1 Exploitations of new and emerging ICT capabilities

The VIRTU@LIS project has engaged state-of-the-art techniques of dynamic and multi-agent modelling, multi-media representations, and information search interfaces, in each of the four component types being designed for the representation of a selected environmental problematique. Although we intended to build, wherever possible, on existing models and interface concepts, and on existing experience within the consortium and elsewhere in the world, there is definitely some experimentation and pushing further of existing concepts. For example:

• The Personal Barometer concept is being experimented by a variety of research and environmental education groups in different pats of the world. For greenhouse gas emissions, for example (1) a website based product has been developed in Canada and (2) PC-based concepts have been implemented in ULYSSES, a recent European Commission funded research project on climate change, citizens and integrated assessment. By working systematically across four environmental domains, we will review the state-of-the-art and will establish robust design concepts that can be rapidly generalised and adapted to different environmental problems and user contexts.
  
• The Scenario Generator concept also already has several prototypes, in attempts in Europe and elsewhere to provide a capacity for a non-expert user to 'drive' existing simulation models so as to explore themselves the outcomes (and uncertainties) of particular individual or societal choices. The ViRTU@LiS developments are distinctive, however, because we intend to start with the picturing of people's everyday situations and build systematically the linkages back to validated 'integrated model' systems so that users can 'locate' themselves within the economic and environmental systems being modelled. Most existing integrated models have been developed in a relatively "classical" way at their chosen level of sectoral and environmental aggregation. So the reframing of them through a lifestyle-based user interface, is innovative, and constitutes new development work for our project. For each of the four environmental domains, VIRTU@LIS has chosen models with relatively 'generic' concepts ; these has - but not necessarily - included models developed by the partners themselves.
  
• Multi-agent simulation techniques are used as a method for allowing a user to explore consequences of different individual behaviours when aggregated up on economic and ecological scales, and in distinct institutional/governance contexts. Quite a number of multi-agent models exist for environmental problems such as common property resources - e.g., forest exploitation, fisheries exploitation, surface and underground water use and management - and a few for climate policy. Few of these models are yet made "intuitive" to non-scientific users, nor usually have they been designed to let users identify their own 'role' as an agent within the model. Our project has created scientifically validated multi-agent models, or adapt existing ones, in order to (1) bring an individual "into" the model world and (2) permit a truly interactive environment with the possibility of a multi-user "game" unfolding in real time.
  
• The Virtual Visit concept is a deliberate exploitation of current, and anticipated, technological capabilities for dynamic interactive multi-media interfaces. Fundamentally, the Virtual Visit refers to a virtual reality that "frames" the Personal Barometer, Scenario Generator and Multi-Agent Game components for a chosen environmental domain.
  
• For the creation of the learning environments, the consortium has experimented with techniques now called Augmented Reality, which is state-of-the art for 3-D visualisation and modelling.
  
• In addition, within any ICT Virtual Visit learning environment, there can be located Search Engines, Thesaurus Browsers and 'Virtual Library' capacities adapted to the environmental issues. An example of an intuitive Virtual Library concept is the use of structured search capacities to generate an ordering of 'titles' in a 3-D visualisation like a multi-shelf, multi-storey library, where the items most closely matching the search are closest to the observer and in brightness. For the ViRTU@LiS implementations, bookshelves might be replaced by … fish laid out in an open marketplace, or ears of corn in fields, or… or …

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