Designing shared virtual environments for social interaction (original) (raw)
Designing Virtual Environments for Social Interaction
2000
The Distributed Legible City (DLC) is an interactive multi-media art installation enabling a number of 'cyclists' to participate in a shared virtual environment. In this paper we describe the evolution of the DLC guided by ethnographic study. We consider the implications and problems associated with designing a virtual environment where the requirements to 'support social interaction' are ambiguous and open ended. Although our own work is but exploratory, we identify trans-situational features of social interaction which may be oriented to and explicated in other settings in designing virtual environments to support social interaction.
Architectural Science Review, 2020
Regarding laypeople's active participation with artefacts in the early stage of urban design, there is a certain difference between conventional urban design process and participatory urban design process. The design artefacts used in the conventional urban design process do not allow laypeople to take part actively in the early stages of the design process. Similarly, in the participatory design process, the generated design ideas remain hidden in assumption due to the lack of associated information of the artefacts and the participants perform as individual actors. The research speculates that a virtual immersive participatory design instrument can reduce the gap, where the participants can act together as a unit to produce authentic design outcomes. An Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) assisted design experiment setup has developed for laypeople to engage in a shared and enhanced communicative platform. The article reports the procedure of developing the instrument and discusses them in terms of design communication, participation and expert's role. It concludes with a reflection of how laypeople as co-designers can use IVE instruments to design their neighbourhood meaningfully. ARTICLE HISTORY
Virtual environments as medium for laypeople to communicate and collaborate in urban design
Architectural Science Review, 2020
Regarding laypeople's active participation with artefacts in the early stage of urban design, there is a certain difference between conventional urban design process and participatory urban design process. The design artefacts used in the conventional urban design process do not allow laypeople to take part actively in the early stages of the design process. Similarly, in the participatory design process, the generated design ideas remain hidden in assumption due to the lack of associated information of the artefacts and the participants perform as individual actors. The research speculates that a virtual immersive participatory design instrument can reduce the gap, where the participants can act together as a unit to produce authentic design outcomes. An Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) assisted design experiment setup has developed for laypeople to engage in a shared and enhanced communicative platform. The article reports the procedure of developing the instrument and discusses them in terms of design communication, participation and expert's role. It concludes with a reflection of how laypeople as co-designers can use IVE instruments to design their neighbourhood meaningfully.
The development of the Virtual City: A user centred approach
… Conference on Disability, Virtual …, 1998
This paper will develop the theme of the importance of community based involvement in the development of virtual learning environments (VLEs) for people with a learning disability. It is being presented alongside two other papers, one by the User Group, the other by the Testing Group, describing the design, testing and distribution of the Virtual City. This set of VLEs comprise a computer aided learning (CAL) tool to teach independent living skills to people with a learning disability. Our presentation will demonstrate the involvement of users in each of the stages of development of the Virtual City, and the benefits of this partnership, as opposed to a more tokenistic involvement.
Tending a Virtual Garden: Exploring Connectivity between Cities
This paper introduces a new experience-driven design concept to public spaces, such as bus stops, to strengthen connections between cities and their citizens. With the prototype described here we are provoking inquiry into whether the "technology" that is a bus stop, with high tech augmentations can engender civic engagement and more interconnected cities. Our preliminary user studies showed that people, while waiting for the bus, do not interact with each other, and as such are “alone together”. Our concept is to connect people in the city, and also between two different cities by utilizing their waiting time. ‘Virtual Garden’ creates the experience of ‘being connected’ by providing users with the possibility to ‘grow’ a collaborative garden using a smartphone and natural gestures as the control interaction. Lo-fi prototypes were used to gather user feedback which informed the design of the 'Virtual Garden'.
Virtual City As a Place for Educational and Social Activities
International Journal of Emerging …
In recent years, virtual worlds have become increasingly popular in education and social life. Using a ‘city’ metaphor, we are developing a 3D virtual world enriched with social and educational tools. This virtual world allows performing a number of activities, such as exploring the city, learning and communicating with its citizens, building a social network. In this paper we report the results of case studies we have performed to explore users’ activities and behavior in a virtual city context. Our goal was to investigate how such a city can facilitate learning and socializing, also in a cross-cultural context. Based on the empirical results, we derive a list of recommendations for a virtual city as a place for social and educational activities.
Advances in Information Systems Development, 2019
Public Participation encounters great challenges in the domain of urban design concerning decision making and citizens' appropriation of a future place. Many tools and methods have been proposed to ease the participation process. In this paper we are targeting artefacts used in face-to-face workshops, in which citizens are asked to make design proposals for a public space. We claim that current state of the art can be improved (i) by better articulating digital artefacts with participatory processes and (ii) by providing interfaces that enhance citizen's spatial awareness and comprehension as well as collective creativity in urban design projects. We present the design and prototyping of an interactive virtual environment that follow the design-science research guidelines.
Strangers and Friends in Networked Immersive Environments: Virtual Spaces for Future Living
2003
This thesis investigates the phenomenon of social interaction in shared virtual environments (SVEs), supported by virtual reality (VR) systems over time. SVEs are computer generated 3D graphical spaces where geographically distributed people can meet and interact with each other in a graphical space. Although there have been a number of studies about social interaction in SVEs, there has been a lack of research looking into changes over time, which this thesis does. In order to gain more knowledge about social interaction over the longer term, this thesis compares and contrasts four different types of VR systems that supported various SVEs. Two of the systems were internet based SVEs on desktop computers where many users could interact at the same time. One of the SVEs had voice based communication. The other SVE had text based communication. The other two were based in laboratory settings. One setting was networked immersive projection technologies (IPT) in which two participants p...
Is spatial intelligibility critical to the design of large-scale virtual environments
2002
This paper discusses the concept of 'intelligibility', a concept usually attributed to the design of real-world environments and suggests how it might be applied to the construction of virtual environments. In order to illustrate this concept, a 3d, online, collaborative environment, AlphaWorld, is analyzed in a manner analogous to spatial analysis techniques applied to cities in the real world. The outcome of this form of spatial analysis is that AlphaWorld appears to be highly 'intelligible' at the small-scale, 'local neighborhood' level, and yet is completely 'unintelligible' at a global level. This paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of this finding to virtual environment design plus future research applications. Introduction: what carries across virtual & real space regarding intelligibility? Increasingly, large-scale virtual environments are being created for everyday, social uses. Such environments may be designed through a 'top-down' process (a centralized design-intent, used to produce, for example, collaborative, online gaming worlds) or designed through a 'bottom-up' process, such as the Activeworlds' environment, 'AlphaWorld' (constructed in a piecemeal manner, over time, by a heterogeneous user-base). Other types of virtual environments may be produced 'automatically' either to visualize large-data sets (Ingram and Benford 1995; Ingram and Benford 1995; Ingram, Bowers et al. 1996; Ingram and Benford 1996; Ingram 1997) and (Chalmers 1995) or to automatically generate urban-like environments for other purposes (Parish 2001). Regardless of how these environments are designed ('top-down', 'bottom-up' or using a rule-based, automated procedure), they are, for the most part, intended to be utilized by a specific user-base, a community of users. The question, which this paper begins to address, is what are the design criteria necessary, such that these virtual worlds should be comprehensible, easily navigable and memorable (with respect to repeat-visits), or as researchers within the architecture community would term it 'intelligible'.