From: "Raphael J. Espino" Subject: RESEARCH: Using VR for modeling organisations Date: Mon, 6 Oct 1997 19:19:56 +0100 (BST) Message-ID: Hi all, I'm a post-grad student looking into the possibilities of using virtual reality for modeling organisations. This involves using VR to present a picture of how an organisation does what it does, what events it handles (ie. customer orders), what actions are triggered by these events (order processing), who carries out these actions, and what results they produce (product dispatch). The goal is to produce an accurate description of the events and flows taking place in the organisation. Another requirement is that users create models of their own area of work, describing their own day to day work activities, and by combining enough of these individual models a picture of the whole organisation emerges. All the work carried out in this area so far has used either 2-D representations such as flow diagrams or textual descriptions to represent this information. What I'm looking into is the possibilities of using 3-D techniques for displaying this information. The idea is to have some sort of virtual environment in which the users can immerse themselves and interact with their surroundings, and in this way create a model of their area of work. In effect building their own virtual world which represents what they do in their jobs. The system would have to be simple enough for a user with very little training to be able to carry this out and flexible enough that the user can represent all the necessary information. What I'm looking for is any pointers to similar work that may have been carried out already and for general comments and suggestions on this idea. Is it feasible that users with little training/computer knowledge can build their own virtual worlds in this way? Are there any glaringly obvious problems that would need to be addressed? The concepts of events and flows are rather abstract, where as most of the work carried out in VR so far seems to concentrate on modeling more concrete objects (buildings, products, aircraft, etc.) Has there been any other VR representations of concepts such as events and flows? -- Raphael Espino rje@co.umist.ac.uk