The Assignment
Context
The Lectorate ‘High Tech Embedded Software’ from Fontys HBO ICT researches methods and techniques to enhance software development for smart high-tech embedded systems.
The project concerned the Digital Twin Academy, City Digital Twin specifically, which conducts case studies on digital twins to enrich open data of air quality with public area info and other data sources to define useful eco-score.
Problem
One of the biggest problems with the most wicked city problems like air pollution or biodiversity loss is that people are not aware of their seriousness, which is why the City Digital Twin project wants to make this more tangible.
Goals
The goal of this project was to make the seriousness of the most wicked city problems more tangible. The desired product was an application that uses Augmented Reality to visualize location-based data in such a way that it is understandable to the people at that location.
It is possible to make Digital Twins of cities for specific contexts and goals. One of these is informative visualizations, which is what our project consists of. This project should both work towards its goal of making an informative visualization of city problems, as well as be useful for future City Digital Twin projects.
Research Questions
For this project, the main research question is: “How can the severity of city problems in Eindhoven be visualized using AR in a way that is accessible and understandable to the users?”
The key questions that are the foundation of this project in answering the main question are the following:
- Which city problems are being monitored in Eindhoven?
- What impact do these city problems make?
- How can this problem be visualized?
- What is the best Augmented Reality technique for this application?
- What data is available regarding this problem?
- How can AI be used to make predictions using this data?
- What devices will the AR application be available on?
- How can it be verified whether users understand the severity of the city problem?
Approach
The approach for this project was a combination of Agile and Waterfall. At the start, the research would be done using a waterfall approach, and once the iterative stage in the project was reached this waterfall approach would be combined with an Agile approach. It would consist of a total of five phases:
Phase 1 - Problem Definition
Phase 2 - Research and Experiment
Phase 3 - Component Development
Phase 4 - Combined Development
Phase 5 - Finalize