us.

That’s also interesting to imagine – what would technology look like now, or what would we be discussing, if it had been more accessible to everyone all these years, or if our democracy had been developing as fast as technology?

A good example is the typical sci-fi film. In almost every sci-fi movie you see technology overrule humanity. There are almost no scenarios where the opposite happens – where humans evolve alongside technology. Not because of chips and super AI. The question is: how can we develop ourselves so that we communicate better and more clearly? Technology should be a booster, not an opponent. This is a provocative thought, of course, and very much open for discussion – but there is a different way to look at it.

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