Using Mixed Reality (MR) to Improve On-Site Design Experience in Community Planning

In recent years, designing in existing environments has been consistently emphasized in community planning. However, practicing such on-site design is not easy for designers, because the current technical conditions do not allow virtual design objects into real environments for 3D visualization and interaction. Thus, designers’ intuitive design perceptions, accurate design judgments, and convenient design decisions are hardly supported. This paper explores the possibilities of using mixed reality (MR) technology to improve designers’ on-site design experiences in community planning. For this, we introduced an MR design support system (MR-DSS) for the interactive on-site 3D visualization of virtual design objects. With the MR-DSS, we performed a design experiment with sixteen participants in a typical on-site design scene of community planning. The results showed that the MR technology could provide designers with intuitive design perceptions, accurate design judgments, and convenient design decisions, thus effectively improving their on-site design experiences.

Light Environment Design Support System Using Light-Guiding Plate With Decorative Cut Surface: Effects of Stripe Pattern Decorative Cutting on Plates Made From Transparent Resin

To increase the transmission efficiency of incoming and outgoing light on the side of a transparent resin light guide, such as an acrylic plate, we created a machined surface that does not become cloudy and transmits visible light well by cutting it with a single crystal diamond tool. When light is guided to this mirror-finished acrylic plate using an LED light source, its uneven brightness or illuminance distribution may be noticeable, depending on the application. To suppress the uneven distribution, attempts have made the luminance distribution uniform by a decorative cut on the acrylic plates for a fine pattern shape. Our research is developing a light environment design support system using an acrylic light-guiding plate with a decorative cut surface. This system consists of a rapid decoration pattern design technique with optical simulation, a decorative cutting technique to satisfy the demanded optical characteristics, and a technique to maintain machining quality. We implemented decorative cutting tests for various stripe patterns by adjusting the cutting conditions for the acrylic plates. Estimation of the decorative shapes was based on the shape of the tool cutting edge and its trajectory. We controlled the decoration shape and dimensions. The tendency of luminance distributions estimated by optical simulation were corresponded with the actual distributions.

Current State of Development of Ship Structural Design and Optimization Methods

This paper presents state-of-the-art methodologies and methods used in the rationally-based structural design of ships and offshore structures, namely design support system, structural optimization, surrogate modelling and sensitivity analysis. It demonstrates their application in structural design of a platform support vessel. It ends with a list of benefits that a structural designer may expect when the presented methods/methodologies are used. It also shows the obstacles to their full implementation in the engineering practice.

Development of Curriculum Design Support System Based on Word Embedding and Terminology Extraction

The principles of computer skills have been included in primary and secondary educated since the early 2000s, and the reform of curricula is related to the development of IT. Therefore, curricula should reflect the latest technological trends and needs of society. The development of a curriculum involves the subjective judgment of a few experts or professors to extract knowledge from several similar documents. More objective extraction needs to be based on standardized terminology, and professional terminology can help build content frames for organizing curricula. The purpose of this study is to develop a smart system for extracting terms from the body of computer science (CS) knowledge and organizing knowledge areas. The extracted terms are composed of semantically similar knowledge areas, using the word2vec model. We analyzed a higher-education CS standards document and compiled a dictionary of technical terms with a hierarchical clustering structure. Based on the developed terminology dictionary, a specialized system is proposed to enhance the efficiency and objectivity of terminology extraction. The analysis of high school education courses in India and Israel using the technical term extraction system found that (1) technical terms for Software Development Fundamentals were extracted at a high rate in entry-level courses, (2) in advanced courses, the ratio of technical terms in the areas of Architecture and Organization, Programming Languages, and Software Engineering areas was high, and (3) electives that deal with advanced content had a high percentage of technical terms related to information systems.