Virtual Worlds have not been deployed widely in collaborative design, and their respective value is largely unknown. In this paper we make a combined use of established principles in design and computer-mediated communication studies to provide an account of their value for collaborative design by presenting three case studies concerned with: (a) review sessions of the architectural design of a cottage; (b) collaborative design of the interior space of an academic laboratory; (c) collaboration of design teams for the user interface design of a multimedia kiosk. We have found that collaborative design in VWs is a very engaging experience for remote participants and can add value to the activities of conceptual design and/or design review in the domains of design examined. Keywords: Virtual worlds; computer-supported collaborative design; case study;Virtual Worlds (VWs) are computer-generated, persistent 3D environments in which users co-exist as avatars exploring, building, interacting and communicating. The increase in processing power, graphics capabilities and network bandwidth of home computers have resulted to the emergence of a significant number of novel VW platforms and technologies during the last decade, like Second Life (SL) and World of Warcraft (WoW), drawing the attention of researchers from various disciplines. Maher (2011) presents VWs as the latest descendants of CVEs (Collaborative VirtualEnvironments) following (a) the first generation of CVEs (Benford et al, 2001) that were largely based on either Virtual Reality (VR) technologies or a mix of 2D and 3D user interfaces (e.g. VRML and the Web); and (b) Augmented Reality (AR) environments that offer virtual artifacts as replacements of tangible objects to the desktop computer screen. Indeed, VWs are the offspring of VR and networked 2 desktop technologies, having left behind several shortcomings of VR -like the excessive cost of hardware interfaces, and allowing for social interaction in 3D spaces from the desktop computer.It is not surprising that the design community is showing increasing interest in VWs for collaborative design. VWs have a number of affordances that are exploited to foster collaborative activities in various stages of design: communication, embodiment, presence and co-presence, 3D visualization and interaction, and increased user engagement as a result of all of the above. VWs have been employed to support some collaborative design activities including, among others: architecture and organizational or interior space design (Mobach, 2008;Vosinakis et al, 2008); virtual design studios (Bessière et al, 2009;Schmeil & Eppler 2008); and collaborative learning in design education (D' Souza et al, 2011;Vosinakis et al, 2011).Despite the increasing interest in exploring the affordances of VWs as a platform or 'tool' for mediating collaborative design activities, design studies in VWs are still scarce. This is reasonable not only because VWs are a new medium, but also because the design community would be interested in pragmatic use...

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate Hermes, a robust framework capable of aiding a spatio-temporal database developer in modeling, constructing and querying a database with dynamic objects that change location, shape and size, either discretely or continuously in time. Hermes provides spatio-temporal functionality to state-of-the-art Object-Relational DBMS (ORDBMS). The prototype has been designed as an extension of STAU [6], which provides data management infrastructure for historical moving objects, so as to additionally support the demands of real time dynamic applications (e.g. Location-Based Services -LBS). The produced type system is packaged and provided as a data cartridge using the extensibility interface of Oracle10g. The offspring of the above framework extends PL/SQL with spatiotemporal semantics. The serviceableness of the resulting query language is demonstrated by realizing queries that have been proposed in [9] as a benchmarking framework for the evaluation of LBS.

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Abstract. Software simulations of building evacuation during emergency can provide rich qualitative and quantitative results for safety analysis. However, the majority of them do not take into account current surveys on human behaviors under stressful situations that explain the important role of personality and emotions in crowd behaviors during evacuations. In this paper we propose a framework for designing evacuation simulations that is based on a multi-agent BDI architecture enhanced with the OCEAN model of personality and the OCC model of emotions.

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