17 selected projects for Innovation Impact Challenge: IX in urban development

On March 10, 17 selected projects for the Innovation Impact Challenge: IX in Urban Development presented their feasibility studies during the entrepreneur expo, organized in collaboration with RVO. These projects are currently conducting a feasibility study (phase 1) within the challenge. In april 10 projects will be selected for phase 2, where they will further develop their ideas.

About the Innovation Impact Challenge: IX in Urban Development

This innovation challenge focuses on how immersive technologies can aid in complex urban issues, such as (affordable) housing construction, sustainability, climate adaptation, and accessibility. Immersive Experiences (IX) are technologies that immerse users in a lifelike, often digital environment. Think of virtual reality, 360° video, augmented reality, interactive animations, or games. These technologies can provide insights into various scenarios and the impact of choices in the physical living environment.

The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), CIIIC, RVO, and the municipalities of Amsterdam and Almere challenged entrepreneurs to develop innovative IX products and services that contribute to a future-proof urban environment. The solutions demonstrate how IX can help municipalities and other involved parties make faster and better-informed decisions in urban development, as the coherence and impact of different solutions become visible.

Entrepreneurs submitted their ideas for two different themes:

• Theme 1: suitable, innovative, and future-proof IX solutions that approach urban challenges integrally.
• Theme 2: preventing and reducing the negative consequences of urban development for stakeholders.

The entrepreneurs with the 17 best proposals received a budget of up to €25,000 per project. With this budget, they tested the feasibility of their innovation and developed a plan for a possible follow-up trajectory. Below, we briefly introduce the 17 selected projects.

LOS Ruimte - Participate-360: participation, data, and visualization in the living environment 

ReGreeny is developing a digital 3D platform that allows residents, designers, and municipalities to collaboratively plan for their street or neighborhood. In many communities, making good choices about issues like greening, traffic, and water management is challenging because these topics are complex and interrelated. 

With this platform, users can immediately see the impact of their choices, allowing plans to be adjusted more quickly and effectively. This helps prevent misunderstandings and delays and ensures greater community support. 

Witteveen+Bos - Experience, explain, decide: an IX stakeholder participation framework

Good intentions can sometimes get lost in translation, and positive ideas can be trapped in negative frameworks. The flexible IX stakeholder participation framework renews communication. 

This framework can serve as an AR model with projections that bring concepts to life, or as a 3D representation on a traditional screen in a community center. It breaks down miscommunication, transforms the way ideas are shared, connects with others, and results in real impact. 

Anarch Games - Immersive platform: making the combined impact of urban development clear to stakeholders through 3D environments

This project develops an accessible and immersive platform that allows even non-technical users to experience future environmental plans in an accessible way before they are realized. The platform enables all parties involved, from citizens to policymakers, to digitally engage in urban development processes at an early stage. 

The (immersive) tools to be developed actively involve stakeholders in the process. This increases support and leads to more efficient decision-making, resulting in time and cost savings. 

Virtual Frontier - URban Planning IX

URban Planning IX (URPIX) helps urban planners quickly translate policy scenarios into representative views of cityscapes. This gives residents insight into the consequences of different scenarios. Residents view the images with XR visualizations and have the option to switch between different scenarios. 

In addition to the cityscape, URPIX also displays the effects on the living environment, such as air quality, impact on mobility, and population density. Residents gain early insight into the consequences of policy choices and can also participate in the dialogue between planners, policymakers, and implementers.

MapGear B.V. - TransitieTwin3D

Dutch cities face an unprecedented accumulation of spatial challenges: housing construction, grid reinforcement, heat network installation, greening, and climate adaptation. These challenges collide at street level, with designs and communication often developed separately. This leads to fragmentation, delays, and misunderstanding among residents. 

TransitieTwin3D offers an integrated IX solution: a virtual, interactive environment for policymakers, implementers, and residents to understand, influence, and better align spatial projects. The application runs on the web-GIS platform GeoApps, enriched with a real-time 3D engine and live BIM integration via Innobrix. Users experience the impact of projects via a 65” TouchTable or online, without VR headsets or specialized hardware. 

Stichting Bioto - The Sensory City

The Sensory City is an immersive toolkit aimed at young people aged 12 to 16. Through IX, AR, VR, sensors, and a digital twin, young people are playfully involved in urban issues related to biodiversity, climate adaptation, and quality of life. 

In a hybrid play location in both virtual and real urban nature, young people experience the value and role of nature in the city. They also learn how their choices impact the quality of their living environment. The toolkit is scalable, educationally deployable, and provides policymakers with insights into young people's perspectives. 

Advier B.V. - City in Play

City in Play allows decision-makers in area developments to experience the effects of their choices and collaboration. In this interactive experience, they engage in conversations with people from a future city scenario. These conversations reveal what abstract policy dilemmas and design choices mean for everyday life. 

Playing creates space for empathy, reflection, and better conversations. The game thus contributes in an accessible and stimulating way to more humane policy, more effective work, and cross-domain thinking about the city of tomorrow. In short, a conversation starter to arrive at new perspectives.

MG Interactive - HoloCollab 

HoloCollab is a concept for a mixed reality co-planning tool that accelerates and improves integral urban planning. Instead of piles of separate drawings and static 2D maps, participants receive a single joint 'holographic' project environment. 

With a mixed reality headset, policymakers, designers, and implementers view a virtual 3D model of the planning area in the middle of the meeting table. Together they explore different design options, place spatial notes, and visualize changes. This shared interactive image prevents miscommunication and accelerates decision-making in urban projects. 

Stipo - Placemaking Immersive

Stipo and Orb Amsterdam are exploring how to convert physical participation tools for urban development into a digital, immersive application. With virtual and mixed reality, they are investigating how citizens, policymakers, and developers can better understand the coherence and impact of spatial choices. 

The intended IX solution makes participation more accessible and enables different stakeholders to provide feedback from their own perspective and to enable co-creation. This helps improve decision-making, prevent unwanted side effects, and create broader support for complex urban challenges. Consider housing construction, sustainability, and accessibility. 

Theme 2: preventing and reducing the negative consequences of urban development for those involved

Novi Hogeschool B.V. - Urban Remix: AI-driven citizen participation through visual storytelling

Urban Remix is an AI-driven platform that helps residents visually convey their ideas for their own neighborhood. Through a chatbot, map interface, image, and animation tools, citizen input is made more accessible, convincing, and visually appealing. 

The feasibility study examines the technical, social, and economic conditions for successful implementation. This bridges the gap between residents and policymakers. In addition, students have the opportunity to work on a current societal issue where AI, IX, and inclusion are central.

Webbio B.V. - City in View – Participatory digital twin for future-proof urban development

In this project, Webbio B.V. investigates the feasibility of a participatory digital twin, specifically for the municipality of Nijmegen. The focus is on combining spatial data, policy information, and interactive visualization via webXR. The goal of the participatory digital twin is to make policy choices visually understandable and to engage citizens in an accessible way. 

In this phase, Webbio, in collaboration with the municipality of Nijmegen and two specialized technology partners, creates a working proof of concept focused on one specific neighborhood. The technical feasibility, user interaction, data integration, and policy embedding are validated. 

Siekerman Technology B.V. - AR Insight: Transparent Urban Development

Siekerman Technology B.V. is developing an innovative AR solution that helps municipalities communicate more effectively about urban developments. Users of new AR glasses see context-relevant information - duration, background, and expected outcomes - at the exact location of work. Residents have the opportunity to respond directly and influence project information and contact implementers. 

The goal: reduce inconvenience through better information provision and increase support for necessary urban developments. 

Mama Producties B.V.  - Virtual Reality and Neurofeedback: towards an inclusive city

The Elephant Path Consortium states that the time of well-intentioned drawing board plans and unintended elephant paths is over. The Elephant Path Consortium is developing a participation tool that provides insight into people's conscious and unconscious reactions to a spatial environment or spatial design using VR, AI, and neurofeedback based on environmental psychology. 

This tool provides broad insight into how different groups of people experience the spatial environment. This helps prevent urban planning mistakes, costly adjustments afterward, and delayed construction processes.

BRIGHT Coöperatie U.A. - Ground Guide 

The Ground Guide is an interactive tool from Studio Metaform and Bright that connects residents playfully with their underground neighborhood. Due to climate change, the energy transition, and grid congestion, the (underground) public space is increasingly under pressure.

The Ground Guide makes underground systems such as energy, water, data, and greenery visible and understandable. This makes it clear that choices within households are interconnected with developments in the public space. The Ground Guide ensures an integrated approach where people can make informed choices, understand their living environment, and collectively contribute to sustainable development. 

Dutch Rose Media - Urban Prototype Station: Through Our Eyes 

Urban Prototype Station: Through Our Eyes is a mixed reality platform that reduces the negative consequences of urban development by combining 3D city models, storytelling through volumetric videos of residents, and open data. The platform visualizes the impact of construction projects on three functional scales: 

• bird's eye view (1:500) for project-on-table discussions;
• neighborhood scale (1:50) for Madurodam-like neighborhood visualization;
• street level (1:1) for real-size in the actual environment. 

It integrates personal stories from, for example, residents about inconvenience experiences, thanks to lifelike holograms directly in the design process. The platform provides a communication channel between administrators and residents, allowing plans to be visualized, residents to give direct feedback, and alternative implementation scenarios to be simulated to minimize inconvenience. 

Parallel - PLAN Configurator

PLAN is a digital tool that allows municipalities and project developers to present spatial plans understandably to residents. During participation evenings, it visualizes adjustments directly in realtime within a photorealistic 3D environment with scanned data. As a result, residents immediately see the effect of their input, leading to more trust and engagement. 

PLAN aligns with the participation requirement of the Environmental Act. It enables governments and initiators to communicate plans transparently and clearly and to involve citizens in spatial decision-making at an early stage.

Common City Development B.V. - PublicTwin 

PublicTwin is a hybrid platform that provides professionals, officials, and residents with relevant insights into the spatial planning process and the social support for it, both online and on-site. By involving residents at an early stage, the risk of backlash is prevented or limited. This prevents costly delays in planning processes. 

Visitors to PublicTwin have the opportunity to visualize the project and its impact, respond in real-time, ask questions, and make suggestions. This allows professionals to respond effectively and efficiently to the reactions. PublicTwin builds community support and also collects invaluable qualitative data to support decision-making. This makes investments significantly less risky and accelerates the planning process.