Project makes barriers in everyday city life tangible again
The "Achtung Barriere!" project tests how people with disabilities experience the city and what obstacles make their everyday lives difficult. Mixed reality applications are used for this purpose. The project is being carried out by Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Correctiv.Schweiz and zentralplus.ch. The results will be incorporated into urban planning in the future.
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, the research collective Correctiv.Schweiz – the Swiss branch of the German non-profit research organisation Correctiv – and the Central Swiss online magazine zentralplus.ch have tested everyday city life for obstacles faced by people with disabilities.According to a press release, the “Achtung Barriere!” (Beware of barriers!) project aims to give others an insight into the everyday life of people affected by neurodiversity and show how they perceive their environment.
The first step was to develop a virtual city tour. The digital application makes it possible to understand “how challenging it is for a visually impaired person to cross a street and how much stress this causes”. Secondly, immersive mixed reality (MR) experiences are used, which enable users to “immerse themselves in the scene” with special MR glasses and headphones, as explained by Tobias Matter, a design researcher specialising in augmented and mixed reality. This makes it possible to experience the multisensory overload that “noise, movement and the chaotic situation of a construction site” have on an autistic person.
Lucerne residents are also contributing their experiences to the research project, which is funded by the Gebert Rüf Foundation. The public can report their experiences with obstacles on the research platform CrowdNewsroom.org, which belongs to Correctiv.
According to Pascal Ruedin, head of projects at the civil engineering office, “different perspectives, expectations and experiences come together at almost every corner of the city”. As the project’s contact partner, the city aims to “bring different perceptions into a common exchange”. The results are intended to provide a basis for political decision-makers to “better understand spatial impacts” in future urban planning decisions.