Building a virtual laboratory for teaching and learning is a highly complex process, incorporating diverse areas such as interaction design, visualisation, and pedagogy. This article focuses on the production and implementation issues that were found in the comparison of two different virtual laboratory projects, and discuss which design considerations can be drawn from these observations. Two web-based virtual laboratories - the Gas Laboratory and the Virtual Colour Laboratory - were developed independently of each other within two different content areas. The laboratories share considerable overlaps in goals and production circumstances. Through a comparison of production and outcome, similar problems related to design, development and implementation were observed. The research uses a mixed method approach combining quantitative pre- and post-tests for assessments, qualitative surveys, and qualitative, ethnographic observations and interviews. By comparing the background material, five design challenges for developing virtual laboratories are identified: 1) how to balance ambitions with available resources; 2) how to balance intended levels of user interaction with exploratory freedom; 3) how to find appropriate levels of realism depending on target group; 4) how to choose between mimicking real world appearance and enhanced features; and 5) how to find the best learning situation for the virtual laboratory. To meet these challenges, the following design considerations are proposed: Guide the design work with a clear understanding of purpose and context; select appropriate technology to ensure efficient design and media usage; select level of realism considering purpose and end users; and provide learning guides before and after the virtual lab session.

A key feature for urban digital twins (DTs) is an automatically generated detailed 3D representation of the built and unbuilt environment from aerial imagery, footprints, LiDAR, or a fusion of these. Such 3D models have applications in architecture, civil engineering, urban planning, construction, real estate, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), and many other areas. While the visualization of large-scale data in conjunction with the generated 3D models is often a recurring and resource-intensive task, an automated workflow is complex, requiring many steps to achieve a high-quality visualization. Methods for building reconstruction approaches have come a long way, from previously manual approaches to semi-automatic or automatic approaches. This paper aims to complement existing methods of 3D building generation. First, we present a literature review covering different options for procedural context generation and visualization methods, focusing on workflows and data pipelines. Next, we present a semi-automated workflow that extends the building reconstruction pipeline to include procedural context generation using Python and Unreal Engine. Finally, we propose a workflow for integrating various types of large-scale urban analysis data for visualization. We conclude with a series of challenges faced in achieving such pipelines and the limitations of the current approach. However, the steps for a complete, end-to-end solution involve further developing robust systems for building detection, rooftop recognition, and geometry generation and importing and visualizing data in the same 3D environment, highlighting a need for further research and development in this field.

Virtual Reality has great potential to become a usable design tool for the planning of light and colour in buildings. The technical development has provided us with better computer graphics and faster rendering techniques. However, the reliability and usability is delimited by lack of knowledge about how humans perceive spatial colour phenomena. The setting up of parameters for material properties in light calculation software is done arbitrarily. We present a comparison between a real room and a digital model evaluated on a desktop PC and in an Immersive Projection Technology (IPT) type system. Data were collected from video recorded interviews and questionnaires. The participants assessed the appearance of light, colours and space. They also evaluated their involvement in solving this task, and their presence in each environment. Our results highlight the benefits and disadvantages of the real and virtual models. The participants had difficulties in estimating the size of both the desktop room and the room in the ITP system. The comparison of real and virtual rooms revealed unsatisfying differences in shadowing and colour appearance. We defined the magnitude of perceived colour reflections in the real room, and elaborated with some of the parameters in Lightscape/3dsmax6.

With a growing interest in environmental data and the need to consider various environmental factors earlier in the planning processes, it becomes more important to disseminate this type of information to different target groups in a comprehensible way. To support easier decision making, many cities and municipalities are increasingly using digital city models where it is possible to integrate different types of information based on simulation and visualization of future scenarios. Such tools have high potential, but the visual representation of data still needs to be developed. In this paper, we investigate how professionals within urban planning currently use visualization to communicate environmental data, and what their needs are regarding tools and visual representation. We discuss challenges for representing environmental data in urban development processes, with the aim of contributing to a better understanding of these issues. We base our investigation on a literature study, an inventorying survey and a focus group discussion with professionals within urban planning. This study provides an end-user perspective among urban planners and valuable insights on tool usage and visualization. Results show that applications used for environmental visualization still can be improved regarding, e.g., user friendliness and information handling, which may increase their efficiency.

The aim with our research is to contribute to a better understanding of how colour research findings can be conveyed to a broader target audience, using digital media. This article presents a user study focusing on the popular science project the Virtual Colour Laboratory (VCL). The VCL is an interactive webpage for presenting and demonstrating existing research results on spatial colour phenomena. It was initiated and carried out with the intention of spreading knowledge of colour appearance and colour perception to a wider target audience, from the viewpoint of practice based architectural colour research. The VCL enables the user to investigate actively how colours appear in different situations, and provides information on relevant literature and links for further studies. In a questionnaire study, carried out in 2014, two groups of users including architecture students and professionals within architecture, art and design evaluated the usability of the VCL with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The predominant result showed that the VCL generally was highly appreciated. However, the results also show differences in how the two groups experienced the visual and written content of the stations in the VCL, as well as differences in how they experienced the VCL as a whole. This highlights the importance of adjusting levels of information depending on the target group, as well as presents advantages and difficulties of showing research on spatial colour appearance on the web using digital visualization as a medium for presentation. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 41, 611–625, 2016