PLAYARCH. Interactive Architecture Environment

Objectivo

The main goal of this PhD Thesis is to: (1) investigate and create a hypothesis for a new creative process in Architecture based on interactivity; and (2) to specify, develop and evaluate a 3D simulated environment to demonstrate that hypothesis. The simulation will be based in an immersive VR prototype capable of multimodal interaction, through which it will be possible to examine, by means of experimental methods and results analysis, which are the spaces that can be considered good, bad or even indifferent and which is the connection between the selected spaces and the social and individual culture of the tested individual. This evaluation study aims also at reaching a more profound and defined knowledge of the space of Architecture and its relation with man.

Through the prototype system to be developed, the user will have the opportunity to experience and explore the several forms that the space of architecture can acquire, all its faces and complexity. Not those that society made familiar to him but the spaces he looks for. He will be able to know the spaces with which he identifies, the ones he likes and those he dislikes and the reason/origin of his own choices. In order to make this possible, the work is divided into 6 main phases of investigation, namely: (A) Study and analysis of our western background, from the Historical, Philosophical and Emotional perspectives; (B) Study and analysis of immersive virtual reality and applicable multimodal human-computer interfaces (HCI); (C) Maturation of the essential computing programming skills to fit the thesis’ goals; (D) Specification of a new proposal for architecture creation based in the principles of dialog spaces ,interactive geometry and form change; (E) Specification and development of an immersive VR and interactive 3D architecture creation system; (F) and usability evaluation of the developed prototype as well as system’s analysis and evaluations, with a panel of representative test subjects (around 30).

In order to disseminate the novel work and the accomplished advances to the State of the Art, submission of papers for main international conferences and indexed journals in the area of Virtual Reality, Information Technologies and Architecture will be made. Doctoral classes will be attended for as a complement of the candidate´s knowledge on this thesis subject.

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The methodology will be based in State of the Art assessment, analytical modeling of the proposed solutions, specification, development, test and concrete deployment of algorithms and software systems, including also external sourcing of hardware components in the specified use cases and usability evaluation of such cases with end-users. Special focus will be placed in the production of papers for peer review international conferences (e.g. the CONVR – Constructions Applications of VR series of conferences, EGVE – Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments, IEEE VR, Laval Virtual, Journal of Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering – CACAIE ).