This paper highlights selected grand challenges that concern especially the social and the design dimensions of research and development in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Smart Environments (SmE). Due to the increasing deployment and usage of 'smart' technologies determining a wide range of everyday life activities, there is an urgent need to reconsider their societal implications and how to address these implications with appropriate design methods. The paper presents four perspectives on the subject grounded in different approaches. First, introducing and reflecting on the implications of the 'smart-everything' paradigm, the resulting design trade-offs and their application to smart cities. Second, discussing the potential of non-verbal communication for informing the design of spatial interfaces for AmI design practices. Third, reflecting on the role of new data categories such as 'future data' and the role of uncertainty and their implications for the next generation of AmI environments. Finally, debating the merits and shortfalls of the world's largest professional engineering community effort to craft a global standards body on ethically aligned design for autonomous and intelligent systems. The paper benefits from taking different perspectives on common issues, provides commonalities and relationships between them and provides anchor points for important challenges in the field of ambient intelligence.
The paper discusses the use of precedents from architecture, urban design and film to propose guidelines for the improvement of navigation and wayfinding in virtual environments.
Virtual EnvironmentsThe predominant use, so far, of virtual reality technology in relation to architecture, has been as a means of visually simulating architectural designs. In this respect, virtual reality may be considered as the ultimate medium for producing representations of architectural designs, as it is the only technology capable of simulating the experience of being and moving within a designed environment, prior to its construction. This paper, however, is concerned with how architectural design may contribute to the design of virtual environments themselves. More specifically, it refers to the problem of designing virtual environments from the point of view of enhancing the users' spatial awareness and, consequently, aiding the task of navigation and wayfinding within virtual environments. The need for addressing this issue is evident in the number of virtual environments which are not very efficient in orientating their operators (and are usually aesthetically displeasing as well).This study has been carried out in relation to a particular class of virtual environment. World Design Inc., in a report on the design of virtual environments (1993, p.12), classified virtual environments in terms of the represented level of realism. They defined:• Hyper-realities, which aim at representing the material world and reflecting its complexity and in which the creative design element is often limited to modeling interaction with the user.• Selective realities, which are simplified representations of the material world and where some aspects of the environment are distorted or transformed and others are accurately represented.• Abstractions, where the virtual environment represents a very complex material world information or information that has no physical representation. In this case, the designer must conceive an effective abstraction of the complex information (which implies a transformation of meaning of what is being represented) and make this understood and responsive for the operator.
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