The Citizen’s Right to the Virtual City: Urban Governance in the Metaverse Through an Exploration of Decentraland

Museums and the Web is an annual conference sponsored by Archives and Museum Informatics.The 99 conference provided us with an opportunity to reflect on how museums are being transformed by the Web as well as to understand the challenges that they are being presented with by the demand for parallel virtual programming

After the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, which had a global impact, the concept of space, both as a definition and as an experience, has moved far away from traditional frameworks that only describe a physical realm. It has introduced "Virtual Spaces" into our lives, making it necessary to reconsider the concept of space. Thisstudy focuses on the city of Bitlis and its 3D virtual representations of its historical sites, taking into account the richness of its cultural heritage, while investigating what differences emerge between physical and virtual spaces in terms of user experience. The research includes elements of historical heritage that already have virtual data in the digital environment, such as Ahlat Seljuk Square Cemetery, Bitlis City Center, İhlasiye Medrese, Hizan City Center, and the Döküktaş Church. The differences in the navigation schema between virtual and physical spaces were evaluated based on users' experiences in virtual spaces. In this context, a field study was conducted with 22 participants, limited to some questions and tasks directed at them. Thus, the reasons behind the differences in navigation experiences between virtual and physical spaces, based on the users' experiences, were explored. The results of interviews conducted through a virtual platform revealed the user's virtual space experience and the variety of this experience.As a result, it was observed that the increase in virtual space data enhances the visibility of the city and sparks curiosity in individuals, thus creating a desire to physically experience the space. Additionally, due to Bitlis’ scattered urban texture, it was found that 3D representations of historical sites enable a richer spatial experience.

This chapter is part of personal artistic research through which I analyse how Artificial Intelligence can create a connection between physical and virtual space in different artistic practices and how it can generate new perspectives in the process of educating the next generations. Artists have always been interested in problematising the concept of space and contemporary art involves various approaches that question how we relate to physical and virtual space. Virtual space can function as an extension of physical space. In their practices, artists create different virtual spaces that compose or recompose physical spaces in order to explore topics related to cognitive science, ethics, pop culture, or themes related to the memory of a space. This chapter proposes an analysis of how children might develop critical thinking through interaction with this type of artistic practice. The participatory nature of contemporary art can serve as a platform for informal learning through which the educational process could take place via observation, debate, and creative workshops based on the artworks displayed in the exhibition space. The use of AI is more and more common nowadays, with artists staging various dialogues between virtual and physical space through the use of AI as a connecting node. This artistic research, resulting in art objects, can shape platforms of debate in children's education by enhancing critical thinking. The technological advancement we are witnessing has the potential to enhance different analytical capacities in children’s education through exposure and interaction with AI-augmented artwork in physical and virtual space, or even at the intersection of these two.

The Convergence Effect: Real and Virtual Encounters in Augmented Reality Art

With advances in digital technology, physical and virtual spaces have gradually merged. For digitally disadvantaged groups, this transformation is both convenient and potentially supportive. Previous research on public infrastructure has been limited to improvements in physical facilities, and few researchers have investigated the use of mixed physical and virtual spaces. In this study, we focused on integrated virtual and physical spaces and investigated the factors affecting digitally disadvantaged groups’ intentions to use this new infrastructure. Building on a unified theory of the acceptance and use of technology, we focused on social interaction anxiety, identified the characteristics of digitally disadvantaged groups, and constructed a research model to examine intentions to use the new infrastructure. We obtained 337 valid data from the questionnaire and analysed them using partial least squares structural equation modelling. The results showed positive relationships between performance expectancy, perceived institutional support, perceived marketplace influence, effort expectancy, and facilitating conditions. The influence of psychological reactance was significantly negative. Finally, social interaction anxiety had a regulatory effect on performance expectancy, psychological reactance, perceived marketplace influence, and effort expectancy. Its effects on perceived institutional support and facilitating conditions were not significant. The results support the creation of inclusive smart cities by ensuring that the new public infrastructure is suitable for digitally disadvantaged groups. Meanwhile, this study presents new theoretical concepts of new public infrastructures, mixed physical and virtual spaces, which provides a forward-looking approach to studying digitally disadvantaged groups in this field and paves the way for subsequent scholars to explore the field in theory and literature.

Today’s youth live in a world where public life is changing rapidly and public spaces are no longer restricted to the physical urban landscape. With the global reach of the Internet, youth are increasingly surrounded by and immersed in new technologies which offer them access to virtual space. Access to virtual space was until recently limited to the higher- and middle-income groups in Latin American cities, but the rapid proliferation of the so-called cabinas (cyber cafes) and cable connections at home in low-income neighborhoods has brought virtual space within reach of the hitherto excluded. This chapter explores how youngsters from a peripheral settlement in Lima, Peru, are maneuvering both physical and virtual spaces. The chapter demonstrates that in a context of adult-regulated physical public spaces and physical insecurity, processes of socialization and identity formation are increasingly taking place online. The virtual world can provide youngsters with a new realm in which they can weaken their parents’ vigilance over their everyday lives. This chapter concludes that the rise in virtual socialization does not however imply that physical public space becomes unimportant for the youngsters in these settlements but, instead, reveals a fascinating interplay in marking identities in physical and virtual public space.

In recent years, many scholars have carried out researchs on UAV digital twin from various aspects. However, the research is still in the preliminary stage, and there are still some problems, such as incomplete data and model fusion, poor migration of algorithm policy, poor relation between virtual and physical space, and lack of extensibility of application scenarios. In order to explore the application potential of digital twin technology in UAV fields, this paper introduces digital twin into UAV monocular visual navigation. Therefore, this paper proposes a digital twin(DT)-based framework integrating with deep neural network, which consists of physical space, virtual space, twin data layer and application layer. Next, the multi-modal decision model with decoupling methods in application layer consisting of perception model and control model is built to explore the global optimal solution and control the behaviors of UAV. Finally, the digital twin system and decision model are verified in virtual space and physical space respectively. The results shows that the UAV visual navigation system based on digital twin reduces the cost of application, algorithm development and deployment, and improves the migration ability of navigation policy. Compared with the baselines, the proposed decision model has the best navigation performance in both virtual space and physical space. Compared with the navigation policy without the decoupling method, the performance index is improved by about 8.6% in virtual space and 2.7 times in physical space.

Responsibility accounting, managerial action and ‘a counter-ability’: Relating the physical and virtual spaces of decision-making

This paper proposes an innovative concept of community, called Mirror Reality, which is formed by the seamless interaction between users of physical space and virtual world. The Mirror Reality is relying on a portal to achieve the data translation and communication between virtual and reality worlds. This study employs the Ontology technology to analyze unified representation of objects and events in both virtual world and physical space. Furthermore, the research issues of creating a Mirror Reality are also identified. The portal that is implemented from the analysis is called Portality to emphasize its role between virtuality and reality. In other words, Portality takes care all of the data conversion and processing to permit the interoperability between two totally different worlds. Finally, the prototype of Mirror Reality for the university campus with its Portality is illustrated at the end.

The introduction of digital devices into all spheres of life has led to a significant restructuring of our everyday life and the world of the modern person. The real world is increasingly and actively extended by the digital environment, forming a historically unique life in a mixed online and offline reality. Psychology still lacks analyses of the worldview of adolescents most actively socialized in real and virtual spaces and comparisons with perceptions of elder generations that would contribute to understanding the choice of behavioral strategies of different generations and their adaptation to digital transformations. This study compares representations of real and virtual spaces as components of the world picture in adolescents and parents with different levels of user activity, digital competence, and value orientations. The sample was comprised of 282 adolescents aged 14–17 and 337 parents of adolescents of the same age. Adolescents’ pictures of the real and virtual worlds converge, while parents keep these worlds apart in their general system of perceptions. Adolescents and parents have different visions of the virtual world, while they are in common perceptions of the real world. The more time both adolescents and parents spend online, the more positive they perceive the virtual world, which is also characteristic of parents with a high level of digital competence. Adolescents with various value orientations differ in their perceptions of the real world only, while parents differ in their perceptions of both the real world and the virtual world. Thus, compared to the parents’ generation, adolescents, in addition to a generally positive picture of the world and high importance of the real world, also had more positive views of the virtual space and actively adapted to a mixed reality, which could act as a good psychological resource for adapting to major changes and shocks in the pandemic and the transition to distance learning.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses how virtual business environments can accelerate the advancement of research in fraud investigation and mentions two topics within the issue including fraud in virtual world and role of Embodied Conversational Agents in interviews.

<p>The application of aesthetics and techniques from photography into computer generated images leads audiences to read images of a virtual space similarly to images of a physical space. This phenomenon has allowed for a continuation in the cultural fascination with photorealism, and cases of audiences mistaking images from the virtual space as ‘real’. This thesis looks in detail at how the boundaries between the virtual and physical space shift when approaching the virtual space of a video game from the perspective of a photographer, rather than a player. It looks in detail at how audiences interpret images of the virtual space of video games when displayed in a form reminiscent of art photography. Photographs of the virtual and physical spaces were produced for online surveys and an exhibition to test audience perceptions of image origin. Participants were also asked to try and distinguish photorealism in the landscape form, urban form, and material form. Technical analysis of audience responses, combined with textual analysis of the images themselves, helped in determining the types of content, as well as styles of photography that were used by the audience as indexes to reality in the virtual space. In some cases, the technical theory could explain the thought process of the participants, however in other cases there were dominant factors that more significantly impacted participant interpretations, despite what theory suggested. This highlighted the blur that is emerging between the physical and virtual spaces. There were difficulties in designing tests that could identify and isolate the elements that influenced perceptions of photorealism, due to the complex, and sometimes unexpected, ways in which people made judgments about the images. A variety of factors and areas for future research arose from the tests, including using the medium of photography to document the ever-changing landscape of the virtual space.</p>

Post public sphere is a conceptual term which derived from the author to describe the emergence of new public spaces called virtual or digital public spaces. The virtual public space appears together with advances of information technology, which not only transforms the communication space of society, but also disrupts communication patterns that take place in the real world into the virtual world. This is a digital era which marked by disruption in various fields of life, in social, cultural, and economic and political life. One of the symptoms that arise is the disruption of public space from the real world to the virtual or digital space. Virtual space becomes a medium where each individual communicates without being limited by space and time. The post-public sphere refers to the phenomenon of change (disruption) in the public space that has led demos to enter a new communication arena that is different and does not even relate to the old public space. The new communication arena operates in a virtual (digital) world that is radiated by social media such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, including the massive media currently being is the YouTube media. Thus, the presence of various kinds of social media also provides preference for communication spaces for individual citizens to access and disseminate information independently. In the sense of an individualized information on each subject of citizenship.

Spatial Experience Of Physical And Virtual Space

The notion of spaces constantly is growing with the advancement of technology. The spatial interactions using digital media provide new possibilities to bridge between physical and digital spaces. Location is not all about longitude and latitude, but all the added digital layers may change the idea of positioning. Over the last decades, studying space faced many conceptual perceptions. The approach of having/imagining the different worlds and spaces, such as cyberspace and physical space, has been mostly formed by distinguishing them. Adriana de Souza e Silva (2006) drew a chronology for these imaginary spaces from cyberspace to virtual and hybrid space. Hybridizing of space with the advancement of nomadic technology like mobiles become more popular and indicates how the interfaces are transparent in our everyday life. So, hybridity occurs when the interconnection of the spaces is reachable for the people who can interact with, through the devices, wearables, headsets, etc. In this respect, the physical space needed to be filled with data, as Manovich (2006, p.226) defined this as augmentation of the space through “overlay[ing] physical space with layers of data.” The question of reality may not be valid anymore since both are affecting each other. And, it is time to think about the interlinked worlds and their effects rather than separating and labelling them as real and unreal. Technology can play a crucial role in changing our interaction with space. The paper will investigate the concept of hybrid spaces in relation to the production of dis-locative space. The dislocation environment reveals the interconnected spaces and their realities through new ways of interactions and narratives. The realities are created under the influence of each other. The paper will use the art project Shadows from Another Place as a case study. It will explore the idea of dis-location through spatial interaction and digital technology. The paper will profit from the theories including Production of Space by Henry Lefebvre, Supermodernity and Non-places by Marc Augé, and Relational Spaces by Scott McQuire. Paula Levine is a scholar and media artist who experiments with maps, geolocation data, and the dynamic of spaces. Shadows from Another Place is a web-based project using transposed maps, including three artworks San Francisco <-> Baghdad, The Wall, and TheWall-TheWorld. In this series, she tries to challenge the reality of geographical distances by hybridization of the spaces. Shadows from Another Place is a series of artwork that examines the discussion around dis-locative space, and spatial interaction using digital technology. The paper investigates three questions of locations and dislocation, real and unreal, and intervening in the physical space by the virtual world and vice versa. Question of Location ‘where am I’? What is un/real? How virtual world affects the physical world and vice versa?