Advances in Extended Reality for Smart Cities

Dear Colleagues,

Extended reality (XR) is sewn increasingly into the everyday fabric of human life. The application fields range from entertainment to more advanced fields such as military, healthcare, surgical, educational, and cultural. Despite a large amount of literature, there are areas where XR is not sufficiently explored or still lacks practical applications such as smart cities.

Solutions developed in the area of smart cities adopt information and communication technologies to facilitate the connection of people among each other and with a wide variety of city services including healthcare, transportation, and infrastructures. The main goal is to improve the quality of life for citizens, create a common conscience and promote more sustainable and efficient economic growth.

In this field, XR can play a crucial role by creating ad hoc interfaces to connect citizens with their urban environment, and to foster civic participation making it easier to access city services, understand open data, learn about the historical and social context, helping city operators to collaborate and plan in an easier way even among distances.

Contributions to this Special Issue are expected to push the boundaries of extended reality in smart cities, exploring how it can improve citizens’ quality of life, gradually engage them in the surrounding space, foster civic participation and facilitate any operations in a smart city.

Areas of interest, which can take advantage of the combination of the smart city approach and XR, include (but are not limited) to the following:

• Urban planning
• Urban stimuli
• Social interactions
• Urban experience
• Urban transportation
• Civic participation
• Cultural heritage
• Technology Enhanced Learning
• Smart learning
• Smart campus
• Smart building
• Ambient intelligence
• IOT and environment interaction
• Emergency management systems
• City Security Management systems
• Smart farms and industries
• Health care
• Urban sustainability
• Playable cities

Dr. Marco Romano
Dr. Teresa Onorati
Guest Editors

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