From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Taking time to understand: articulating relationships between technologies and organizations

Dynamic relationships between technologies and organizations are investigated through research on digital visualization technologies and their use in the construction sector. Theoretical work highlights mutual adaptation between technologies and organizations but does not explain instances of sustained, sudden, or increasing maladaptation. By focusing on the technological field, I draw attention to hierarchical structuring around inter-dependent levels of technology; technological priorities of diverse groups; power asymmetries and disjunctures between contexts of development and use. For complex technologies, such as digital technologies, I argue these field-level features explain why organizations peripheral to the field may experience difficulty using emerging technology

Mixed reality participants in smart meeting rooms and smart home enviroments

Human–computer interaction requires modeling of the user. A user profile typically contains preferences, interests, characteristics, and interaction behavior. However, in its multimodal interaction with a smart environment the user displays characteristics that show how the user, not necessarily consciously, verbally and nonverbally provides the smart environment with useful input and feedback. Especially in ambient intelligence environments we encounter situations where the environment supports interaction between the environment, smart objects (e.g., mobile robots, smart furniture) and human participants in the environment. Therefore it is useful for the profile to contain a physical representation of the user obtained by multi-modal capturing techniques. We discuss the modeling and simulation of interacting participants in a virtual meeting room, we discuss how remote meeting participants can take part in meeting activities and they have some observations on translating research results to smart home environments

Immersive and non immersive 3D virtual city: decision support tool for urban sustainability

Sustainable urban planning decisions must not only consider the physical structure of the urban development but the economic, social and environmental factors. Due to the prolonged times scales of major urban development projects the current and future impacts of any decision made must be fully understood. Many key project decisions are made early in the decision making process with decision makers later seeking agreement for proposals once the key decisions have already been made, leaving many stakeholders, especially the general public, feeling marginalised by the process. Many decision support tools have been developed to aid in the decision making process, however many of these are expert orientated, fail to fully address spatial and temporal issues and do not reflect the interconnectivity of the separate domains and their indicators. This paper outlines a platform that combines computer game techniques, modelling of economic, social and environmental indicators to provide an interface that presents a 3D interactive virtual city with sustainability information overlain. Creating a virtual 3D urban area using the latest video game techniques ensures: real-time rendering of the 3D graphics; exploitation of novel techniques of how complex multivariate data is presented to the user; immersion in the 3D urban development, via first person navigation, exploration and manipulation of the environment with consequences updated in real-time. The use of visualisation techniques begins to remove sustainability assessment’s reliance on the existing expert systems which are largely inaccessible to many of the stakeholder groups, especially the general public

A haptic-enabled multimodal interface for the planning of hip arthroplasty

Multimodal environments help fuse a diverse range of sensory modalities, which is particularly important when integrating the complex data involved in surgical preoperative planning. The authors apply a multimodal interface for preoperative planning of hip arthroplasty with a user interface that integrates immersive stereo displays and haptic modalities. This article overviews this multimodal application framework and discusses the benefits of incorporating the haptic modality in this area