Designing Service Environments for Virtual Scene Applications

Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Creative Technologies

Virtual worlds can be approached in a broader sense of that which refers to common conceptions of virtual reality and immersive environments. This chapter explores the design of virtual worlds in a time when much contemporary media is accessed through and simulated by software. Today, the main extensions of man are cognitive skills and experiences. Software is a way of seeing the world; it plays a central role in media design and distribution. Software and perception of reality are intertwined and pervasive: media not only exist in form of software but the shape and properties of media are also designed with software. In order to understand the implications of computational media, it is necessary to re-articulate problems in a creative and virtual manner. At the end of the chapter, the author speculates on design approaches and presents some examples developed by him.

2018

This booklet showcases findings from a research project called VIRJOX-Engaging services in virtual reality 1 carried out in Finland between the end of 2016 and summer 2018. VIRJOX focused on the design, implementation, and evaluation of immersive experiences for digital services, primarily based on virtual reality (VR). The two application areas were journalism and airport context. The VIRJOX project was carried out as a collaboration between the following three universities and their departments and research entities:

The paper presents an initial framework for studying issues in the design and evaluation of Collaborative Virtual Environments based on immersive projection technology systems. The framework consists of a software platform, developed using Virtools® software suite, which supports collaborative work among collaborators in different immersive systems (CAVE®- like environment, Workbench, etc.), and usability inspection of each iteration of the platform. The objective of this setting for the framework was to gain insights on both technological aspects regarding the development of such a platform and human factors issues on collaborative work within Virtual Environments; and more importantly on the interrelation between technological and human factors aspects for building usable Collaborative Virtual Environments. A live demonstration of the platform connecting two CAVE®-like environments situated in geographically distant places was organized to collect feedback from participants. The demonstration provided the users with different interaction metaphors addressing the three main characteristics of collaborative work through Virtual Environments: awareness of others, context sharing, and negotiation and communication. Details about the platform, results of an informal observational study though the live demonstration and lessons learned from conducting such a framework are presented in the paper.

2015

This book has been elaborated to be used as a course book in the unique two-year MSc Program – Management in Virtual Environments, offered by Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland. The program is aimed at preparing “digitally native” students for the role of managers and specialists ready to take advantage of the Internet and network technologies in creating the competitive advantage of an enterprise.

Virtual Reality, 2007

In this paper we describe an e-Tourism environment that takes a community-driven approach to foster a lively society of travelers who exchange travel experiences, recommend tourism destinations or just listen to catch some interesting gossip. Moreover, business transactions such as booking a trip or getting assistance from travel advisors or community members are constituent parts of this environment. All these happen in an integrated, game-like e-Business application where each e-Tourist is impersonated as an avatar. More precisely, we apply 3D Electronic Institutions, a framework developed and employed in the area of multi-agent systems, to the tourism domain. The system interface is realized by means of a 3D game engine that provides sophisticated 3D visualization and enables humans to interact with the environment. We present ''itchy feet'', a prototype implementing this 3D e-Tourism environment to showcase first visual impressions. This new environment is a perfect research playground for examining heterogeneous societies comprising humans and software agents, and their relationship in e-Tourism.

Journal For Virtual Worlds Research, 2011

Nowadays, tourism has become a very important industry in the international economy. Information and communication technologies are in constant development; they progress worldwide and across sectors. Their applications in tourism and tourist resources is rapidly increasing, reaching new, innovative and sometimes amazing results in terms of effectiveness, productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction. Exploring the interaction between technologies and tourism is difficult and challenging. Specifically, using virtual world technologies as a new means of information for potential tourists is a big challenge where the actual methods, goals and needs still need to be exactly identified.This paper aims at analyzing why and how virtual worlds can become an important platform for tourism-oriented areas to promote a destination in general, and their local heritage and tourist added-value services in particular. The document will also introduce the design of the first prototypes and the v...

Capin: Avatars, 2001

There have been several networked virtual environments (NVEs) described in the literature. Each NVE system considers a separate part of the problem and a reference frame for listing all components and comparing different NVEs missing. We summarize the issues to consider while developing complete NVEs, and we compare the most characteristic solutions in the literature for each issue.

Stereoscopic Displays and Virtual Reality Systems II, 1995

Today, the media of VR and Telepresence are in their infancy and the emphasis is still on technology and engineering. But, it is not the hardware people might use that will determine whether VR becomes a powerful medium-instead, it will be the experiences that they are able to have that will drive its acceptance and impact. A critical challenge in the elaboration of these telepresence capabilities will be the development of environments that are as unpredictable and rich in interconnected processes as an actual location or experience. This paper will describe the recent development of several Virtual Experiences including: "Menagerie", an immersive Virtual Environment inhabited by virtual characters designed to respond to and interact with its users; and " The Virtual Brewery", an immersive public VR installation that provides multiple levels of interaction in an artistic interpretation of the brewing process.

1999

Traditionally, the development of virtual environments (VEs) has been limited to particular technologies and the associated constraints on environment definition and interaction. However, with advances in both graphics hardware/software and the availability of new input/output devices, many of the restrictions on VE development have been removed. As VEs become increasingly realistic, there is a need to investigate where requirements and design information are located within these environments and how information can be structured and analysed. This is complicated by the close binding between the user and the environment. The aim of many systems is to make the man/machine barrier transparent so that the user feels "immersed" in the environment. To enable this, the virtual environment designer must be aware of the information resources that are available in the man/machine system and how they are distributed. In this paper, we approach the description of VEs in terms of distributed cognition. Distributed systems can be studied by analysis of the way in which distributed representations are coordinated , propagated and transformed. By analysing the process of representation and re-representation we are able to account for how tasks of users in a system are transformed and made more or less difficult. As a starting point for the cognitive analysis of this information, we propose to use the Resources Model (Wright99). We demonstrate how the Resources Model can be used to represent and understand interaction in a way that can be used early in the design phases of VE development.

2000