V4Design developed a platform that provides the ability to leverage existing visual and textual content from content providers and freely available web resources. Towards this direction, several data collection mechanisms (e.g. crawling, search) have been implemented to accommodate for different types of sources. The innovative tools that compose the V4Design platform allow architects, game developers and designers to reuse and re-purpose existing heterogeneous multimedia content, inspiring and eventually significantly reinforcing the design process.
The V4Design platform includes two authoring tools, one for architects and one authoring tool for virtual-reality game designers. The architecture authoring tool is based on Rhino 3D, and works as a complete editor for architecture applications. Similarly, the game tool is developed on top of Unity, and allows users to create virtual environments, using the assets generated by the V4Design services.
To develop the tools of V4Design, we used some innovative methods in the existing technologies. Specifically, V4Design multimodal components information used the W3C recommendation Web Annotation Data Model to promote interoperability and reusability. Moreover, V4Design Crawler is a fully-fledged solution that is implemented to support all the required operations for collecting content from web and social media in a single module. Lastly, the main innovation aspect of the Architecture Authoring tool (consisting of the V4D4Rhino plugin and the Compute server) rests on its ability to integrate innovative services from other partners to add more value to the Rhino users, services such as 3D reconstruction and BIM extraction, among others.
Therefore, all these used technologies contributed to achieve the following impacts: (a) greatly enriches and diversifies the architecture and video game markets by providing an innovative SoA solution that facilitates access and re-use of previously unavailable digital content (b) helps to reduce the time required to search for relevant content and use it in their work (c) it combines leading edge ICT technologies for 3D-model extraction, coupled with BIM, and the semi-automatic localisation of buildings, objects and various architectural elements from visual content (e.g. movies, documentaries).
The main impact of the V4Design innovations is towards 3D content designers, architects and professional/amateur game developers. Even though advanced platforms like V4Design are less labour intensive, they generate a lot of employment in fields like architecture, movies, gaming and employ people right from designers, architects, movie editors, gamer developers, software engineers to marketeers. The industries targeted by V4Design are seeing a heavy surge in investments from private enterprises and foreign companies especially in the gaming industry, which further brings employment and growth across Europe. Tools such as V4Design bring creativity, innovation, and employment with its development and these are the innovations that are required to fuel the economy.
