Intelligent Placemaking, Bringing Digital Twin and Virtual Reality to Shape a Healthy Ageing Neighbourhood: The Blue Zones’ Case and User Experience Study

Abstract

Ageing societies, such as the Netherlands, face an imperative challenge regarding how to make places conducive to healthy ageing in an intelligent manner.The integration of Virtual Reality and Digital Twins (VR-DT) into placemaking offers opportunities to shape/examine a place before it is actually constructed. To cultivate a healthy ageing place through DT-VR placemaking, one might draw upon previous experiences with successful healthy communities.Among those communities are "Blue Zones", which have the world's longest-lived populations. This paper proposes a DT-VR placemaking prototype using knowledge about Blue Zone socio-spatial characteristics to create a healthy ageing environment for a Dutch neighbourhood before implementing this placemaking in real life. 25 academics are invited to participate in a UX study to determine the prototype's usability and perceived ease of use. Further, a group of senior residents has been invited to participate in the placemaking process to discuss possible design scenarios based on the Blue Zones concept. This paper reports on the feedback received from academics and residents, which enables us to understand the preferences associated with the scenarios and gauge the perceived ease of use and utility of the prototype. It concludes with comments on further developments of DT-VR-based placemaking and directions for future work.

Keywords: Intelligent Placemaking, Healthy Ageing, Blue Zones, digital twins, Virtual Reality, User Experience