• ONL
  • ONL team
  • Biographies
  • Mission statement
  • Job and Internships
• News
  • News Archive
  • Upcoming events
• Project
  • In The Pipeline
  • Under Construction
  • On Hold
  • Realized
  • Competition
  • Masterplanning
  • Exhibition
  • Image Gallery Built Projects
• ONLart
• Publicity
  • Theory
  • Exhibition
  • Book
  • Publication
  • Lecture
  • Workshop
  • Request
• Hyperbody TU Delft

The spaceship the WEB of North-Holland as designed by ONL [Oosterhuis_Lénárd] in Rotterdam entered the world stage at the Floriade World Exhibition in 2002. The WEB of North-Holland has been disassembled and renamed the iWEB and is scheduled to make a soft landing at the Delft University of Technology in front of the Faculty of Architecture in the first quarter of 2006. The iWEB is designed to become a trans-faculty server hosting Protospace, the augmented design studio for Collaborative Design and Engineering in Real Time developed by the Hyperbody Research Group directed by Prof. Ir. Kas Oosterhuis.

Protospace. The group design room in the interior of the iWeb physically is a 360 degrees projection screen around a playing field. The Protospace playground is filled with an array of sensors and tracking devices to establish a fine-grained high-resolution and above all emotional communication between the players [experts and stakeholders] and the design worlds in progress. The communication is processed in a game program, which is naturally played in realtime. The design task can be a building, a detail of a building, a neighbourhood of a city, a bridge, a large infrastructural planning task. It can also be a graphic environment to give shape to an interactive decision procedure. Protospace supports and stimulates collaborative design and engineering in realtime. After one year of experiments Protospace will invite commercial third parties and non-experts to join the design game. After all Protospace is meant to become an instrument to involve experts, public and clients in one and the same complex but fluid design game. In due time Protospace might prove itself to be instrumental for direct democracy.

Protospace is a vehicle for research, education and commercial activities.
Protospace as a server on the Campus of the Delft University of Technology [DUT] can be used for variety of purposes:

A    Research
multi-player interactive designlaboratorium
rapid virtual prototyping [protospacing]
group design/decision room
B    Education
workshops to connect reality to virtual reality
digital workshops
lectures [with dataprojection]
informal weblounge [meeting place for students with expert staff]
C    Commercial purposes
pilotprojects with building partners [project developers, contractors, advisors]
pilotprojects with cities for direct democracy
highly specific research [larger companies]

Swarm Behavior. The Protospace environment is based on the principles of Swarm Behavior. Swarm Behavior is applied to all objects and players in the collaborative design game. Swarm Behavior forms the dynamic basis for all communication between people and objects in the interactive design worlds. Swarm Behavior proves to be very advantageous for the quality and effectivity of the collaborative design task. Managers, architects, urban planners and project developers will all benefit from the improved communication between the designers and with the design objects. Working in Protospace means working in an augmented reality environment, where changes in the design are calculated and evaluated in real time. It allows the players to explore alternatives in their own disciplinary field very quickly, and it immediately informs the other players on the validity of their alternatives.

Interface. The players are given the most natural ways to communicate with the design game: handheld wireless devices, speech recognition, hand movements or simply moving around in the playing field. A step forward in the playing would trigger a pressure pad and bring the player forward in the design environment. The player can use speech to toggle on or off certain aspects of the design worlds like gravity active or inactive, surroundings hidden or revealed, graphic representation with or without icons, abstract or concrete representation of the proposed building volumes.

Rapid Protospacing. Working in the collaborative design environment of Protospace enhances the sensitivity of the players to each others points of view. While designing in real time, the players will open up their sources of knowledge to the others. Protospace is an open source design studio for Rapid Protospacing. Rapid Protospacing means the making of fast and informative prototypes for organizational diagrams, spatial designs, planning schemes and project development concepts. Working in Protospace means augmented insight within a condensed timeframe, and hence more value for money, especially in the conceptual stages of the design.

The Hyperbody Research Group [HRG] at the Faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology is directed by Prof. Ir. Kas Oosterhuis. The aim of the HRG is to study interactivity in architecture and to develop practical applications. Programmable buildings will illustrate the paradigm shift from animation towards realtime behaviour. Hyperbodies are pro-active building bodies acting in a changing environment. The HRG introduces interactivity not only in the process of collaborative design, but also during the use and maintenance of buildings. The HRG looks at all stages of the lifecycle of buildings and at the economical and ecological consequences, focusing on the development of new ideas and practical applications for interactive architecture.

More information at www.protospace.bk.tudelft.nl