Augmented reality meeting table: a novel multi-user interface for architectural design

Immersive virtual environments have received widespread attention as providing possible replacements for the media and systems that designers traditionally use, as well as, more generally, in providing support for collaborative work. Relatively little attention has been given to date however to the problem of how to merge immersive virtual environments into real world work settings, and so to add to the media at the disposal of the designer and the design team, rather than to replace it. In this paper we report on a research project in which optical see-through augmented reality displays have been developed together with prototype decision support software for architectural and urban design. We suggest that a critical characteristic of multi user augmented reality is its ability to generate visualisations from a first person perspective in which the scale of rendition of the design model follows many of the conventions that designers are used to. Different scales of model appear to allow designers to focus on different aspects of the design under consideration. Augmenting the scene with simulations of pedestrian movement appears to assist both in scale recognition, and in moving from a first person to a third person understanding of the design. This research project is funded by the European Commission IST program (IST-2000-28559)

Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform: The Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA)

We describe the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the first professional scientific organization based exclusively in virtual worlds (VWs). The goals of MICA are to explore the utility of the emerging VR and VWs technologies for scientific and scholarly work in general, and to facilitate and accelerate their adoption by the scientific research community. MICA itself is an experiment in academic and scientific practices enabled by the immersive VR technologies. We describe the current and planned activities and research directions of MICA, and offer some thoughts as to what the future developments in this arena may be.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in the refereed proceedings of "Facets of Virtual Environments" (FaVE 2009), eds. F. Lehmann-Grube, J. Sablating, et al., ICST Lecture Notes Ser., Berlin: Springer Verlag (2009); version with full resolution color figures is available at http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/Publication

Realising intelligent virtual design

This paper presents a vision and focus for the CAD Centre research: the Intelligent Design Assistant (IDA). The vision is based upon the assumption that the human and computer can operate symbiotically, with the computer providing support for the human within the design process. Recently however the focus has been towards the development of integrated design platforms that provide general support irrespective of the domain, to a number of distributed collaborative designers. This is illustrated within the successfully completed Virtual Reality Ship (VRS) virtual platform, and the challenges are discussed further within the NECTISE, SAFEDOR and VIRTUE projects