From EuroVR Knowledge Base

Visions and Scenarios

Introduction

Coming to the Energy sector and concerning the past decade, 3D plant modeling has made a breakthrough as a tool in plant delivery projects, and a 3D plant model is becoming a standard part of the plant delivery. A 3D model greatly enhances communication between the project parties and helps to understand complex process structures in the plant. The planning of installation and maintenance work and later modifications on the site is intuitive using the 3D model. Typical questions that would certainly benefit from the VR/VE usage are: "Will the tank fit in this room?” and “Will we be able to carry it in and install it?" or "Will there be room for maintenance staff to operate this equipment?".

The Constructions sector has become an information intensive industry and information management has become a discipline in its own right in this industry. Despite the interest and effort applied by leading companies, information management in the construction industry is still in its infancy. Many efforts are underway to work towards developing a virtual information model for construction projects which can capture information related to each product life cycle stages of a construction project.
Additionally, there are significant barriers to communications between the stakeholders. Most of these limitations are due to project information not stored in electronic form which makes thousands of documents shared during a typical project, leading to significant human errors in managing the versioning of these documents while at the same time the data is usually not managed while it is created, but instead it is captured and archived at the end of the construction stage. This means that people who have knowledge about the project are often likely to have left for another project by this time – so their input is not captured.

From the analysis of the Construction Industry, Urban Planning and Energy sector (available here), it is apparent that all three sectors are demanding very similar advanced features in their future IT systems. The common themes emerging from the above three sectors are:

Collaborative virtual environments for supporting all the stakeholders involved in a project.
Advanced multi-simulation capabilities to optimize the proposed designs by analysing various product life cycles.
E-learning environments which are visual and interactive to explore what if scenarios

Within these generic research directions, the WG2.4 members have decided to focus mainly on the following four areas due to its importance for the chosen industrial sectors:

Collaborative Virtual Environments for Built Environments
Intelligent Maintenance Environments for Buildings
E-Learning Environments for Construction Personnel
Multi-simulation Environments for Behaviour Modelling of Process Plants

Visions

The overall IT vision of the chosen sectors in this WG is that virtual prototypes within future collaborative workspaces will be used to link up distributed team members and relevant resources (simulation, databases etc) to provide an innovative product creation and product maintenance environments. Such technology will allow multi-functional teams to work together to assess products from various engineering view-points before it goes to the construction stage. Future virtual technology will allow citizens to provide their views on proposed construction and urban regeneration projects, ensuring transparency and promoting democracy through public participation. The same virtual representation and the underlying distributed environment should support the maintenance aspects of the buildings and training environments for the workforce.

The following visions were developed for the chosen subject areas during the workshops organised by the WG2.4 members:

Scenarios

Distributed Design Work Environment

Research Roadmap

Barriers to Change

While there are clear drivers for change, change itself or the speed of change is often hampered by a set of barriers. More recent projects such as "Future Workspaces" and MOSAIC projects have identified following barriers for the built environment sectors, which are common for other engineering sectors including the energy sector as well:

Organisational readiness for deploying advanced virtual technology.
Lack of understanding of business benefits.
Resistance to change
High cost in developing and deploying appropriate virtual reality solutions.
Lack of business models for supporting collaboration between stakeholders
Lack of understanding of models of collaboration
Lack of security and control for supporting seamless access to business information and tools.
Lack of integrated platforms which can provide seamless access to information, tools and people with appropriate security and QoS.
Lack of VR integration with existing enterprise solutions.
Non intuitive nature of current VR interfaces for performing real industrial tasks.
Difficulty in configuring and using current VR environments for supporting design reviews of complex projects.
Difficulty in integrating current information sources with VR environments without losing the integrity of sensitive data.
Inability to handle large data sets within current VR environments.
Lack of standards for creating interoperable software platforms for supporting the entire product life cycle stages with adaptable interfaces.
Lack of training to use advanced technologies by workers.

Drivers for Change

Although there are many barriers for deploying mobile technologies, the following drivers were recognised as the ones which will drive the deployment of virtual technologies in the chosen sectors in this WG:

Need to improve business processes to compete in the global market.
Increasing need for collaboration between workers in the same organisation and between stakeholders from different organisations.
Company image for attracting potential clients and skilled workforce.
Importance of service-centric products
Environmental / sustainability objectives.
Customer demand for smarter products
High cost office spaces
Need for offering stimulating new work environments for workers with improved quality of life.
Affordable technology solutions
Demand for implementing democratic processes in urban planning
Need for considering safety and security issues (terror attacks, floods etc.)
Maturity and affordability of advanced IT products such as graphics workstations and communication technology.
New generation of young work forced who are IT literate than the older generation.

Research Agenda

In WG2.4, the team has identified the following research topics as the most important areas.
The following sub sections presents the research areas identified by the team as important to remove the technical barriers identified in the previous section.

Summary of the Research Roadmap

Research Areas	Research Steps		Dependent Scenarios	Period	Depends on	TRL(of* outcome)	Entry TRL* (optional)
As described above (shortened)	As described above (shortened)		Scenario(s), which depend on the Research Step or not applicable (N/A)	ST = < 5 yrs MT = 5-10 yrs LT = >10 yrs	Research steps mentioned in this table or External or Not Applicable	L(1)-L3(3)	L(1)-L3(3)
Display Technology for Immersive Environments	1.1	HiRes LCD/DLP Panels		ST	External	L3
	1.2	HiSpeed Panels		ST, MT	External	L3
	1.3	HiRes Display		ST	1.1	L3
	1.4	HiSpeed Displays	Collaboration Environment	ST, MT	1.2	L3	L2
	1.5	Large Scale Flat Panels	Office and Home Environments	MT		L3
	1.6	Wide FOV HMD	Mobile and Augmented Environment	MT	1.1	L3
	1.7	Holographic Displays	N/A	LT

Conclusions

Under FP6, we have seen research investment in many areas such as collaborative work environments, multimodal interfaces etc. Therefore, we see that most of the short term research challenges identified in this report will somewhat addressed through the currently funded FP6 projects. For example, under call 5, EU has funded 4 IPs to work towards the implementation of a reference architecture for collaborative frameworks. Much more coordinated approach between the funded CWE IPs has been put in place to create an impact in Europe. We believe that similar approach is also important for creating critical mass in areas such as multi-modal user frameworks, data models for creating intelligent mixed reality environments for maintenance and e-learning systems, Intelligent agent frameworks for supporting future design teams and E-learning environments etc. Such environments should be made Open Source so that EU researchers can work towards standards and converge their efforts for developing stable industrially relevant software products.

Another issue to be considered in FP7 is the support for underlying themes for breaking the current barriers for deploying VR technologies. Such themes include support for integrating mature VR technology within enterprise solutions, offering dissemination and training opportunities for companies, providing support for large scale demonstrator projects, perhaps by implementing the Living Lab concepts etc.

Such a coordinated European approach will enhance our competitiveness in the area of VR technology and its applications to large number of industrial sectors. This will not only help the engineering companies to be more competitive in the global market by being more efficient, but also strengthen the position of VR companies in Europe by being able to offer industrially relevant solutions. Such a marriage between the two sectors (VR and engineering) will have a positive effect in creating new jobs Europe.

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