الفهرس 
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Abstract
The primary goal of thesis was to present a Methodology for Designing the Architecture of Interactive Virtual Environments using Cinematic Techniques with the help of sensate environments. This was set out by studying the various elements in sensate environments, architectural design, cinematic techniques and space, as well as mediation layer, and exploring their concepts, applications, usage and limitations in order to come up with a framework that would best suit the requirements of architectural design within an interactive virtual environment.
Sensate Environments
Sensate spaces are responsive environments enabled by embedded sensor technologies. A lot of focus has been given on designing innovative materials, embedded sensors and intelligent furnishings capable of capturing data derived from human behaviors and interaction.
Designing the responsive experience with increasingly accessible pre-fabricated sensors and retro-fitted sensate technologies allows building design to flow into the realm of experience and interaction design, blurring the barriers between the computation machine and the sensate environment.
Architecture is based on the modulation of the properties of the spaces around us. It expresses those spaces by representing their boundaries with tangible and visible substance. How spaces, whether physical or virtual, are conveyed to us, depends on our perception. Space perception in turn is based on our internal and external senses. Internally, the kinaesthetic sense and the sense of equilibrium provide stimuli about the relationship of our bodies to the space around us and our movement through it. Externally, the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell deliver data about the boundaries that define spatial cells. The output of our sense organs is then synthesized according to inborn and acquired models.
We have seen that sensate technologies are not only useful in terms of building intelligence and aiding sonic or visual stimulation. While they have given rise to the development of a more ‘knowledgeable’ architecture in creating structures that are responsive to human sensory perception, the possibility for further advancement, especially within the interactive virtual environment is more promising.
The success of interactive virtual environments lies in its level of engagement with its user. The challenge is to steer the user away from seeing from outside the ‘box,’ and pulling them inside in order to actively engage them in a memorable, meaningful and enjoyable virtual experience.
Two research projects have been studied which transform the surrounding real space architecture into a graphical memory device and a video-based storytelling agent, using purposely designed wearable computers. By designing 3D space as a memory city organized around reference landmarks and grouped in functional districts, a tailored information landscape is constructed which helps the wearer build a cognitive map of the information flow on the wearable display. By using real time computer vision techniques for object recognition and location identification it provides a bridge between the real and the virtual inside the augmented reality display of the wearable, and accomplishes architecture’s historical dream to transform itself in narrative.
Cinematic and Architectural Space
Drama adds color to cinematic experience. There are interrelationships between architecture and cinema where cinema gives vision and futuristic vision to architecture; on the other hand architecture gives a sense of territory to cinema.
Dramatically mediated space is a valid and desirable condition for a successful VE implementation because it engages users through a direct and evocative experience of place, rather than confronting them with a representation of uncharacterized space.
Cinematic mediation has the power to complicate the comprehension of virtual space, but can also allow for impossible spaces. Staged events and structured interactive access can signify certain moments of a user experience.
By reviewing various film projects which utilized architectural design within a cinematic virtual realm, we have seen how cinema is capable of infusing a profound sense of realism within the interactive virtual environment.
In the same way we have seen how films are affected by the architecture not only as mere backDROPs to scenes, but more importantly as ‘drama-inducers’ that give life to an otherwise stale cinematic experience.
In describing the cinema experience film theorist Robert Stam draws this conclusion: ‘Film derives from a cinematic situation that encourages feelings of narcissistic withdrawal and dreamy self-indulgence, a regression into primary process conditioned by circumstances similar to those which lie in the illusion of reality in dream.’
Cinematic Techniques
Architecture plays a significant role as a driving mechanistic force for the future of our built world. The exploration of the virtual world and the use of cinematic techniques will allow us to develop new and exciting approaches to design as well as a new type of architecture.
Cinema has greatly influenced architecture into exploring new forms of media, advancing the art through technology and artifice. There are many qualities that exist in cinematography that can be applied to the way we represent architecture as a visual art. Today’s architectural visualizations are a testament to the fact that cinematic dramatizations of form add depth to the visual quality of the images produced.
We are now in an era where technology is considered a necessary tool to the advancement of our way of life. We have learned not only to depend on technology, but we have also found ways to develop it to build and create for the future. Technology is here to support our culture and our way of life, not destroy it. We have become more focused on how we can make it work for us, and have, for the most part, accepted it as a useful tool.
There are now many architectural design studios that make use of cinematic techniques, such as lighting, camera-perspective and sound effects to achieve realistic architectural spaces. In the same way, new technologies originally intended for the use of film are now being used to derive architectural form.
Architecture and film will continue to be enhanced through the sharing of technology and the interdisciplinary nature of their processes. As more designers overlap between industries we will start to notice a distinct shift in the paradigm of architecture and film and will forever be enriched by the results yielded from this unique relationship.
Architectural Framework
Chapter four have demonstrated how the different approaches of technology within the given elements are actually interrelated and can be meshed together in order to come up with our design framework.
This chapter discuss various developers from all over the world applied these techniques and know-how to build a highly interactive 3D environment that is able to effectively balance freedom of interaction and authorial control of given technologies.
The conceptualization of architectural space is undergoing radical innovation. Our relationship to the thinking and making of architecture is directly linked to technologies utilized in the conceptualization, visualization, and fabrication of ideas pertaining to the body, movement, space, and program. These new technologies take their form as digital tools and are used in the representation of ideas as projective realities for human experience. These imagined projections are not limited by the conventional mediums of architectural representation and as such permit a greater perceptual range of experience in a fluid, time based and animate medium. These liquid image fields are cinematographic in nature and are imbued with what Juhani Pallasmaa refers to as qualities of lived space, ‘where memory and dream, fear and desire, value and meaning, fuse with the actual perception.’
Eventually, architect-designers as stagers of human experience can capture and elucidate meaningful experiences through the fluid time based medium embodied in digital stereoscopic space and create an experiential condition within which the architectural design process can originate. Architect-designers thus become perceptual painters of animate experience through a technological medium that permits the sensorial intensity of an experience of movement, color, form, and space.
The tools utilized in the creation of digital virtual environments, specifically those of stereo space and interactivity, may augment the existing design strategy of an architectural project or they may very well stand alone as part of a systematic approach that exists outside of the application of a subjective set of values. In either case, the turn towards employing digital stereoscopic technologies as instruments within a larger conceptual cross-programmed framework is necessary towards manifesting the desire of integrating a physically induced synesthesia with the enabling feature of a metaphoric schema of the body. Both the technological condition and the linguistic condition, one of mutual dependency in the explication of the other, can bring to fore the necessary rift, opening, rupture, displacement, or disconnect in order to create an alienated state of deconstructed habituated perceptions. This space transgresses the boundary conditions between the virtual and real, and shares a likeness to those imagined architectures that are created through an intensified interaction within a metaphorically enabled field of digital tectonics. It is within this fluid dialogic space of encounter, where we become enmeshed within the interference noise or perturbed signals folded into and out of the robust sensorial field of human experience.