PRT Simulation in an Immersive Virtual World

Abstract

Immersive virtual world environments, such as Second Life T M (SL), have the potential to dramatically improve the process of analyzing usability within technically correct system simulations, long before the system is built. We report our findings with the SL simulation of a Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system. The SL model and simulation were done according to the original technical specifications. In interacting with this simulation, the system designers were able to identify several usability issues that would have gone unnoticed in a non-immersive simulation environment. Namely: (1) a problem with the design of the offramp to the station; (2) further requirements for the design of the top of the vehicles, so that the suspended track is out of direct sight of the people inside; (3) further safety requirements for dealing with unexpected obstacles along the path.While all of these issues would have been identified upon deployment of the physical prototype, the contribution of our work is to show how usability issues like these can now be identified much earlier, using simulations in a virtual world.

Virtual Cities in Urban Planning: The Uppsala Case Study

“…Because its build tools are so easy to use, several experiments in urban development and architecture have been made there. Our work in virtualization of urban plans started in Second Life [24], but it soon moved to OpenSimulator [25] evolved into a commercial endeavor. ArchVirtual is now using OpenSimulator, so it shares many similarities with the infrastructure presented here.…”

Intelligent Open Data 3D Maps in a Collaborative Virtual World

“…Many studies have presented the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in urban planning and smart cities, such as broadband deployment, e-services, and open data (e.g., [32,38,39,48,49]). For application development, it is essential that the model has an organized structure and that other information can be connected to the model's components.…”

Informatics at UC Irvine

“…Similarly, Ph.D. student Lilly Irani is studying an online disability activist group that uses a combination of virtual environments, social networking services, email, and blogs to stay connected. Meanwhile, Crista Lopes has been using the popular virtual world of Second Life as a prototyping platform, developing and testing new virtual transportation systems [6] and even conducting courses in the virtual world.…”

“…Another alumnus, Jim Whitehead, headed the committee to develop the Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) standard while he was still a doctoral student at UCI. As another example, Crista Lopes has been working with the Irvine-based transportation company Unimodal Inc. to create models of a commercially viable rapid-transit system, the SkyTran [6]. In addition to our expansive work in launching efforts, we work tightly with corporate figure 1: Lopes's avatar travels in one of the virtual transporation "pods" she designed as part of the prototype system.…”