Digital Services in Immersive Urban Virtual Environments

Virtual Environments (VE) systems may provide a new way to deliver information and services in many areas, for example in tourism, urban planning and education. In urban VE there is a close link between the virtual environment and the urban environment that are intended to represent. These VE can be an intuitive way to access a set of services with a direct association to the real object or entity to which they are related. In this article, we describe a case study that aimed at exploring the possibility of using new interfaces to exploit and use services in urban VE with a greater sense of immersiveness. The results indicate that the VE interfaces are a natural and intuitive access to digital services. While users have felt a greater difficulty in performing some of the tasks in immersive scenario, the majority considered that this scenario provided a greater sense of immersion and realism.