Designing shared virtual environments for social interaction

PhD Thesis-Victoria University of Wellington, 2020

The distance between urban design processes and outcomes and their communication to stakeholders and citizens are often significant. Urban designers use a variety of tools to bridge this gap. Each tool often places high demands on the audience, and each through inherent characteristics and affordances, introduces possible failures to understand the design ideas, thus imposing a divergence between the ideas, their communication and the understandings. Urban design is a hugely complex activity influenced by numerous factors. The design exploration process may follow established design traditions. In all instances, the medium in which the exploration takes place affects the understanding by laypeople. Design tools are chosen, in part, to facilitate the design process. Most urban design community engagement does not use Virtual Environments (VE) as a means of communication and participation in the early stage of the design generation. There has been little research on how the use of VE for urban design can engage laypeople as contributors to the design process. It has been suggested that VE instruments can allow laypeople to express, explore and convey their imagination more easily. The very different nature of perceptual understanding of VE and its capability to produce instant 3D artefacts with design actions may allow laypeople to generate meaningful design ideas. An experiment setup has developed to leverage laypeople in authentic design collaboration. This thesis examines in the context of New Zealand’s National Science Challenge ‘Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities’ the drivers of change that contribute to the shaping of places, development and design of future neighbourhoods. A series of experiments have been conducted in the site of a neighbourhood to investigate the relative effectiveness of immersive VE to facilitate people in collaborative urban design. The findings support the hypothesis that VE with the generation of 3D artefacts enhances design communication for laypeople to design an urban form for their neighbourhood. The thesis concludes by discussing how New Zealand’s ii future neighbourhoods can be shaped and developed with VE assisted participatory urban design.

2003

Members of a community may not know each other in real life. The design of CVE in which members are known and there is interaction in a real space is different to the traditional design of CVE. It should consider the real location of each resource, appropriated awareness and communication strategies, and the human-human and human-resource relations. Our University Department was selected as an example organizational unit for experimentation. We start with the real physical environment and we design a CVE to provide new collaboration features to people working in the unit and those who will visit it. The advantages of the approach are many. First, people are familiar with the basic physical environment. Second, some activities requiring physical presence can be done with virtual presence, enabling more convenient ways to work for employees. Third, new opportunities for collaborative work appear as it is easy to do them with the proposed CVE. Finally, the approach is extensible, since new features can be added. In this paper we present the approach and the design of the proposed CVE.

… Journal of Virtual …, 1999

This paper describes the initial development of the Virtual Life Skills project. A user-centred design approach was developed to build virtual environments (VEs) intended to provide a practice arena for skill learning in children and adults with learning disabilities. The context for learning these skills is a computer generated model of a city in which users have freedom to explore different buildings and practice a variety of everyday living skills.

ISPRS - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 2012

MIC is an EU funded project to explore the use of shared virtual environments as part of a public discussion on the issues of building the city of the future. The project involves four science museums -Trenton, Lisbon, Copenhagen and Jerusalem -and MeLa Multimedia Lab of University IUAV of Venice, which was responsible for the artistic coordination and implementation of part of the virtual environments * . The initiative crosses themes and skills of social research, architectural and urban design, public administration and technology in an interactive exploration of four cities, now visiting on web (www.myidealcity.eu) and on the exhibitions in the four museums of the consortium. The translation of places and family problems into a new medium is a chance to see them in different ways and from different points of view, to imagine new scenarios to overcome barriers and stereotypes no longer effective. Virtual environments are an ideal starting point for a 'game' serious simulation and imagination applied to social relations that have as background the city scene, in particular those between the different categories of population. The four cities involved represent four very different variations of the same idea of cities dialectics: European and Mediterranean, old and new, real and virtual, rigid and at the same time changing. In this complexity, which represent the city of MIC, is possible to recognize a character and an identification of the most valuable assets of the same European culture. Understanding and reflecting the participants point of view was essential, therefore abstractions had to be carried on carefully in order to turn them into a model that reflected the point of view of the participants. The situation resembles * The MIC project was funded by European Community's Seventh Framework Programme, under Grant Agreement n. 230554. The project was created by Carlo Maiolini and Maurizio Teli (Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali), coordinated by Denise Eccher, Carlo Maiolini, Maurizio Teli (Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali) under the supervision of Michele Lanzinger -CEO and

Springer eBooks, 2001

IADIS Applied Computing 2007, 2007

In this paper we present the LEDs Urban Carpet: an interactive urban installation using a body-input as a form of a nontraditional user interface. The installation was tested in various locations around the city of Bath, UK. We selected locations with low, medium and high pedestrian flows. The aim is to generate a novel urban experience, which can be introduced in different locations in the city and with different social situations. The installation represents a game with a grid of LEDs that can be embedded as an interactive carpet into the urban context. A pattern of lights is generated dynamically following the pedestrians movement over the carpet. In this case the pedestrians become active participants that influence the generative process and make the pattern of LED-s change. The paper suggests that introducing this kind of display in a social scenario can enrich the casual interaction of people nearby and this might enhance social awareness and engagement. However, we should point out that a number of factors need to be taken into consideration when designing an interactive installation, especially when situated within the urban space. The experience we present here can assist designers in understanding difficulties and issues that need to be taken into account during the design of an interactive urban project of this nature.

Massively multiplayer online (MMO) environments are an emerging computer technology that makes possible new kinds of distributed communities and online sociability. What distinguishes MMOs from other Internet media is that they take face-toface conversation as their primary metaphor for user interaction, rather than, say, the page or the bulletin board. Because they simulate 3D spaces and contain thousands of people who do not know each other, MMOs constitute public spaces, although virtual ones. As such, they can be studied in ways analogous to those of public places in the physical world. Inspired by the work of William H. Whyte and Ray Oldenburg on sociability in real-life public places, we take a similar approach toward the study of MMOs. We ask the question: what makes some virtual public spaces in MMOs successful “third places” while other similar places fail? Through our virtual ethnography of dance clubs and corner bars in three MMO environments, we find four features of virtual public spaces that appear critical for their success: accessibility, social density, activity resources, and hosts. We further argue that MMO sociability is just as authentic as that in “real-life” contexts while highlighting ways in which it is distinctly different.

interactions, 1996

The purpose of this chapter is to show how important it is to use visu-alization techniques for enhancing public participation in creating smart cities. The chapter focuses on exploring people's opinions with regard to urban design, and on exploring new media and digital tools for public engagement. More specifically, it focuses on exploring the potential of using virtual worlds in the process of urban design from the first stages of the design process to the construction and maintenance phases. Quantitative and qualitative research methods have been used for the purposes of this chapter. The Terf virtual world is explored as a laboratory for interdisciplinary collaboration in urban design as well as an interface allowing involvement of different actors within a public participatory process. The final part of this chapter offers guidelines for future development of support tools for public engagement, especially concerning the Terf virtual world, and their potential use by municipalities.

Technology affects our social life, where the virtual spaces allow anyone to publish content and share it to millions of people. That not only affects our social life, but also the way we gather inside the city. This essay argues user-publish content in virtual spaces, and analyzes of public gathering at 21st century city’s spaces.