VR-Participation: On the feasibility of next-gen Virtual Reality technologies as Participation channel

1While progress in the development of e-Participation platforms has been significant and the emergence of new Social Media-driven platforms appears to bring significant (by quantity), citizen engagement, litle attention has been paid by researchers to the limitations of the pervasive textual communication for political participation. In this paper, we describe the major sociotechnical challenges of classic e-Participation solutions and how the emerging next-gen Virtual Reality (VR) technologies can be leveraged to alleviate some of the issues identified.