Jelena Petric

Sustainability: real and/or virtual?

The starting point for this paper is the identification of the four necessary and sufficient conditions which a building should exhibit to be judged to be sustainable; fitness-for-purpose, cost effectiveness, environmental friendliness, and cultural significance. The contribution which the current generation of CAD tools is making to the complex human activity of designing sustainable buildings is then discussed under the headings of widening the search for solutions, integrating the decision-making process, improving design insights, differentiating objective/subjective issues and photorealistic visualization. The paper then describes developments in the next generation of IT tools, based on virtual reality, which will allow multiple designers, working in distributed locations and on different computer platforms, to design from within the virtual world.

Real Teaching and Learning through Virtual Reality

This paper addresses an articulated vision of Virtual Reality, which lends itself to design collaboration in teaching, learning and communication of architectural design ideas among students, design professionals and client bodies during the early stages of the design process. Virtual Reality (VR) has already acquired a new degree of complexity through development of network-based virtual communities and the use of avatars. A key intrinsic quality of VR technology is to support collaborative design experience. The design tools developed for this experiment are capable of creating 3D objects in a shared VR environment, thus allowing the design and its evolution to be shared. The choice of programming language (JavaTM) reflects the desire to achieve scalability and hardware independence, which in turn allows for the creation of a VR environment that can co-exist between high-end supercomputers and standard PCs. The prototype design environment was tested using PC workstations and an SGI system running in a Reality Centre.

JCAD-VR:: a collaborative design tool for architects

The research reported in this paper describes the development and application of a tool that aims to increase the opportunity for architects to design and collaborate within virtual worlds and enable effective and transparent information exchange.The objective was to provide a Virtual Reality (VR) tool that is capable of creating 3D shapes in a shared VR environment, thus allowing the early design and its evolution to be shared by professional and client body. The system has been implemented using Java™ and Java3D™ and it has been tested on PCs workstations as well as an Sgi system running a Reality Centre.

Aprendiendo de Plečnik

The generation of the master plan of Ljubljana develops according to different layers of information: public spaces, patrimonial buildings, new architecture ...

ECOBUILD: an interactive guide to the design of environmentally friendly sustainable buildings

Examines ECOBUILD as an interactive guide to the design of environmentally friendly sustainable buildings.