1 Introduction

1.1 Amusement and Theme Parks

A theme park, applying themes to provide visitors with interesting experiences different from daily life, is an aggregation of attractions including architecture, landscape, rides, shows, food services, costumed personnel and retail shops (Pearce 1988).

Amusement parks are places where guests, as Walt Disney used to say, “Leave the real world behind and step into a world of fantasy”. Still, they are in real world and in real cities and can benefit from this.

Technology has always been crucial in the process to reach this goal and allow visitors to enjoy an exciting and thrilling experience. Parks are always competing to offer higher, faster and more exciting rides.

The amusement park represents an important and historic form of entertainment where mass participation and technological innovation have traditionally worked closely together. The continuing development of ever more exciting visitor experiences within amusement parks has provided a significant driver for many forms of entertainment technology.

Indeed, we can almost say that, until a couple of decades ago, guests visited theme parks to experience the latest in entertainment and technology.

Whilst the earliest amusement rides were simple manually-operated roundabouts (National Fairground and Circus Archive), modern amusement rides are becoming increasingly dependent upon substantial amounts of computing technology. The use of digital technologies is prominent both during the design process, where simulations of rider experience are often employed before physical prototypes are produced, and during the ride experience, where automated ride control and computer-controlled lighting are becoming commonplace (Worsell 2000).

But with rides reaching physical limits that it is not convenient to overcome, and home entertainment at the highest levels, thanks to digital devices, what can amusement parks do to convince people to leave home and to plan a visit?

This paper intends to review the main technological innovations applied to the world of theme parks, with the aim of identifying the strategies that can be planned to guarantee visitors an optimized experience. At the same time, it aims to understand how the very technology can help improving the integration between the fantasy space and the real, urban space.

Although in this paper the terms amusement parks and theme parks are used as if they were synonymous, they are not exactly the same thing: the former focus on mechanical performance, often associated with increasing levels of thrill, and are increasingly rare; the latter, instead, are characterized by a massive use of storytelling, staged also through multimedia technologies, and constitute a more current line of development.

Multimedia technology and storytelling become inseparable in design to avoid the risk of early obsolescence and ensure a high level of user involvement: in this sense, in fact, multimedia allows a sustainable renewment of the structure of the parks, while storytelling makes it possible to renew the emotional system.

It is therefore necessary to take into account the inclinations and tastes of the visitors, in an attempt to identify new entertainment trends among users, considering that from 2006 to 2015 the park visitors number has increased by 25% in USA and in the rest of the world (Rubin 2016). What do current visitors ask to the amusement parks? A possible answer is provided by the results of a survey conducted by Omnico (Omnico 2017) that lasted two years, based on a sample of 3470 visitors: a widespread use of artificial intelligence is expected from a park, regarding security and reception (92%), while a wide use of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) is hoped for orientation in the park or to reach restaurants and hotels, but also to choose the attractions with apps and finally of course to experience new fun experiences: “visitor expectations are stretching beyond the desire to experience new thrills”. The request therefore seems to be a total integration of VR, AR and other technology in every moment of the visit.

Like any other industry, theme parks are now facing severe challenges from other entertainment competitors. To survive in a rapidly changing environment, creating high quality products/services in terms of consumer preference has become a critical issue for theme park managers (Martin 1987).

Anyone who has been at a theme park at least once knows what the main problems people may have during this experience are: long lines, broken rides, high ticket costs, anxieties about losing the kids, weather-related closures.

The goal must therefore be on the one hand to improve more and more attractions, but above all to ensure that the periods in-between the rides are just as immersive and satisfying as the rides, as we are going to address in the next chapter.

Before the conclusions, chapter 3 investigates the relationship between the theme park and the spatial context it is built in and how new technology can be used to optimize this relationship and empower people.

2 Technology and Theme Parks

2.1 Space/Time Management

The main problem in visiting a theme park is guests’ time and space management: visitors need to apply an accurate strategy, and use time efficiently in order to visit an amusement park of a certain size. Today mobile apps offer maps of the parks, and through GPS can localize the users and provide them with information about waiting times of nearby attractions and about shortest routes to reach them.

A study by Thinkwell Group shows that 80% of people visiting theme parks have a device on them and they spend part of their time on social media. Through location-based social monitoring, theme parks can have an ear to the mentions and conversations that are taking place, and respond in real-time to guests through social media, or in person if the situation calls for it.

Still, although smartphones provide a lot of utility, it’s really important that theme parks are a physical experience. That’s why people go there. They want to step into that world and feel like they’re a part of it.

So, smartphone isn’t the best device in this case and in near future it can be replaced or at least joined by wearable technology.

One of the greatest fears of a parent is, without a doubt, losing sight of their children. In large amusement parks, usually covering an area greater than one square kilometer, locating a child can be a very difficult task.

Especially on high season days, visitors flock to the parks and finding a single child in the middle of the crowd is almost impossible. The consequence is that often the guest service points are stormed, with endless lines of panicked parents looking for their children; the finding process can take several hours and turn into a big security issue that involves both operators and visitors.

In principle, the main instrument used in the case of missing children consists of surveillance records, otherwise operators proceed by asking any witnesses. It is clear that these methods do not guarantee a high success rate, so amusement parks are always looking for further methods. For example, modern location technology, such as GPS, that can track the child’s position, is currently used. However, it is necessary for the child to carry a receiver, to make these systems effective. Although nowadays even small children have a smartphone with integrated GPS, this is a limitation to the freedom of movement of the children themselves, and extra care and protection required to prevent damage to the components, can be complicated in an environment like that of theme parks.

Another technology that has been establishing for these purposes in recent years and seems to be much promising is radio frequency identification (RFID), which offers the possibility of low-cost tracking thanks to radio waves. In this case, an integrated tag integrated inside a wristband to be supplied to children records all of their movements inside the park, for example when they enter a ride or pass near checkpoints equipped with RFID readers.

However, there are several challenges facing RFID-based personnel tracking system for amusement parks. Firstly, with the large physical area that must be covered, there will be a large number of RFID readers scattered around the park in order to effectively monitor the entire park due to the limited coverage of RFID radio.

Secondly, security and privacy preservation are of importance to the success of such a tracking system. It is crucial to prevent any adversary from being able to track and/or control children, which could pose security threats to the general public and lead to child abduction (Lin 2010).

For this purpose and in the context of wearable technology, Disney has developed and activated in its parks a system called MyMagic+, based on a wearable RFID bracelet: MagicBand lets guests pay for food and merchandise, be identified, open hotel room doors.

The bracelet links electronically to an encrypted database of visitor information, serve as admission tickets, hotel keys and credit or debit card. It begins when visitors book their hotel and tickets through Disney. After that, they are able to plan every detail on their trip from airport to hotel transportation. Additionally, guests can also schedule when their visit to each theme park is, where they would like to dine for meals. Moreover, users are allowed to pre-order their food. They don’t need to endure waiting in a super long line when hungry. Also, the tracking power is extremely important for Disney theme park because it helps Disney determine when to add more staff at ride, what restaurants should serve, what souvenirs should be stocked and how many employees in costume should roam around at any given time.

Another similar example is Accesso Prism, which let the parks schedule ride bookings in advance and reduce queue lines. Accesso Prism is a wearable device that gives theme parks and attractions the power to schedule ride bookings without kiosks or cell phones and connect with visitors in new ways throughout their entire visit. It allows them to have a wait-free experience by reserving their place in line, changing their ride selection and monitoring their ride return time. It also has an integrated smart park system which provides front gate entry, allowing cashless purchases and providing the first interactive wearable that can push notifications or trigger nearby events based on user location.

However, this type of technology is still in its infancy and will evolve in the future through intelligent facial and clothing recognition, that will be used by theme parks to detect individuals and capture their image.

Understanding the spatial and temporal behavior of tourists could enhance the management of attractions and contribute to extending the geographical distribution of tourists and tourist expenditures within regions (Thornton 1997). Knowing which rides have been taken, which shows have been attended and which shops and squares have attracted the attention of tourists, could lead to radical improvement in satisfaction performance.

Beyond this information, however necessary, the visiting sequence is a very important factor that helps visitors complete their trips on time. Without a personalized route suggestion, guests tend to make an inefficient trip or even get lost in the complex theme park environment.

When planning routes, some considerations are to be included: not all visitors have enough time to get around the park in its entirety, so they would like to access a route allowing them to complete their visit in the time they have in mind. This is a fundamental limit to consider, otherwise visitors may not have enough time for their favorite attractions.

Linked to this, we must also consider that every guest, at the beginning of the visit, has a set of “must-play” rides; the suggested route must include these attractions.

Moreover, custom routes do not only have to worry about optimizing visit time, but can get great benefits if they are designed to take account of previous visitors behavior (Tsai 2012).

Finally, quite often in theme parks visitors congregate in certain areas while at the same time other adjacent areas are vacant. If the recommendation system can take the crowd situation into consideration and provide a less congested route, the service quality of the theme parks should be higher (Milman 2001).

Another technology expected to be applied in theme parks is Artificial Intelligence (AI), which offers a way for theme parks to have ‘conversations’ with guests when people aren’t around. By using vast amounts of data, machines can make intelligent recommendations and offer useful information based on a guest’s query.

2.2 Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

The same AI considered in the previous paragraph can also be used in rides, to improve immersivity, combined with Virtual Reality (VR).

It will then tailor the attraction to the needs of the consumer at specific points throughout their journey.

The most common way VR is being used on rides at the moment is that the existing ride simply has a VR experience laid over the top.

People still climb aboard the physical ride and experience all the same twists, turns and acceleration. But they wear a VR headset that enables them to see, and sometimes hear, something completely different to the real-world experience.

The advantages of going VR for theme parks are multiple. It’s relatively easy to trick the brain into thinking it’s somewhere else, and it’s substantially cheaper to create a VR attraction than a traditional coaster or flat ride. These experiences can also be updated quickly (think of a Christmas or Halloween-themed version of an existing offering).

According with our preliminary studies on this topic though, so far rider reactions have been varied. Thrill-seekers want “more story” from these attractions, which suggests that while we rush to embrace flashy technology, we still have an inherent need for narrative—we still want to be told a story. And while many park-goers love the novelty, purists curiously dismiss these VR experiences as “not real”.

However, for some industry leaders, VR isn’t the silver bullet. Disney’s CEO Bob Iger has publicly shunned VR headsets, suggesting they block visitors’ view from reality and place them inside a fake digital world. When all visitors see is a VR screen, theme parks lose the value of the physical environments they’ve spent so much money to create.

But what if parks could put together the best of both worlds and show VR animation in a way that allowed people to keep seeing all that wonderfully themed physical space in the park around them? That’s augmented reality, and that might be the next big thing in theme parks.

However, focus should not only be placed on the attractions. These technologies can be applied to a wider level, covering the parks entirely, so that they become fully multimedia. This trend favors an almost total dematerialization of the rides and of the parks, replaced by hybrid environments in which the boundary between park and attraction becomes thinner. Among the most well-fitting examples are: (a) The Void, Virtual Reality Theme Parks where people can experience adventures in augmented reality and in groups, mainly taken from film sagas (such as Star Wars and Ghostbusters), wearing special individual devices; (b) Virtual Reality World USA, huge unthemed “containers” where people can experience dozens of different virtual experiences; and (c) East Science Valley China, one of the first thematic parks entirely based on virtual reality.

VR and AR are rapidly taking off in other areas of hospitality as well, helping users all over the map: from offering instant translation on menus and other signage to enabling wayfinding through interactive wall maps, and even creating virtual, changeable decor.

2.3 Ride Empowerment

The main concern of an amusement park regards the emotions and the adrenaline rush that the rides can trigger.

In the previous paragraph we have already seen how virtual reality and augmented reality can influence this, but there are other technologies to consider.

In particular, an important trend is outlined by the indoor mega dark rides that use integrated systems, sets and 3D projections to immerse guests in a story. The innovations in this area concern both the physical aspects, such as height of attraction, number of falls and air-times that follow the development of the history of dark ride, and the multimedia aspects related to storytelling, as the possibility to include huge screens that allow, given their size, to continue to follow the story of the ride despite the speed.

A particularly intriguing example of project regarding this type of attraction is Pirates of the Future, which aims to lead users into a series of representations of furious battles between the English Navy and a band of outlawed pirates. The most innovative aspect of this attraction, currently at the prototype stage, is that the boats, themed in pirate style, will not sail in a track, but in “open ocean”, with their position controlled by a local GPS system. There will also be interactive sections in which users can command a cannon that will trigger explosions in the scenes in front of them. The boats will also have a system that will shake them and tilt them when they are hit or collide with rocks and waves. The scenes will no longer be constructed with the classic animatronics, rather they will present a mix of real sets and 3D images, with life-size holograms. The random combination of all these elements will lead to different experiences conducted by the users themselves.

Digital technology is not used to improve only the integral parts of rides, but also the overall user experience, for example through the production of automatic souvenirs in the form of photos portraying people on the attraction, shot during key moments.

This stratagem is part of a broader strategy applied by the entire entertainment industry, the realization of insights on the experience lived by guests, in order to highlight unusual details that would otherwise be lost, such as the facial expressions of riders. These insights of thrilling individual experiences, obtained through video and audio technologies, are so intriguing that can be shared and enjoyed even by other people who may be unlikely to take part in the activities, perhaps because they are too dangerous or too expensive.

The extension of the experience of rides to watching audience reflects an emerging theme within Human Computer Interaction, it is to say how interaction has to be designed in order to be engaging not only for direct users, but also for spectators as well.

To this extent, telemetry can be used to extend and augment amusement rides to allow the experience to be shared by others and also to be retrospectively enjoyed by riders themselves (Walker 2007).

Static images such as photos, in fact, fail to capture all the emotional and dramatic potential that an adrenaline experience can transmit to the audience, but telemetry can allow a substantial enrichment of the data available.

Furthermore, the same data can be used for a detailed analysis of the experience, which allows designers to understand the precise moments in which an attraction creates an emotion and to understand how people react.

Another possibility is to design future rides that directly adapt to individual riders’ preferences or past history, for example tuning their movements in response to telemetry data, providing a more personalized riding experience than is currently possible (Hooper 2005).

Thanks to telemetry, it is possible to design new types of rides focused on users: heart rate monitors, audio inputs and individual touch screens can structure personalized experiences and different levels of thrill. During the ride different sensors measure body reactions to shocks, movements and turns and the route can be recalculated in real time to meet the user’s preferences. With audio sensors, words like “stop” can calm the ride; on the contrary, a few seconds of silence will cause the attraction to “engage” to increase the level of thrill. The possibility also to connect this type of ride/experience to the RFID bracelets (an example are the Disney Magicbands, which we have already discussed) also allows the attraction to recognize the user’s preferences so as to delineate a tailor-made experience.

3 Amusement Parks in the Urban Context

3.1 Social Parks

Recognition of the tastes and preferences of visitors is a fundamental prerequisite for offering visitors a personalized and interactive experience and the same technologies can be used to improve the relationship between the theme space of the park and the real space of the city surrounding the park, so as to make the transition from one to another as smooth as possible.

Disney’s “It’s a Small World” ride’s automated system recognizes and identifies guests. As they prepare to leave, it tells them good-bye, by name and in the appropriate language.

Disney always knows where guests are. Your favorite Disney character can come up and greet you, personally wishing you a happy birthday or congratulating you on your graduation or marriage. All the data you’ve fed into the system are available to Disney as they try to deliver an even better theme park experience.

The nice thing about it is that as soon as the guest is identified, the system can immediately present to team members previous information about this guest in a very quick, digestible manner. Team members can respond in a more personalized way rather than having to ask a whole bunch of questions about their day. The team members can see it all on a dashboard.

Otherwise, they get into the parks and they’re anonymous to the operators. They’re just people coming through.

Theme parks are trying to find ways to incorporate apps and social media into the games and rides, so people will continue the immersive experience even after they’ve left the park and they’re back in the real world. Some rides and theme park experiences allow guests to play game versions of the rides on their phones, or compare their in-game scores to other guests via an app.

There’s a social dynamic behind it. At the end of the day, humans are social creatures who get value out of the shared experience. Part of a roller coaster being exciting is the physical senses that you feel, but part of it is also the thrill of having other people around you yelling and screaming.

3.2 Theme Parks and Video-Games

Theme parks can borrow techniques from video-games to improve the dynamic explained in the previous paragraph and allow users to continue the experience at home or in urban space.

The last frontier of video-games is on the one hand a stronger integration with AR and VR technologies, on the other hand the attempt to overcome the boundaries between online and offline, just as the parks are trying to do; proof is the renewed success that in recent years technologically advanced versions of traditional escape rooms and laser games are having.

The video-game is becoming a fundamental tool for the renewal of amusement parks essentially for three reasons:

  1. 1.

    The park can offer a unique and non-replicable context for offline/online integration of video-game experiences: the avatar and the player’s body can merge into an all-encompassing experience, capable of involving cognition and sensoriality.

  2. 2.

    Video-games are the most effective “trojan horse” to introduce storytelling strategies within theme parks, since they are capable of transforming attractions based exclusively on emotions and primary sensations (fear, vertigo, speed, height, etc.) in narrative contexts.

  3. 3.

    Video-games could represent an excellent tool for prolonging the experience beyond the visit to the park and therefore of retain guests. Video-games storyworlds could be built starting inside the park, continuing after the visit on a digital platform, and maybe, at some point, prompting the player to return to the park to finish a field mission.

Although video-games are still slightly used and almost exclusively in their offline-analogical type, the increasingly massive introduction of digital technologies within the parks is almost naturally leading them towards the use of gamification strategies. Examples are the recent VR Park (Dubai and New York) but also the more “traditional” Cinecittà World or Sovereign Hill.

The real keywords are “interactivity” and “immersion”. It’s not enough to just passively ride an attraction. Thrill seekers want to go fast, watch a 3D movie and shoot zombies at the same time.

3.3 Relationship with the Context

In the seventies Umberto Eco embarked on a trip to the United States in search of confirmations that would support his intuitions concerning the progressive abandonment of reality in favor of fake worlds, reproductions on a 1:1 scale capable of staging improved versions of the world. The result of this trip was the essay Travels in Hyperreality (Eco 1975), in which Eco theorized the concept of hyper-reality associated with the (at that time) growing phenomenon of theme parks. In an essay following Eco’s investigation, the anthropologist Marc Augé took up the philosopher’s reflections in order to grasp the winning formula of these hyper-worlds, and with regard to Disneyland he stated: “It is to begin a question of scale. Everything is in full size but the worlds that are discovered (Frontierland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, Discoveryland) are miniature worlds. The city, the river, the railway are reduced models. But horses are real horses, cars are real cars, houses are real houses […]” (Augè 1999).

Since the seventies, the growth of the theme park phenomenon has not stopped, advancing towards continuous updating and improvement of standards. Thinking of the future means managing the obsolescence of traditional mechanical rides as opposed to the potential, in terms of sustainability, updating and experience, of multimedia and ambient intelligence technologies. Eco, at the time of his trip to the United States, said: “Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can ever give”.

To create an ever stronger connection with the surrounding territory and the heritage that characterizes it, parks can implement strategies that incorporate the use of technologies we have talked about, such as AR and VR, and at the same time storytelling and gamification mechanisms.

Virtual amusement parks are flourishing, they aggregate activities and shows: from augmented reality to virtual reality, up to hyper-reality. These parks can be categorized into three types, depending on their location and architecture: indoor virtual parks, contained in a building, let user try out various activities such as mad houses or escape rooms; outdoor virtual parks maintain the morphology of traditional synthetic parks, but with a strictly virtual offer; diffused or mixed virtual parks are integrated in multi-functional contexts (malls, outlets, museums, etc.), representing only one section of them.

In this way, theme parks can effectively enter the urban space and no longer be relegated only to its suburbs.

Indoor Virtual Parks.

An interesting example is the Virtual Reality World in New York, which is proposed as a place to experiment fifty different virtual performances on the model of digital arts and films, selected among the best practices of VR and AR, with the aim of not circumscribing these technologies exclusively in the sphere of video-games, but exploring different objectives: tests of skills and dexterity like exploding an asteroid before the impact with the Earth, or defusing a robot-bomb, climbing the top of Kilimanjaro or trying culinary skills.

Outdoor virtual parks. In China, the Oriental Science Fiction Valley Theme Park (or East Valley of Science and Fantasy) was recently inaugurated in the city of Guiyang, in the Guinhou province, one of the most depressed in the country.

The park, which is totally virtual, will eventually present 35 attractions spread across 330 acres of land. A simil-Transformer giant robot welcomes the public at the entrance, allowing the most reckless to perform bungee jumping. Attractions range from virtual roller coasters, to battle against dragons, or exploration of the galaxy, based on the use of virtual goggles and motion simulators.

Diffused or Mixed Virtual Parks.

Adiffused virtual park provides interactive VR shows organized in a public/commercial building or in a reserved wing of the building. The entire Dubai Mall hosts Virtual Reality exhibits with 7D holograms of animals hovering in the crowd of the Mall, or shows with animals in improvised theater spaces. At the same time the VR Park, recently opened in Dubai Mall, uses the storylines of movies and tv series (The Mummy, the zombies of The Walking Dead, the monkeys of Planet of the Apes etc.).

There is a large production of VR machines and systems that can be fitted in every environment: shopping centers, airports, as standalone locations or using an entire space like a train station.

In Dubai, for example, a space in a public building was assigned to a VR room where guests can choose in a screen-menu hung on the wall the virtual reality in which they want to be immersed and the performance they intend to execute: if they choose a fight against the zombies they are equipped with a laser gun to defend themselves. One of the users’ most recurrent comment was: “I would like to have it at home”, an affirmation that opens up an interesting perspective for home entertainment business.

Another fundamental element to be considered in this analysis is the context, understood not only for its physical and geographical features, but above all from the historical and social point of view. Remarkable is the difference between parks that, like Disneyland Paris, are almost completely unrelated to the place where they are built (Disneyland Paris was in fact built around Paris only as an area easily accessible by the European public) and parks that have instead a relationship between their own narrative universe and the context in which they are inserted (as in the case of Sovereign Hill, Australia).

Thanks to these modalities, the space of the parks tends more and more to merge with the urban and public space: it will never become a desirable substitute for democratic public space, but theme park model can be effectively expanded out of the boundaries of theme parks and transform the public realm as a whole.

Large theme parks are customarily designed, constructed, and operated by thousands of individuals working in multiple, interdisciplinary teams that simultaneously design its presence in the media, the material and immaterial routes that lead people to theme parks, their material environment, and guest experiences alike.

Theme parks exist within the system of urban spaces and that of social relationships, rendering the theme park simultaneously as a spatial and social machine (Mitrasinovic 2006).

4 Conclusions

4.1 The Future of Theme Parks

Theme parks are a form of entertainment that has been intertwined with technological developments since its origins.

In this paper we have therefore analyzed the role of technologies in theme parks and the main innovations that have been recently applied in this area. These innovations aim at guaranteeing visitors a new and enhanced visiting experience. The use of technology in amusement parks is important but it’s equally important that technology become invisible, to optimize the experience.

We have seen how, regarding the design of rides, attention has shifted from the pursuit of ever stronger and more extreme physical emotions to the pursuit of involving and exciting storytelling experiences.

In this context, expectations of the insiders are centered on virtual reality and augmented reality, as these technologies are able to foster the engagement and the construction of a consistent narrative universe.

However, a theme park should not be just a set of rides; since most of the visitors’ time is spent waiting in between the attractions and idling in the other areas of the park, it is necessary that the technology is used to optimize the user experience even in these situations, so as to provide an efficient management of time, through line-control systems, and space, with personalized routes to go through the park. The application of technologies such as radio frequency identification can serve these purposes and also provide value-added services, like systems to find lost children.

In the final part of the paper, we have focused our attention on the relationship between the themed and fake space of the park and the real space in which it is built. The goal must be to use the technologies to improve this relationship. Actually, in fact, amusement parks are built in liminal areas, set up on purpose in the name of the massification of accesses, thanks to mega-parking lots and structures built ad hoc. In this way, however, theme parks end up becoming non-places, places where people go to spend a funny day but completely disconnected from the urban context and everyday life. Visitors have no motivations to come back, once they leave the park they return to real world and the experience is essentially over.

Thanks to the new technologies that we have discussed, instead, parks can implement strategies to encourage the guests to come back, for example through apps that propose adventures to be continued in daily life, and then be concluded again within the park. Likewise, these technologies make it possible to recover the relationship between city and theme park, and make the latter a space available to citizens, who can access it, paying a reduced price, even just for a walk.

This is, in a way, a return to the origins: in the past, amusement parks were built within the city and became an inseparable part of the urban context, think for example to the case of Tivoli, a park that became a symbol of the city of Copenhagen and that it is one of its main green spots. However, technology can make a significant contribution in this perspective, by retraining spaces that otherwise would be abandoned or under-used, for example through the creation of diffused virtual parks. These topics, which are only partially dealt with here, will be the subject of further study in the next works.