Prototyping IoT-Based Virtual Environments: An Approach toward the Sustainable Remote Management of Distributed Mulsemedia Setups

Business models built upon multimedia/multisensory setups delivering user experiences within disparate contexts—entertainment, tourism, cultural heritage, etc.—usually comprise the installation and in-situ management of both equipment and digital contents. Considering each setup as unique in its purpose, location, layout, equipment and digital contents, monitoring and control operations may add up to a hefty cost over time. Software and hardware agnosticity may be of value to lessen complexity and provide more sustainable management processes and tools. Distributed computing under the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm may enable management processes capable of providing both remote control and monitoring of multimedia/multisensory experiences made available in different venues. A prototyping software to perform IoT multimedia/multisensory simulations is presented in this paper. It is fully based on virtual environments that enable the remote design, layout, and configuration of each experience in a transparent way, without regard of software and hardware. Furthermore, pipelines to deliver contents may be defined, managed, and updated in a context-aware environment. This software was tested in the laboratory and was proven as a sustainable approach to manage multimedia/multisensory projects. It is currently being field-tested by an international multimedia company for further validation.

FPGA Remote Laboratory Using IoT Approaches

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are relatively high-end devices that are not easily shared between multiple users. In this work, we achieved a remotely accessible FPGA framework using accessible Internet of Things (IoT) approaches. We sought to develop a method for students to receive the same level of educational quality in a remote environment that they would receive in a typical, in-person course structure for a university-level digital design course. Keeping cost in mind, we are able to combine the functionality of an entry-level FPGA and a Raspberry Pi Zero to provide IoT access for laboratory work. Previous works in this field allow only one user to access an FPGA at a time, which requires students to schedule time slots. Our design is unique in that it gives multiple users the ability to interact simultaneously with one individual top-level design on an FPGA. This novel design has the benefit for classroom presentations, collaboration and debugging, and eliminates the need for restricting student access to a time slot for FPGA access. Further, our hardware wrapper is lightweight, utilizing less than 1% of tested FPGA chips, allowing it to be integrated with resource-heavy designs. The application is meant to scale with large designs; there is no difference between how many users can interact with the remote design, regardless of the complexity of the design. Further, the number of users who can interact with a single project is limited only by the bandwidth restrictions imposed by Google Fire Base, which is far beyond any practical number of users for simultaneous access.

Challenges and Strategies in Remote Design Collaboration During Pandemic: A Case Study in Engineering Education

The COVID-19 pandemic forced college education to shift from face-to-face to online instruction. This effort is particularly challenging for freshmen and sophomore students, in engineering design projects where collaborations are needed. The study aims to qualitatively understand challenges and possible strategies revealed by students in remote design collaboration through the lens of an undergraduate-level engineering design introduction class. The authors closely observed team members’ struggles and how they handled them through bi-weekly and final reflections in a semester-long project. The challenges and strategies from 11 teams (42 students) were analyzed and implications for future engineering design education were discussed. The findings provide insights to experimentations that aim to establish a successful remote learning environment that reaches core education objectives of engineering design while also helping students adapt to a geographically distributed engineering workforce in future. The study also illustrated the usefulness of reflections as a tool to capture students’ learning dynamics.

Transition from Physical Design Studio to Emergency Virtual Design Studio. Available Teaching and Learning Methods and Tools—A Case Study

At the core of architecture education are the design studio classes, where students test ideas, build physical models, and propose design projects in a shared creative environment. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 created a large disruption of this status quo and required a major shift in the whole experience of teaching and learning at design studios. Using a case study approach, the present paper describes the systematic process of translating Physical Design Studio into emergency Virtual Design Studio and how it has been perceived by students enrolled in the investigated courses. The focus was primarily on those tools and methods that were intended to compensate for traditional workshop methods (for example the tactile exercise of physical model making and pin-up board presentations). To meet this objective, available tools for performing Virtual Design Studio were assessed using experiences of Design Studio instructors on the one hand and students’ surveys on the other hand. The study’s results can be used as recommendations on how to optimally implement a transition from a Physical Design Studio environment to teaching a digital remote design studio. Furthermore, the results also add to creating design guidelines for setting up blended architecture education post-COVID-19.

Riding the Same Wavelength: Designers’ Perceptions of Shared Understanding in Remote Teams

The buildup of shared understanding is central to design work. It is particularly important in remote teams, where design work is carried out by participants scattered across geographical locations. We contribute by exploring designers’ perceptions of shared understanding in remote teams. Taking the perspective of individual designers working in remote teams, we pursue two aims: first, to uncover the work elements that are perceived as requiring shared understanding, and second, to identify the perceived enablers of and barriers to the buildup of shared understanding. Albeit under-researched, such individual perceptions are important because they likely shape the scope and extent of the shared understanding built in the remote team. To pursue our aims, we conducted in-depth interviews with experienced designers. Using thematic analysis, we found that team spirit, shared experience, trustworthiness, and transparency, as well as project management and related micro-practices, are perceived as central to building shared understanding in remote design teams.