A world where technology is ubiquitous and embedded in our daily lives is becoming increasingly likely. In order to prepare our students to live and work in such a future, we aim to turn Saxion’s Epy Drost building into a living lab environment. This will entail setting up and drafting the proper infrastructure and agreements to collect people’s location and the building’s data (e.g. temperature, humidity) in Epy Drost, and making the data appropriately available to student and research projects within Saxion. In particular, we will also explore ways in which we can improve social cohesion between students and personnel of Epy Drost through gamification strategies that make use people’s location information.
Slowly, but surely, a future where technology is ubiquitous and embedded in our daily lives is becoming more of a reality than a far-fetched dream. Not only are computing systems able to sense our surroundings and obtain data from virtually every device, but they can also analyse the data faster and more efficiently. How we interact with these systems is changing, too, moving towards embodied interaction paradigms where our body, rather than a mouse and keyboard, is the focus of the interaction.
Following this vision, the goal of this project is to transform Saxion’s Epy Drost building into a living lab, where the building’s and people’s data can be used to facilitate or automate certain tasks that are currently difficult/impossible to carry out. For instance, finding available rooms on-demand, allocating resources (energy, space) efficiently, or promoting sustainable healthy working behavior. In doing so, Epy Drost could become a valuable platform and testbed for education and research. Not only will this benefit current students, but it will also bring awareness to new prospective students to the kind of forward-thinking research and education being pursued and offered at Saxion.
"Let's be social"
As we all know, many people walk in and out of the building every day without talking to each other, or even knowing what they are studying or working on. We aim to make everybody just a bit more connected using ambient intelligence. Therefore, one of the topics to be researched within this project is how collected data and the building’s infrastructure could be leveraged to promote sustainable healthy work behavior through the use of playful strategies. More specifically, we will explore how the anonymized coarse location data of people in the Epy Drost building (collected from WIFI routers) could be used to promote social cohesion between students and/or personnel in the Epy Drost building through the use of gamification strategies or building-wide games.
Can we get individuals to meet new people that work/study in the building? Can we persuade people in the building to engage in more social interactions with others? Can we achieve this in a sustainable and reliable manner through gamification? These are some of the questions that we will aim to answer.
Possible deliverables:
- A public “visualization” system for the Epy Drost building. Theme and style, as well as visualization strategies, will be decided based on the gamification possibilities and needs.
- A visualization and control tool, similar to deliverable (1), but developed as a VR application. Through this system, users will be able to control certain devices in the building, such as lighting bulbs (on/off) or speakers (play sounds), depending on which actuators we can acquire and communicate with.
- At least one prototype for a building-wide game designed to promote physical and/or social activity, through which healthy working behavior is promoted and a more enjoyable working environment created.
Duration
This project will run from the beginning of September 2018 until the end of August 2020.
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