Project Immersive Decision Theater 2 - Green Jena

Prof. Dr. Bernd Fröhlich
M.Sc Ephraim Schott
M.Sc. Karoline Brehm
 

To make effective decisions in domains such as politics, sustainable development, urban planning, or crisis response, a deep understanding of complex and interdependent systems is required. Stakeholders must grasp these relationships, consider expert knowledge, and predict cascading effects to foresee the decision outcomes and determine the best course of action. Immersive environments offer a powerful medium to support such high-stakes decision-making processes, by enabling distributed stakeholders to collaboratively experience, explore, and evaluate complex scenarios through interactive simulations and immersive visual analytics.

In our semester project “Immersive Decision Theater - Green Jena”, we aim to prototype an immersive decision theater that communicates key dimensions of urban landscaping and greening, such as costs and climate effects, to the general public. Using the city of Jena as a case study (and building up on a previous tree-related project [2]), a central goal is to design a social virtual environment that conveys the complexities of planting and maintaining trees in urban contexts, and supports the assessment and deliberation of different decision outcomes. In this environment, a group of users will be able to explore the climate impact of trees, learn about the factors influencing the cost of urban greening, and apply this knowledge in discussions about the future development of Jena. We envision a collaborative space where decision-makers, domain experts, and affected communities can jointly plan, communicate, and reflect on future strategies and scenarios.

Deliberating complex problems in distributed immersive environments raises several research questions. In the context of urban greening and climate strategies, these include how to spatially organize diverse information sources (such as environmental data, cost factors, and growth simulations) and their visualizations. Further questions concern how to ensure coherent experiences for both collocated and remote participants when exploring the long-term impacts of planting decisions, and how to enable fluid transitions between different presentation forms and user perspectives, for example when shifting between real-world urban spaces and their simulated future states.

To address these research questions, you will apply and deepen your knowledge in (multi-user) XR development to design and implement an application prototype. Furthermore, you will explore advanced multi-user interaction concepts by experimenting with different interaction metaphors, mixed-reality transitions, and visualizing data in a spatial context. For example, you might apply a worlds-in-miniature approach for exploring climate effects of city greening at different scales, from the individual tree to the city [1]. Programming and interaction design will be central components of the project; therefore, a strong background in VR development with Unity and C#, and/or solid experience in designing user interactions for social immersive environments is recommended.

[1] BREHM, K., SCHOTT, E., HARTMANN, M., AND FROEHLICH, B. Multi-wim paradigm: Comparing urban planning variants with worlds in miniature. To appear in: 2026 IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. (See Project Page)
[2] STADT JENA - TEAM GRUNDLAGEN DER STADTENTWICKLUNG. Bäume in Jena (StadtBaumKonzept). planen-bauen.jena.de/system/files/2019-05/07-B Accessed: 2026-03-18.

The final assessment of your work will be based on the project contributions of each team member, including:

• Quality and innovation of your practical results
• Active participation in the project during and in between weekly meetings
• Intermediate and final project presentations
• Documentation, e.g. in form of a poster