Public consultation people want to take part in
Interactive 3D experiences – in VR, on screen and on physical rigs – that get people who never come to consultations to take part
For: Surrey County Council, Wirral Council, Network Rail and the Design Council, Cornwall Council, and Bolsover District Council, with Digital Urban
When: 2022 – early 2023
Built with: Unreal Engine, VR headsets, screens with Xbox controllers, custom physical rigs
In short
Councils running regeneration and community engagement want to hear from people who never come to a consultation evening – especially the under-35s. Digital Urban took their plans for high streets, promenades and stations out to pop-up events and let people explore them – in a VR headset, or on a screen with an Xbox controller – by jet pack, pedalo, open-top bus, bike and hot-air balloon. We built the engine room behind it: the multi-user Unreal architecture, all of the interactivity, the questionnaire back end that captured people’s views and exported them for each council, and the optimisation that let detailed town models run smoothly in a headset. Digital Urban made the buildings and the art.
The questions sit in the place itself, and people answer where they stand – here on the New Brighton promenade.
The projects
Farnham: jet packs on the high street
Surrey County Council, summer 2022. Visitors strapped on a jet pack – a converted beer keg – and flew along a future Farnham high street at pop-up events in the town. Digital Urban reports that engagement among under-35s rose from 6% to 45%. The events were covered by BBC South Today, and the project went on to win Surrey County Council an ADEPT President’s Award for digital innovation in placemaking.
Farnham: the jet pack at the pop-up shop, and a question answered in the virtual street.
As featured on BBC South Today, 19 August 2022.
New Brighton and Seacombe: an open-top bus and a pedalo
Wirral Council, October 2022. Two experiences built from local young people’s ideas for their area, gathered in school sessions over the summer. In New Brighton, visitors rode an open-top bus along the promenade with a live tour guide in the same virtual scene. In Seacombe, they pedalled a VR pedalo along the waterfront – a real pedalo, where pedalling is what moves you.
At the New Brighton event, October 2022: the “411” open-top bus and the pedalo, both live in VR.
New Brighton’s promenade, as local young people imagined it.
Around the virtual promenade: the buildings and art by Digital Urban, the tour, interactivity and questions by us.
The Wirral: the in-VR questionnaire, and visitors on the open-top bus.
ExploreStation: stations of the future
Network Rail and the Design Council, 2022. A multi-user tour of a railway station of the future: arrive by train, then walk the new station with fellow travellers at different times of day and in different weather. It toured the UK, including London Design Festival. More on ExploreStation.
Newquay: a bike ride through the town centre
Cornwall Council, September 2022. A virtual bike ride through ideas for the future town centre, at events run by the Newquay Futures partnership.
Shirebrook: a hot-air balloon over the town
Bolsover District Council, November 2022. A bird’s-eye tour of the town’s possible future from a virtual hot-air balloon, with The Future Fox.
Up, up and away: rising over Shirebrook’s market square.
Who it’s for
Anyone who needs the public to step up and take part: councils and planning teams, developers and architects consulting on a scheme, regeneration and transport projects, housing associations, health and research programmes, museums and festivals, and brands at trade shows and launches.
The format follows the audience. We’ve built VR for headsets and for ordinary screens, AR, iPad experiences, projection and camera-tracked walls, and physical controllers made for the job: a jet pack, a pedalo, a real bike and, for a trade-show game, a real spray bottle.
Questions people ask
Can VR be used for public consultation?
Yes. Instead of reading plans or looking at boards, people explore the proposed place in a VR headset – a high street, a promenade, a station – and answer questions inside it. On these projects, people rode a jet pack, a pedalo, a bike, an open-top bus or a hot-air balloon through the proposals, and gave their views as they went.
How do you get young people to take part in a consultation?
Make it something they want to do. In Farnham, Digital Urban reports that engagement among under-35s rose from 6% to 45% once the consultation became a jet-pack ride down the high street. The experiences were built on young people’s own ideas where possible, as in New Brighton and Seacombe.
Does everyone have to wear a VR headset?
No. In most cases the same experience also ran on a screen with an Xbox controller, so people who couldn’t or didn’t want to wear a headset could explore the plans and answer the questions just the same. We’ve also built tablet versions of this kind of experience for other projects.
How is feedback collected?
The questions sit in the virtual scene, next to the thing they ask about, and people answer by pressing buttons with their hands – yes or no, or a choice of options. Every answer is recorded and exported for the council, so it gets feedback tied to specific places and proposals rather than general impressions.
Want to know how it went in practice? What people told the councils, what worked and what we’d do differently next time – get in touch below and we’re happy to talk it through.
Answers are only part of the picture. These projects recorded what people said rather than how they moved around, but elsewhere we’ve captured both: on Jurassic World VR Expedition we tracked what riders looked at most from every seat, building up hotspots of attention, and for retail and luxury brands we’ve measured how people actually use an experience – where they go, what they choose, how long they stay. Collected anonymously and run through modern analytics, that kind of evidence can sit alongside a council’s questions, showing what caught people’s attention as well as what they said.
These are the projects that have made it into the public eye. There’s plenty more council and city planning work, along with transport and city infrastructure work for operators in London – for other clients, and white-label for agencies and consultancies – that stays confidential, but we’re always happy to talk about the approach.
Planning a consultation, exhibition or event?
What we did
- Multi-user architecture – Unreal Engine projects built so several people, and a live guide, could share one scene.
- VR and screen play – every experience ran in VR headsets, and in most cases also on a screen with an Xbox controller, so anyone could take part without wearing a headset.
- All the interactivity – the jet pack, the pedalo, the bike, the bus and the balloon, each tied to its physical rig.
- The questionnaire back end – questions asked in the place itself, answered with a press of a button.
- Data for the councils – every answer exported for each council to analyse: a big part of the job, and the point of the whole exercise.
- Optimisation – getting detailed town and station models running smoothly on headsets at busy public events.
Behind the scenes in New Brighton: running the shared sessions from the operators’ desk.
Digital Urban created the buildings, environments and art, and ran the events with each council. We’ve also built tablet versions of this kind of experience on other projects.
Not our first time out in public
Getting the public to step up and have a go is something we’ve been doing for well over a decade:
- National Media Museum Games Lounge (2012) – a Kinect wall where visitors became part of the exhibit.
- Enchanted Forest (Redbridge Central Library, 2012) – an interactive projection in the renovated children’s library that follows children as they move.
- Ways of Seeing (Light Night, Leeds, 2014) – the public playing with a projection on a city-centre building.
- VR Cycling (2014) – a real, pedal-powered bike in VR on an early Oculus Rift DK1 for road-safety learning: the ancestor of the Newquay bike ride.
- Kinetic Flux (Manchester Science Festival, 2015) – visitors’ movements driving light through glass, part of Electricity North West’s conversation about future energy.
- Born in Bradford VR (2019) – one of the world’s largest health studies, made explorable in VR.
Why it works
Traditional consultation reaches the people who already come to consultations. A jet pack on a high street reaches everyone else – and once someone has flown down their own high street, they have opinions about it. The fun is the way in; the questionnaire is the point.
The same thinking – making something complex explorable, so people want to engage with it – runs through our work on public engagement with science, from the Virtual Plant Cell to Microbial Puppet Masters at the House of Lords.
Planning a consultation, an exhibition or an event that needs people to actually take part? Get in touch.
