Building a Mobile AR Engagement Tool: Evaluation of Citizens Attitude Towards a Sustainable Future

Adopting a sustainable way of living in today’s cities requires a high level of citizen empowerment, motivation, and engagement. The mobile Augmented Reality (AR) technology offers an accessible, inexpensive, and rich user experience that has the potential to lead towards this adoption. The widespread smartphones and tablets with unique features (e.g., embedded sensors, cameras, high-speed Internet, accessibility, and portability) provide powerful and ubiquitous platforms for supporting such applications. Mobile technology, and the easiness of immersing a mobile user in AR, impact the interaction of citizens with their environment. We leverage the deep penetration of mobile phones in urban environments and their advanced features to design and develop an AR citizen engagement tool. The tool is employed in a municipality and studied as means to foster citizen engagement in sustainable practices. The Technology Acceptance Model is used to study the acceptance of this application and the factors that may affect its adoption. In total, 127 end users were exposed to the prototype system that allowed 3D, audio, and 2D visualizations as well as interactions with them. Through a web-based survey, we assessed the factors and measures influencing the acceptance of technology and how they can be aligned with the characteristics of the contemporary urban settings and utilize the potentials offered by mobile AR technologies. Providing detailed information regarding the system design we expect that the results of this study will contribute to the discourse on the use of mobile AR as a tool for citizen engagement to guide the development of future efforts.