75,746 research outputs found
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
Simplified Distributed Programming with Micro Objects
Developing large-scale distributed applications can be a daunting task.
object-based environments have attempted to alleviate problems by providing
distributed objects that look like local objects. We advocate that this
approach has actually only made matters worse, as the developer needs to be
aware of many intricate internal details in order to adequately handle partial
failures. The result is an increase of application complexity. We present an
alternative in which distribution transparency is lessened in favor of clearer
semantics. In particular, we argue that a developer should always be offered
the unambiguous semantics of local objects, and that distribution comes from
copying those objects to where they are needed. We claim that it is often
sufficient to provide only small, immutable objects, along with facilities to
group objects into clusters.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2010, arXiv:1007.499
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The Collective Building of Knowledge in Collaborative Learning Environments
The intention of this chapter is to investigate how collaborative learning environments (CLEs) can be used to elicit the collective building of knowledge. This work discusses CLEs as lively cognitive systems and looks at some strategies that might contribute to the improvement of significant pedagogical practices. The study is supported by rhizome principles, whose characteristics allow us to understand the process of selecting and connecting what is relevant and meaningful for the collective building of knowledge. A brief theoretical and conceptual approach is presented and major contributions and difficulties about collaborative learning environments are discussed. New questions and future trends about the collective building of knowledge are suggested
An Infrastructure for the Dynamic Distribution of Web Applications and Services
This paper presents the design and implementation of an infrastructure that enables any Web application, regardless of its current state, to be stopped and uninstalled from a particular server, transferred to a new server, then installed, loaded, and resumed, with all these events occurring "on the fly" and totally transparent to clients. Such functionalities allow entire applications to fluidly move from server to server, reducing the overhead required to administer the system, and increasing its performance in a number of ways: (1) Dynamic replication of new instances of applications to several servers to raise throughput for scalability purposes, (2) Moving applications to servers to achieve load balancing or other resource management goals, (3) Caching entire applications on servers located closer to clients.National Science Foundation (9986397
WARP: A ICN architecture for social data
Social network companies maintain complete visibility and ownership of the
data they store. However users should be able to maintain full control over
their content. For this purpose, we propose WARP, an architecture based upon
Information-Centric Networking (ICN) designs, which expands the scope of the
ICN architecture beyond media distribution, to provide data control in social
networks. The benefit of our solution lies in the lightweight nature of the
protocol and in its layered design. With WARP, data distribution and access
policies are enforced on the user side. Data can still be replicated in an ICN
fashion but we introduce control channels, named \textit{thread updates}, which
ensures that the access to the data is always updated to the latest control
policy. WARP decentralizes the social network but still offers APIs so that
social network providers can build products and business models on top of WARP.
Social applications run directly on the user's device and store their data on
the user's \textit{butler} that takes care of encryption and distribution.
Moreover, users can still rely on third parties to have high-availability
without renouncing their privacy
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