Immersive Decision Theater 2 - Green Jena - Einzelansicht

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, integrate expert knowledge, and anticipate cascading effects to determine appropriate courses of action. Immersive environments offer a powerful medium to support such high-stakes decision-making by enabling distributed stakeholders to collaboratively explore, experience, and evaluate complex scenarios through interactive simulations and immersive visual analytics. In our semester project Immersive Decision Theater – Green Jena, we aim to prototype such an environment to communicate key dimensions of urban landscaping and greening—such as costs and climate effects—to a broader public. Using the city of Jena as a case study, we 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.

Within this environment, groups of users will explore the climate impact of trees, understand 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. This raises several research questions, including how to spatially organize diverse information sources (e.g., environmental data, cost factors, and growth simulations) and their visualizations, how to ensure coherent experiences for both collocated and remote participants, and how to enable fluid transitions between different presentation forms and perspectives, such as shifting between city overviews, first-person street views and different simulated future states.

To address these challenges, you will design and implement a multi-user XR prototype in Unity. You will explore interaction concepts such as mixed-reality transitions, spatial data visualization, and collaborative interaction techniques. Strong experience in Unity/C# or immersive interaction design 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 (2026) (see https://www.uni-weimar.de/de/medien/professuren/medieninformatik/vr/research/multi-user-virtual-reality/multi-wim-paradigm/)

[2] STADT JENA - TEAM GRUNDLAGEN DER STADTENTWICKLUNG. Baume in Jena (StadtBaumKonzept). https://planen-bauen.jena.de/system/files/2019-05/07-B Accessed: 2026-03-18.

Time and place will be announced at the project fair.

Before registering for this project, please ensure you meet the following course requirements:

-      Successful completion of Introduction to Virtual Reality or similar previous experience is required.

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

M.Sc. Computer Science for Digital Media

M.Sc. Human-Computer Interaction

M.Sc. Digital Engineering