Faculty of information technology and electrical engineering

The objective of this master’s thesis was to develop a mobile augmented reality (MAR) client application that enables citizen participation in design of services, products and city plans, for example. The application was developed to be a part of an existing citizen participation platform. The interest was on finding out what functions such an application should provide and what kind of user interface (UI) it should have. The application was developed iteratively, by building prototypes in parallel with researching best practices from existing literature. Especially finding suitable tracking solutions for MAR applications were of concern, so that desired functionalities could be provided. The final prototype enabled users to explore urban environment through augmented reality (AR) and find location-based surveys. The surveys could present city plans in AR and ask the users’ opinions on the plans. For evaluation, the application was tested with real users (n = 9) in authentic environment. Quantitative data was gathered with questionnaires to evaluate the usability of the application. In addition, semi-structured interviews were used to gather qualitative data. The results give some indications that simple graphical user interface together with the AR provides an approachable way to control such an application. However, more interactive functionalities could be required to make such an application interesting for the users. In addition, much effort is needed to address tracking and content management, before large-scale MAR citizen participation can be fully realized.