C³PO

The visualisation component also played an important role in the C³PO platform. The Belgian design agency Studio Dott created a new form of citizen participation that appeals to – and reaches – the various target groups as broadly as possible. Studio Dott is commercialising a physical installation, the ‘Participation pavilion’ that can be placed anywhere by local authorities that want to collect a citizen-centred view on an urban design proposal. Even less tech-savvy citizens like the elderly can easily use the pavilion, in which responses to questions are recorded using audio. These recordings are anonymously processed using language analysis software. The current prototype has proven to improve citizen inclusion and is currently under further development. Having access to this new market is reflected in a projected revenue growth for Studio Dott of €1.7 m within 5 years.

Belgian technology leader Barco created several demonstrators that enhance the City planning process. For example, the Transportable CAVE (TCAVE) is a professional collaborative VR solution - a mobile setting that offers companies better immersive virtual reality experiences. Citizens step inside the TCAVE wearing 3D glasses to see what a developed space would look like. This unique solution allows two persons inside the cave, each one looking at the 3D model from his or her point of view and negotiating what to modify on an urban design, for example. Previously, only one ‘master’ could interact with the model from a specific point of view; other participants had to try to follow the point of view of the master, which is a bit misleading. The quality and comfort of the collaboration has drastically increased through this world-first innovation. The TCAVE helps Barco to sell its ‘Group VR’ solutions to the market. Barco’s annual revenue on this type of product is about €20 m. In addition, it will also further help Barco in commercialising other solutions such as PowerWalls and CANVAS, the latter addressing a new market segment, the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, where Barco expects annual growth of about 10% in the coming three to five years.

Belgian project partner Createlli helps cities, authorities and other organisations to co-create projects with citizens and stakeholders, using effective participation and co-creation. As a result of the C³PO project, they commercialised a participation platform and participation services. It has been used in over 80 projects so far in Belgium, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the UK, in cities like Brussels, Antwerp, Bilbao, Vitoria, Santander, Eindhoven and Edinburgh. The projects range from urban development and urban planning over infrastructure and mobility to climate planning and nature development. Thanks to the credibility of participation in this international collaborative project, they were able to expand internationally and to offer participation for those projects. This growth meant that they could hire three new people. Createlli now has a team of eight FTEs offering participation services.

Turkish company ERARGE developed a semantic framework that relies on the Urban Transformation and Transportation Ontology (UTTO). UTTO is integrated with the city data, including the vehicle and pedestrian flows, road maintenance data and city events which may affect the functionality of urban transportation infrastructure and its actual use. This approach enabled a data-driven and semantic traffic monitoring solution in Pendik to simulate how the city traffic may be affected by the urban transformation processes. ERARGE then collaborated with Bahcesehir University and applied Augmented and Virtual Reality to inform citizens about urban transformation plans for better citizen sensing, voting and personal opinion crawling. In parallel, ERARGE identified the privacy and security needs as the personal opinions and traffic flows are private information and the cities’ IT infrastructures can be vulnerable to cyberattacks. As a solution, ERARGE developed a hardware-based end-to-end cybersecurity tool to protect both city and personal data. All these studies have turned into three new H2020 projects, one new ITEA project (BIMy), the recruitment of five new junior engineers, more than 20 papers in top conferences and journals and one new product, namely PRIGM, a Hardware Security Module, which is now in a Common Criteria evaluation process.

Furthermore, the Turkish software company Mantis developed an outdoor screen that allows local authorities to showcase what people are saying on social media and start conversations with them at public places. This social media visualisation tool reflects the insights of campaigns to the public and to the campaign owner. It was used many times on different visualisation sources such as municipal billboards, advertisement screens, and presenters for analysis and tracking. Mantis also developed an ontology platform where the data coming from different sources of a smart city can be managed by a single common platform. Using this infrastructure, different components of the smart cities can be semantically associated, and data gathered can be easily queried and retrieved in a meaningful way. Later on, Mantis used this infrastructure to initiate a common project with municipalities in Turkey for railway systems. These solutions pushed up the annual revenue of Mantis by almost 15%. The know-how has also been used in other projects after C³PO.

Netcad, another software specialist in Turkey, is now commercialising a map and GIS-based platform called Netigma, which helps local authorities and designers to analyse data, e.g. the density of urban traffic. Experience gained in C³PO led Netcad to join another international project called ASUA and develop a state-of-the-art smart city platform called Netcad Digital Universe. Both Netigma and Netcad Digital Universe are marketed and sold in Turkey and in the Middle East region yielding in a revenue increase of 30%. Netigma is used extensively by local authorities (1000+ municipalities) especially for GIS-based solutions. Netcad Digital Universe attracts users from local authorities, the government and private sector for IoT, smart lighting and computer vision solutions (Eye-OT™). Both products resulted in a 20% increase in team sizes.