Virtual reality in the service of user participation in architecture

The issue of user participation in the processes of building and urban design is enjoying renewed attention following its relative neglect over the last 20 years due, in large measure, to significant advances in emerging information technologies, particularly multimedia, virtual reality and internet technologies. This paper re-established the theoretical framework for participatory design evolved in the late sixties and early seventies as part of the movement towards a more explicit design methodology and attempts an explanation of why the concept failed to gain commitment from the architectural and urban design professionals. The paper then gives an account of two significant developments in the evolution of the application of information technologies with which the authors have been engaged. These are: i. a responsive and interactive interface to wholly immersive and realistic virtual reality representations of proposed buildings and urban neighbourhoods. ii. an intuitive and platform-independent VR modelling environment allowing collaborative evolution of the scheme from within the virtual world. The impact of these IT developments is demonstrated in the context of the design of a leisure facility for a community of users with physical impairment

Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination

Background: The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e. g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate. The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data. Methods: The developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability. Results: A prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered. Conclusions: The OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results

What influences the speed of prototyping? An empirical investigation of twenty software startups

It is essential for startups to quickly experiment business ideas by building tangible prototypes and collecting user feedback on them. As prototyping is an inevitable part of learning for early stage software startups, how fast startups can learn depends on how fast they can prototype. Despite of the importance, there is a lack of research about prototyping in software startups. In this study, we aimed at understanding what are factors influencing different types of prototyping activities. We conducted a multiple case study on twenty European software startups. The results are two folds, firstly we propose a prototype-centric learning model in early stage software startups. Secondly, we identify factors occur as barriers but also facilitators for prototyping in early stage software startups. The factors are grouped into (1) artifacts, (2) team competence, (3) collaboration, (4) customer and (5) process dimensions. To speed up a startups progress at the early stage, it is important to incorporate the learning objective into a well-defined collaborative approach of prototypingComment: This is the author's version of the work. Copyright owner's version can be accessed at doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57633-6_2, XP2017, Cologne, German