Interaction in an immersive virtual Beijing courtyard house

Courtyard housing had been a standard dwelling type in China for more than 3000 years, which integrated tightly with local customs, aesthetics, philosophy, and natural conditions. As the representative of Chinese courtyard housing, Beijing\u27s style has its unique features including structure, plan layout, and urban form. How to present these features effectively is of great importance to understand Beijing courtyard housing. The current major visualization methods in architecture include physical model, digital imaging, and hand drawing. All of them have two common limitations--small dimensions and non-interaction. As an alternative, VR owns two advantages--immersion and interactivity. In a full-immersive VR environment, such as the C6, users can examine virtual buildings at full-scale and operate models interactively at real-time. Thus, this project attempts to implement an interactive simulation of Beijing courtyard house in C6, and find out if architectural knowledge can be presented through this environment. The methodological steps include VR modeling, interaction planning, and C6 implementation. A four-yard house in Beijing was used as the prototype of VR modeling. By generating the model into six versions with different nodes and textures, it was found that the fewer nodes a model has, the quicker it is in C6. The main interaction mechanism is to demonstrate the main hall\u27s structure interactively through menu selection. The sequence to show the structure is based on its constructional process. Each menu item uses the name of structural components, and by clicking a menu item, the corresponding constructional step is shown in C6. There were five viewers invited to see the simulation and comment on the functionality of full-immersion and interactivity in this product. Overall, the results are positive that the full-immersive and interactive VR environment is potentially effective to present architectural knowledge. A major suggestion from the viewers is that more details can be added in the simulation, such as characters and furniture. Upon the accomplishment of this project, a method to implement architectural simulations efficiently in C6 could be found. In the future, this study could involve more complex interactions such as virtual inhabitants, as a means to show the Chinese culture vividly

Software Process Improvement in Very Small Entities: An investigation of Software Development Knowledge Management and Team issues in maintaining and evolving software process and process improvement.

technique at both management and team level in software development VSEs. These methods assisted the researchers in examining the attitude and perceptions of practitioners towards the research issues. The researchers also made use of survey questionnaires in VSEs in order to gain more input and to validate the qualitative data. The findings from the first stage analysis (qualitative analysis), in which the content analysis and grounded theory coding approaches were used, show the pattern and detailed categories that influence and are related with the software process and process improvement in VSEs. These categories are related to each other and allow the researchers to produce and validate the studies theoretical model. Likewise the second stage analysis (quantitative analysis) assisted the researchers in conforming and enhancing the first stage findings. This investigation shows that SPI programmes in VSEs are being undertaken in a very informal manner and also in indirect ways. The primary reasons identified for the informal nature of VSE SPI are due to cost, time, customer and company size, which give a higher priority to the product rather than process. In relation to teams, the small team size coupled with the working and management style have lead VSEs to be more informal in their knowledge management process and team organization. Moreover VSEs are largely ignoring the best practice SPI models. The reasons and acceptance criteria for this are discussed. This research also confirmed that SPI does not solely depend on technology but also the contributions of human aspects have a strong emphasize, especially in VSEs. Therefore a contribution of this research is to provide an extended knowledge and understanding of SPI research area in general and within VSEs domain in particular

Supporting mega-collaboration: a framework for the dynamic development of team culture

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)This research project, inspired by the nationwide crisis following Hurricane Katrina, identifies mega-collaboration as an emergent social phenomenon enabled by the Internet. The substantial, original contribution of this research is a mega-collaboration tool (MCT) to enable grassroots individuals and organizations to rapidly form teams, negotiate problem definitions, allocate resources, organize interventions, and mediate their efforts with those of official response organizations. The project demonstrated that a tool that facilitates the exploration of a team’s problem space can support online collaboration. It also determined the basic building blocks required to construct a mega-collaboration tool. In addition, the project demonstrated that it is possible to dynamically build the team data structure through use of the proposed interface, a finding that validates the database design at the core of the MCT. This project has made a unique contribution by proposing a new operational vision of how disaster response, and potentially many other problems, should be managed in the future