Professor Anton Nijholt, University of Twente, Netherlands.

Prof. Anton Nijholt received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He held positions at various universities, inside and outside the Netherlands. In 1989 he was appointed full professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, where he initiated its Human Media Interaction group. During some years he was a scientific advisor of Philips Research Europe, Eindhoven. His main research interests are multimodal interaction with a focus on entertainment computing, affect, humor, and brain-computer interfacing. Prof. Nijholt, together with many of the fifty Ph.D. students he supervised, wrote numerous journal and conference papers on these topics and acted as program chair and general chair of many large international conferences on entertainment computing, virtual agents, affective computing, faces & gestures, multimodal interaction, computer animation, and brain-computer interfaces. More recently he explores those topics in augmented reality environments. Recent edited books include the 2019/2020 books “Making Smart Cities More Playable: Exploring Playable Cities” and “Brain Art: Brain-Computer Interfaces for Artistic Expression.”

Exploiting Augmented Reality in Playable Cities

Abstract: Digital technology can make cities smart. City management can make use of information that can be extracted from databases in which data is collected about energy consumption, traffic behavior, waste management, human behavior in public environments, and opinions of the general public, for example as they can be collected from social media. Digital technology can also make cities playful, allow citizens to engage in playful and entertaining activities that help to make them enjoy daily and sometimes boring activities such as commuting, working, career, educational and social obligations. In this talk, we investigate how sensors and actuators can augment the urban environment and be used to design playful applications. Developments in Augmented Reality that enable (future) urban play will be discussed. We discuss how ideas about playable cities have developed and pay attention to the criticism of the concept of playable cities that emerged in recent years. This leads to the question of who will create and own your augmented reality city in the future.