Abstract Product Service Systems (PSSs) introduce new business models for enterprises to promote tangible products along with intangible functions or services, thereby incentivising product sustainability with profitability, economic stability and customer satisfaction. However, the unique characteristics of a PSS challenge obsolete product development processes and demand a dynamic change in the complex building blocks of the underlying design and in the development infrastructure to attain high quality services. This implies a need for radical change in the team structure and the team collaboration model, in the organizational structure, technical infrastructure and in the complex process models by taking the complete product life cycle into consideration. This paper, firstly, identifies PSS unique features that challenge the capabilities of existing frameworks to design a standard PSS. In response, new business models are proposed to address the challenges relating to actors’ involvement, technology provision, organizational needs and process workflow modelling. Secondly, these proposed business models are combined into one comprehensive collaborative PSS design and development methodology by modifying existing modelling techniques. An assessment framework based on Goal-Question-Metrics approach and McCall Quality Model is successfully used to evaluate the PSS development methodology and subsequently, the developed framework through a use-case study analysis.

This paper presents the system architecture of a collaborative virtual environment in which distributed multidisciplinary teams involved in space exploration activities come together and explore areas of scientific interest of a planet for future missions. The aim is to reduce the current challenges of distributed scientific and engineering meetings that prevent the exploitation of their collaborative potential, as, at present, expertise, tools and datasets are fragmented. This paper investigates the functional characteristics of a software framework that addresses these challenges following the design science research methodology in the context of the space industry and research. An implementation of the proposed architecture and a validation process with end users, based on the execution of different use cases, are described. These use cases cover relevant aspects of real science analysis and operation, including planetary data visualization, as the system aims at being used in future European missions. This validation suggests that the system has the potential to enhance the way space scientists will conduct space science research in the future.

This paper presents a mixed reality (MR) system that results from the integration of a telepresence system and an application to improve collaborative space exploration. The system combines free viewpoint video with immersive projection technology to support nonverbal communication (NVC), including eye gaze, interpersonal distance, and facial expression. Importantly, these features can be interpreted together as people move around the simulation, maintaining a natural social distance. The application is a simulation of Mars, within which the collaborators must come to agreement over; for example, where the Rover should land and go. The first contribution is the creation of an MR system supporting contextualization of NVC. Two technological contributions are prototyping a technique to subtract a person from a background that may contain physical objects and/or moving images and a lightweight texturing method for multiview rendering, which provides balance in terms of visual and temporal quality. A practical contribution is the demonstration of pragmatic approaches to sharing space between display systems of distinct levels of immersion. A research tool contribution is a system that allows comparison of conventional authored and video-based reconstructed avatars, within an environment that encourages exploration and social interaction. Aspects of system quality, including the communication of facial expression and end-to-end latency are reported.

We introduce the collaborative telepresence workspaces for SPACE operation and science that are under development in the European research project CROSS DRIVE. The vision is to give space mission controllers and scientists the impression of “beaming” to the surface of Mars, along with simulations of the environment and equipment, to step out together where a robot has or may move. We briefly overview the design and describe the state of the demonstrator. The contribution of the publication is to give an example of how collaborative Virtual Reality research is being taken up in space science.

Communication during the design process has a substantial role because; it exchanges messages and conveys ideas to people with different skills and interests. Also, the development of high quality 3D modelling, photo rendering and VR software has shifted the way we communicate architecture, from a conventional one to a digital format and so, provided us with another way for the communication of information, the visualisation of processes and the creative expression of ideas. This paper investigates the impact that Immersive Virtual Reality technology can have on visualisation of a design review scenario in construction, which was developed during the course of the European CoSpaces project and the potential of such technologies to alter the way enterprises work.

An experimental comparison of interaction in the real world and a CAVE virtual environment was carried out, varying interaction with and without virtual hands and comparing two manipulation tasks. The double-handed task was possible in the real world but nearly impossible in the VE, leading to changed behavior. The single-handed task showed more errors in the VE but few behavioral differences. Users encountered more errors in the CAVE condition without the virtual hand than with it, and few errors in the real world. Visual feedback caused many usability problems in both tasks. The implications for VE usability and virtual prototyping are discussed.

Collaboration between urban planners, government officers and other stake-holders is a key task in the urban planning procedure. This paper presents a VR-centred workspace prototype for supporting collaborative urban planning. This workspace comprises a variety of technologies such as semi-immersive stereo display, table-top display, mobile devices and an optical tracking system. A system framework for VR-centred workspace integrates a user interaction layer along with service and data management capabilities. This open-structured framework can support various visualisation and simulation modules and facilitates collaboration. We have implemented this prototype and some test scenarios have been examined with user groups.

This paper presents our creation and evaluation of multi-modal interface for a virtual assembly environment. It involves implementing an assembly simulation environment with multi-sensory feedback (visual and auditory), and evaluating the effects of multi-modal feedback on assembly task performance. This virtual environment experimental platform brought together complex technologies such as constraint-based assembly simulation, optical motion tracking technology, and real-time 3D sound generation technology around a virtual reality workbench and a common software platform. A peg-in-a-hole and a Sener electronic box assembly tasks have been used as the task cases to perform human factor experiments, using sixteen subjects. Both objective performance data (task completion time, and human performance error rates) and subjective opinions (questionnaires) have been gathered from this experiment.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to stereo correspondence based on the optimization of a continuous disparity surface defined parametrically using radial basis functions. Principal advantages over other methods include the use of constrained nonlinear programming to perform regularization as a hierarchical multiobjective optimization which differs from the standard weighted sum approach, so that regularization becomes more consistent with the notion of Pareto optimality. Furthermore, the optimization algorithm is capable of handling arbitrary constraints on the sought parameters, so that a variety of types of a priori scene information can be incorporated explicitly to the problem definition. To exemplify this we derive a new continuous unary formulation of the disparity gradient limit constraint and propose other types of potential constraints for a priori knowledge. Furthermore, the optimization employs a smoothness oriented regularization operator to preserve surface discontinuities, a flexible block decomposition approach of the disparity surface to allow parallelization and a correlation-based fitting with heuristics to initialize the parameters and avoid local optima effectively. Experiments with standard stereo imagery show that the method handles adequately the imposed constraints and produces surfaces with accurate level of elevation detail.

This paper outlines the development of a virtual environment for constraint based assembly and maintenance task simulation and analysis of large scale mechanical products. It is important that allowance is made for maintenance activities during a products design phase to help reduce the lifetime operating costs of such large scale mechanical products. Unfortunately, current CAE systems do not support such assessment capabilities, with these issues typically being addressed using expensive and time consuming physical prototypes. The design and implementation of an immersive virtual prototyping environment for supporting the assessment of assemblability and maintainability of large scale mechanical products, along with its use as a maintenance training tool will be outlined. Procedures and environments for realistic component assembly, constraint recognition, automatic disassembly sequence generation, and maintenance review and training are presented. The simulation of maintenance operations allows for maintenance to be addressed early in the design stages. This reduces unforeseen problems creeping into the design as it progresses through its life cycle, consequently saving both time and money while improving product quality.

This work presents the design and implementation of an interactive free-form 3D sketching paradigm to support creative designs. This work builds on advances in a large number of related technologies such as multi-screen displays, constraint-based assembly modelling, deformable modelling and state-of-the-art multi-sensory interfaces. This work presents the current design and implementation features of the proposed design paradigm.

The paper evaluates the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) technology at presenting architectural design during the client design review stages of a construction project. A live project from UK House Building Sector was adopted for the evaluation. The work identified a suitable case study, created a 3D model, formulated a presentation strategy for the design review of the architectural design and conducted a qualitative/quantitative evaluation of the VR technology. The results show that VR technology is highly effective as a tool for presenting architectural design, appropriately conveying the spatial dimensions, contextual information and realism of the architectural design to the clients.

This paper presents an optimisation application to support the construction site planning task by finding efficient paths between two site locations based on a combination of safety, transportation cost, and visibility criteria. These criteria can be combined or individually optimised by mathematical search algorithms, namely Dijkstra and A*, in order to present site planners with the safest path, the shortest distance path, the most visible path, and the paths that reflect a combination of low risks, short distance, and high visibility measures between two site locations. This paper identifies the need for the use of simulation for site layout analysis, in particular, it investigates the potential application of mathematical optimisation techniques for the selection of site paths.

This paper presents the design of a simulation environment for the modelling, visualisation and optimisation of construction site layouts. This construction site workspace application aims to support the site planning task by analysing space and risk on the site and generating automated site layouts which satisfy a combination of cost, efficiency and safety criteria. The construction site simulation environment forms part of an EU funded project called DIVERCITY (Distributed Virtual Workspace for enhancing Communication within the Construction Industry). This is concerned with the development of virtual simulation prototypes to support the client briefing, design review, and construction planning stages of the construction process. The site analysis module comprises a safety analysis component, a space analysis component, and an optimisation component. The safety analysis component is a generic model for the graphical and numerical representation of risk/hazard spaces. The space analysis component represents and classifies the various spaces on the construction site according to their relative importance in terms of accessibility and visibility. The optimisation component takes safety and space analysis information, and performs site layout optimisation according to travelling distance minimisation, risk minimisation, and space use maximisation criteria.

Virtual environment technology is now beginning to be recognised as a powerful design tool in industrial sectors such as Manufacturing, Process Engineering, Construction, Automotive and Aerospace industries. It offers the ability to visualise a design from different viewpoints by engineers from different design perspectives providing a powerful design analysis tool for supporting concurrent engineering philosophy. A common weakness of the current commercial virtual environments is the lack of efficient geometric constraint management facilities such as run-time constraint detection and the maintenance of constraint consistencies for supporting accurate part positioning and constrained 3D manipulations. The environments also need to be designed to support the user as they are completing their task. This paper describes the software architecture of a constraint-based virtual environment that supports interactive assembly of component parts, embedded within a task based environment that supports contextual help and allows for the structure of tasks to be easily altered for rapid prototyping.

Abstract This paper presents a novel constraint‐based 3D manipulation approach to interactive constraint‐based solid modelling. This approach employs a constraint recognition process to automatically recognise assembly relationships and geometric constraints between entities from 3D manipulation. A technique referred to as allowable motion is used to achieve accurate 3D positioning of a solid model by automatically constraining its 3D manipulation without menu interaction. A set of virtual design tools, which can be used to construct constraint‐based solid models within a virtual environment, are also supported. These tools have been implemented as functional 3D objects associated with several pre‐defined modelling functions to simulate physical tools such as a drilling tool and T‐square. They can be directly manipulated by the user, and precisely positioned relative to other solid models through the constraint‐based 3D manipulation approach. Their modelling functions can be automatically triggered, depending upon their associated constraints and the user's manipulation manner. A prototype system has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of these techniques for model construction and assembly operations.