VIP-Emulator: To Design Interactive Architecture for adaptive mixed Reality Space Muhammad Azhar, Fahad, Muhammad Sajjad, Irfan Mehmood, Bon Woo Gu, Wan Jeong Park,Wonil Kim, Joon Soo Han, Yun Jang, and Sung Wook Baik Abstract This paper presents an emulator based framework that helps user to design and test an interactive-architecture before deployment in adaptive mixed reality (AMR) space. The concept of smart-media wall (SMW) is incorporated in emulator to design interactive space which has slide and swing movement abilities. SMWs provide flexibility to user in designing more intuitive dynamic space. The proposed emulator also considers SMW parameters such as width, height, and spatial position to architect dynamic mixed reality space. The proposed system has two modes: 1) edit-mode, and 2) play-mode that help users in simulating the movement of SMWs. It also incorporates peer feedback to enhance the typology of the SMWs. The designing of an interactive architecture was simulated numerous times using the proposed emulator. Simulation results proved the usefulness of the proposed emulator system in designing interactive-architecture for AMR space. Keywords Emulator, mixed reality, dynamic architecture, smart media wall. I. INTRODUCTION HE art of designing dynamic architecture is marked as the Tbeginning of a new era in the field of architecture engineering. Recently, several new buildings and skyscrapers have been constructed using dynamic architecture. In addition, these days, architects are planning to construct rotating skyscrapers. For instance, a plan for rotating architecture of a tower, to be built in future (named as Dynamic Tower) has been presented in [1]. The plan for Dynamic Tower not only includes the rotatory but also the dynamic shape shifting. The dynamic architecture is equally good for both the indoor as well as outdoor construction. Figure 1. Shows a few examples of dynamic construction architectures. Interactive architecture is the advanced form of the dynamic architecture. It is a field of architecture which offers a Muhammad Azhar, Fahad, Muhammad Sajjad, Irfan Mehmood, Bon Woo Gu, Wan Jeong Park,Wonil Kim, Joon Soo Han, Yun Jang, and Sung Wook Baik. Email addresses: azhar3797@sju.ac.kr, fahad@sju.ac.kr, sajjad@sju.ac.kr, irfanmehmood@sju.ac.kr, gubonwoo@sju.ac.kr, wanjunghi@ sju.ac.kr, wikim@sejong.ac.kr, hanjunsu@sju.ac.kr, jangy@sejong.ac.kr, sbaik@sejong.ac.kr All authors are with Digital Contents Research Institute, Sejong University, Seoul, Korea. reconfigurable, dynamic and flexible construction architecture that interacts with its environment. It can also be named as responsive architecture. Since last few years, a huge interest has been witnessed in the field of designing interactive architecture. It has completely reoriented the relationship among user, architect, and the architecture. Mixed reality architecture (MRA) is a form of interactive architecture [2], [3] that can be used in a single MR space as a smart media(sm) room [4] as well as linked multiple physical spaces across a shared 3D virtual world [5], [6]. To link the MR space, either in single SM room or virtual 3D world, an agentmediator based communication framework presented in [7] has been opted. The major focus of this work is to design SMW typology for SM room. To construct the SM room in accordance with the adaptive mixed reality space, an emulator having the capability of designing and simulating the SMWs typology is much needed. Therefore, a novel emulator system possessing these features is presented in this paper. Because the fundamental aim of the emulator is to design typology for virtual interactive physical space (VIP) [8], [9], hence we named it as VIP- Emulator. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the proposed system framework. Section 3 evaluates the VIP-emulator and finally the Section 4 concludes the paper and discusses the future work II. VIP EMULATOR FRAMEWORK This section discusses the core functionality and features of the VIP-EmulatorThe VIP-Emulator differs from the other existing emulators in a way that it has certain unique features such as the ability to draw SMW typology according to the scale, the ability to simulate and change the sequence of SMWs.Hence, the VIP-Emulator system overcomes the limitations of the existing emulators. The simulation feature of VIP-Emulator helps to examine different SMWs topologies in SM room, because it may not be possible otherwise due to limitation of the resources like time and cost. Hence, having an emulator to simulate such dynamic architecture is one of the worth mentioning aspect of VIP-Emulator. Corresponding author. Tel.: +82-02-3408-3797; fax: 02-3408-4339. E-mail address: sbaik@sejong.ac.kr. http://dx.doi.org/10.15242/iie.e0214079 132
Fig. 1 Indoor and outdoor examples of dynamic architecture. Fig. 2 VIP-Emulator To build a physical space having spatial arrangements of SMWs, certain parameters should be known. These parameters include scale measurement, look and feel of the walls, response of SMWs according to user s interaction, types of the walls etc. The very first parameter considered in VIP-Emulator is SM room dimensions. To create various SMW typologies according to the user-defined scale, VIP-Emulator provides the scale information which helps the user to observe the length and width of the created SMWs. For the sake of simplicity, the height of each wall is assumed to be a constant K, where K is the distance between floor and ceiling. Without the loss of generality, the thickness of all the walls are assumed to be equal because the change in the thickness of SMWs does not have any impact on either the walls or the SM room dimensions. With these assumptions, the emulator task is more simplified by concerning only about the length and width of the walls. Hence, VIP-Emulator presents a 3D view in the form of a 2-D system. Figure 2 shows the main interface of the VIP-Emulator consisting of rich GUI. It shows 2-D view of 3D SM room in which SMWs are drawn on the user defined scale. To make the appearance of the walls close to real environment, various categories of walls are introduced in VIP-Emulator such as 1) Simple-wall 2) Sliding-wall, and 3) Swing-wall. Simple wall represent the stationary wall as it http://dx.doi.org/10.15242/iie.e0214079 133
Fig. 3 XML-View of VIP-Emulator TABLE I WALLS INFORMATION USED IN XML-VIEWER ID Wall type Length(feet) Width(feet) Swing Angle Rotation 1 Simple-wall 3 1 Nil Nil 2 Sliding-wall 2.5 1 0 right 3 Swing-wall 3 3 90 left does not respond to users. Rest of the two types, i.e. Slidingwall and Swing-wall, are SMWs as these are interactive and respond to user s interaction. This interaction can be in the form of wall movement or changing the contents displaying on SMWs. These walls can be moved on both sides i.e. left or right, according to user s input. VIP-Emulator provides options to change the colour, width and height of the wall by experiencing different design topologies for the SM room. Another unique feature, which VIP-Emulator provides, is to simulate the SMWs movement. VIP-Emulator provides two modes 1) edit-mode and 2) play-mode. By using edit-mode, user can change the position, length, and width of the SMWs. New walls can be added and existing walls can be deleted. Additionally, user can change the movement sequence of SMWs by changing the position of walls from wall-menu in which attributes associated with each wall, used in the VIProom, are displayed. Play-mode is used to watch the movement of SMWs according to sequence set by user. User can switch between edit-mode and play-mode to use all the features of VIP-Emulator. The distinct and important feature of the VIP-Emulator is XML-Viewer. User can view each feature of the walls. Information used in XML-viewer is shown in table 1. Walltype provides information about category of the wall, length and width shows the dimensions of the wall. Left and Right indicates the direction of movement of the sliding and swing walls. VIP-Emulator designed architecture can be shared with the peers to acquire feedback. Accommodating the acquired feedback from peers in the SMW typology is quite simple with the help of VIP-Emulator. In this way, VIP-Emulator can be used to experience adaptive mixed reality space design without physical implementation of that at very low cost. Hence, it can be used to control the operation of SM design and production. III. SYSTEM APPLICATION TO VIP CONTENTS In this section, A SMWs typology is created for evaluation of the VIP-Emulator which describes the relationship between displayed contents and camera view according to user s standing location. As shown in Figure 4, virtual locations of the user have been shown in the form of A, B, C, and D at left side in the design created by VIP-emulator. At right side, respective contents are displayed according to user s location change and other inputs like poses, gestures and commands in the form of speech. After finalizing the design of SMW typology, the design can be implemented in physical space as shown in Figure. 5. The SMWs built in physical space respond according to users interaction that can be in the form of gesture, pose or speech. http://dx.doi.org/10.15242/iie.e0214079 134
Fig. 4 Contents displayed according to User s position Fig. 5 Typology of SMWs in adaptive mixed reality physical space IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK In this paper, a novel VIP-emulator system is presented that has the ability to design and test an interactive-architecture before deployment in AMR space. The concept of SMWs is used in VIP-emulator to generate interactive space. SMW has the ability of both sliding and swinging and can adjust to different typologies on user interaction. VIP- emulator works in two modes: 1) edit-mode and 2) play-mode. In edit mode, user creates and edits the interactive architecture while in play mode this created interactive architecture is simulated to examine the movement of the SMWs. VIP-emulator incorporates peer feedback on the spot to enhance the design of the SMWs typology. In future, we have intention to enhance the functionality of the VIP-emulator system to handle the design of 3D structures to view design from various angles. http://dx.doi.org/10.15242/iie.e0214079 135
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was supported by the Industrial Strategic technology development program, 10041772, The Development of an Adaptive Mixed-Reality space based on Interactive Architecture, funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (MSIP). REFERENCES [1] http://www.costruzionipallotta.it/the_dynamic_architecture.htm [2] H. Schnädelbach, Mixed reality architecture (Doctoral dissertation, University of London), 2007 [3] H. Schnädelbach, A. Penn, P. Steadman, S. Benford, B. Koleva, & T. Rodden, Moving office: inhabiting a dynamic building. In proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 313-322). ACM. November, 2006 [4] C. Greenhalgh, Large scale collaborative virtual environments." PhD diss., University of Nottingham, 1997. [5] H. Schnädelbach, A. Penn, and P. Steadman. "Mixed reality architecture: A dynamic architectural topology. 2007. [6] P. Milgram, and F. Kishino. "A taxonomy of mixed reality visual displays." IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems 77.12, 1321-1329, 1994. [7] J Fahad, M. Azhar, M. Sajjad, I. Mehmood, B. W. Gu, W. Kim, J. S. Han, S. J. Yoo, D. Han, Y. Jang, and S. W. Baik, Real time distributed content rendering technique based on agent-mediator communication framework for multi-display systems, International Conference on Future Software Engineering and Multimedia Engineering, 2013. [8] M. Sajjad, J.J. Lee, Y. Jang, C. Lim and S.W. Baik, Agent-Mediator based Communication Framework for Adaptive Mixed Reality Space, The Journal of Korean Institute of Next Generation Computing, 9 (4), 35-48, 2013. [9] M. Sajjad,J.J. Lee, B.W. Gu,I. Mehmood, Fahad, M.Y. Lee, Y. Jang, S.W. Baik, Synchronized and efficient communication system based on Agent-Mediator framework for adaptive mixed reality space, ICT for Smart Society (ICISS), 2013 International Conference on, vol., no., pp.1,4, 13-14, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.15242/iie.e0214079 136