scholarly journals Collaborative studio in a virtual environment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Aurel Schnabel

© 2002 IEEE. Recently, virtual environments (VE) have been increasingly used as settings for design and research. Using VE to visualize ideas from the initial steps of design, the architect is challenged to deal with perception of space, solid and void, without translations to and from a two dimensional media. The goal of the authors' studies was to identify how designers use and communicate early design ideas by using immersive three-dimensional (3D) VEs and how they describe 3D volumes using a different media. A series of experiments were undertaken, including navigation- and perception-tasks, designing in IVE, transcription of design, remote communication between design partners and controlled observations. They explored initial intentions of 3D-immersive design schemes, textual descriptions and collaborations within IVE. They discuss frameworks and factors influencing how architectural students communicate their proposals in an immersive Virtual Environment Design Studio, and how this approach of design studio enables to understand volumes and spatial relationships.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Aurel Schnabel

© 2002 IEEE. Recently, virtual environments (VE) have been increasingly used as settings for design and research. Using VE to visualize ideas from the initial steps of design, the architect is challenged to deal with perception of space, solid and void, without translations to and from a two dimensional media. The goal of the authors' studies was to identify how designers use and communicate early design ideas by using immersive three-dimensional (3D) VEs and how they describe 3D volumes using a different media. A series of experiments were undertaken, including navigation- and perception-tasks, designing in IVE, transcription of design, remote communication between design partners and controlled observations. They explored initial intentions of 3D-immersive design schemes, textual descriptions and collaborations within IVE. They discuss frameworks and factors influencing how architectural students communicate their proposals in an immersive Virtual Environment Design Studio, and how this approach of design studio enables to understand volumes and spatial relationships.


2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 583-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy N. Bailenson ◽  
Jim Blascovich ◽  
Andrew C. Beall ◽  
Jack M. Loomis

During the last half of the twentieth century, psychologists and anthropologists have studied proxemics, or spacing behavior, among people in many contexts. As we enter the twenty-first century, immersive virtual environment technology promises new experimental venues in which researchers can study proxemics. Immersive virtual environments provide realistic and compelling experimental settings without sacrificing experimental control. The experiment reported here tested Argyle and Dean's (1965) equilibrium theory's specification of an inverse relationship between mutual gaze, a nonverbal cue signaling intimacy, and interpersonal distance. Participants were immersed in a three-dimensional virtual room in which a virtual human representation (that is, an embodied agent) stood. Under the guise of a memory task, participants walked towards and around the agent. Distance between the participant and agent was tracked automatically via our immersive virtual environment system. All participants maintained more space around agents than they did around similarly sized and shaped but nonhuman-like objects. Female participants maintained more interpersonal distance between themselves and agents who engaged them in eye contact (that is, mutual gaze behavior) than between themselves and agents who did not engage them in eye contact, whereas male participants did not. Implications are discussed for the study of proxemics via immersive virtual environment technology, as well as the design of virtual environments and virtual humans.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (122) ◽  
pp. 20160414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehdi Moussaïd ◽  
Mubbasir Kapadia ◽  
Tyler Thrash ◽  
Robert W. Sumner ◽  
Markus Gross ◽  
...  

Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to ethical and methodological constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the viability of shared three-dimensional virtual environments as an experimental platform for conducting crowd experiments with real people. In particular, we show that crowds of real human subjects moving and interacting in an immersive three-dimensional virtual environment exhibit typical patterns of real crowds as observed in real-life crowded situations. These include the manifestation of social conventions and the emergence of self-organized patterns during egress scenarios. High-stress evacuation experiments conducted in this virtual environment reveal movements characterized by mass herding and dangerous overcrowding as they occur in crowd disasters. We describe the behavioural mechanisms at play under such extreme conditions and identify critical zones where overcrowding may occur. Furthermore, we show that herding spontaneously emerges from a density effect without the need to assume an increase of the individual tendency to imitate peers. Our experiments reveal the promise of immersive virtual environments as an ethical, cost-efficient, yet accurate platform for exploring crowd behaviour in high-risk situations with real human subjects.


2010 ◽  
pp. 180-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Steinicke ◽  
G. Bruder ◽  
J. Jerald ◽  
H. Frenz

In recent years virtual environments (VEs) have become more and more popular and widespread due to the requirements of numerous application areas in particular in the 3D city visualization domain. Virtual reality (VR) systems, which make use of tracking technologies and stereoscopic projections of three-dimensional synthetic worlds, support better exploration of complex datasets. However, due to the limited interaction space usually provided by the range of the tracking sensors, users can explore only a portion of the virtual environment (VE). Redirected walking allows users to walk through large-scale immersive virtual environments (IVEs) such as virtual city models, while physically remaining in a reasonably small workspace by intentionally injecting scene motion into the IVE. With redirected walking users are guided on physical paths that may differ from the paths they perceive in the virtual world. The authors have conducted experiments in order to quantify how much humans can unknowingly be redirected. In this chapter they present the results of this study and the implications for virtual locomotion user interfaces that allow users to view arbitrary real world locations, before the users actually travel there in a natural environment.


2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 777-785 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ebru Cubukcu ◽  
Jack L Nasar

Discrepanices between perceived and actual distance may affect people's spatial behavior. In a previous study Nasar, using self report of behavior, found that segmentation (measured through the number of buildings) along the route affected choice of parking garage and path from the parking garage to a destination. We recreated that same environment in a three-dimensional virtual environment and conducted a test to see whether the same factors emerged under these more controlled conditions and to see whether spatial behavior in the virtual environment accurately reflected behavior in the real environment. The results confirmed similar patterns of response in the virtual and real environments. This supports the use of virtual reality as a tool for predicting behavior in the real world and confirms increases in segmentation as related to increases in perceived distance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 485-512
Author(s):  
Sevda Ceylan Dadakoğlu ◽  
Şeniz Aksoy

Depending on the rapid development of technology, many environments, tools and methods are being developed in the field of education and training. These innovations include education in virtual worlds and three-dimensional education technologies that we have encountered frequently in recent years. With the improvement of three-dimensional education technologies, it is known that learning is used in "3D virtual worlds". Accordingly, it is mentioned that virtual environments are used in all levels of education, learning and teaching process.In this study, the virtual world of Second Life, which is a three-dimensional online life simulation and can be defined as an alternative teaching environment, was examined. The aim of this article; Introducing Second Life, a virtual environment that can be used in art and design education, to provide a theoretical perspective, to contribute to researchers and teachers who want to use 3D virtual worlds for educational purposes and to create a theoretical basis for the researches in this environment.Therefore, first of all, 3D virtual worlds are examined from a general perspective. Then, the Second Life application from 3D virtual environments was examined in detail and its general characteristics were defined.In addition, the use of Second Life in education, construction and content creation within the application, art and design making and art education were discussed. For this reason, examples of the artists using the Second Life application were given and some of the educational practices related to how Second Life was used in art and design education were included. In the conclusion part, with the development of technology and the use of virtual worlds in education, the gains that can be achieved in art classes were also included. In this context, the importance of the use of technology, various computer applications (VR, augmented reality applications, etc.) and 3D virtual worlds was mentioned in terms of today's art education gains. It was also stated that the ways of incorporating technology into art education should be questioned. ​Extended English summary is in the end of Full Text PDF (TURKISH) file.   Özet Teknolojinin hızla ilerlemesine bağlı olarak eğitim ve öğretim alanında birçok ortam, araç ve yöntem geliştirilmektedir. Bu yeniliklerin içerisinde son yıllarda sıkça karşılaştığımız sanal dünyalarda eğitim ve üç boyutlu eğitim teknolojileri de yer almaktadır. Üç boyutlu eğitim teknolojilerinin iyileştirilmesiyle beraber “3B sanal dünyalarda öğrenme”nin ön plana çıktığı bilinmektedir. Buna bağlı olarak eğitimin tüm kademelerinde, öğrenme ve öğretme sürecinde sanal ortamların işe koşulduğundan söz edilmektedir. Bu araştırmada üç boyutlu, çevrimiçi bir yaşam simülasyonu olan ve alternatif bir öğretim ortamı olarak tanımlanabilen Second Life sanal dünyası incelenmiştir. Bu makalenin amacı; sanat ve tasarım eğitiminde kullanılabilecek sanal ortamlardan Second Life’ı tanıtmak, bu konuda teorik bir perspektif kazandırmak, 3B sanal dünyaları eğitim amaçlı kullanmak isteyen araştırmacı ve öğretmenlere katkı sağlamak ve bu ortamda yapılacak araştırmalar için kuramsal zemin oluşturmaktır. Bu nedenle öncelikle 3B sanal dünyalara genel bir çerçeveden bakılmıştır. Ardından 3B sanal ortamlardan Second Life uygulaması detaylı bir biçimde incelenerek genel özellikleri tanımlanmıştır. Second Life uygulamasının eğitimde kullanılması, uygulama dâhilinde inşa ve içerik oluşturma, sanat ve tasarım yapma ve sanat eğitimi konusu tartışılmıştır. Daha sonra Second Life uygulamasını kullanan sanatçılara örnekler verilmiş ve Second Life’ın sanat ve tasarım eğitiminde nasıl kullanıldığına ilişkin eğitim uygulamalarından bazılarına yer verilmiştir. Sonuç kısmında teknolojinin gelişmesi ve sanal dünyaların eğitimde kullanımıyla beraber sanat derslerinde elde edilebilecek kazanımlar yer almıştır. Buna bağlı olarak teknolojinin, çeşitli bilgisayar uygulamalarının (VR, artırılmış gerçeklik uygulamaları, vb.) 3B sanal dünyaların eğitimde kullanılmasının günümüz sanat eğitimi kazanımları açısından önemine değinilmiştir. Ayrıca sanat eğitimine teknolojinin dâhil edilme biçimlerinin sorgulanması gerektiği ifade edilmiştir.


Author(s):  
Kurt M. Satter ◽  
Alley C. Butler

Competitive usability studies are employed providing empirical results in a design evaluation and review context. Populations of novice and experienced users are tested against benchmarks. Benchmark 1 is used to evaluate error identification and correction. Benchmark 2 is employed to evaluate the user’s ability to understand spatial relationships. Both benchmarks 1 and 2 compare individual performance with performance of teams. Benchmarks 3 measures quantity of errors found in a 4 min time frame. For benchmark 1, there is a statistically significant difference, but for benchmark 2, there is no statistical difference. For benchmark 3, there is a statistically significant increase in errors found. This increase is evaluated for impact as cost avoidance. It is concluded that cost avoidance by using a cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE) immersive virtual environment easily justifies the CAVE system.


Author(s):  
Derek Harter ◽  
Shulan Lu ◽  
Pratyush Kotturu ◽  
Devin Pierce

We present an immersive virtual environment being developed to study questions of risk perception and their impacts on effective training. Immersion is known to effect the quality of training in virtual environments, and the successful transfer of skills to real world situations. However, the level of perceived immersiveness that an environment invokes is an ill defined concept, and effects of different types of immersion are known to have greater and lesser influences on training outcomes. We concentrate on how immersiveness effects perceived risk in virtual environments, and how risk impacts training effectiveness. Simulated risk can invoke an alief of danger in subjects using a virtual environment. Alief is a concept useful in virtual training that describes situations where the person experiencing a simulated scenario knows it is not real, but suspends disbelief (willingly or unwillingly). This suspension of belief (alief) can cause the person to experience the same sorts of autonomic reactions as if they were experiencing the situation in real life (for example, think of fear invoked on amusement park rides). Alief of risk or danger has been proposed as one phenomenon that can influence training outcomes, like the experience of immersion, when training in virtual environments. In this paper we present work on developing a low-cost virtual environment for the manipulation of immersion and risk for cognitive studies. In this environment we provide several alternative input modalities, from mouse to Wii remote interactivity, to control a virtual avatar’s hand and arm for performing risky every day tasks. Immersion can be manipulated in several ways, as well as the type and risk associated with tasks. Typical tasks include performing kitchen preparation work (using knives or hot items), or wood or metal working tasks (involving manipulation of dangerous tools). This paper describes the development and technologies used to create the virtual environment, and how we vary risk perception and immersion of users for various cognitive tasks. The capabilities and manipulations of immersiveness and risk are presented together with some findings on using Wii motes as input devices in several ways for virtual environments. The paper concludes with some preliminary results of varying perceived risk on cognitive task performance in the developed environment.


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