ROBOAT VR

Project realized at the MIT Senseable City Lab with Louis Charron, 2019

Roboat is a 5 year research project and collaboration between the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In developing the world's first fleet of autonomous floating vessels for the city of Amsterdam, it investigates the potential of self-driving technology to change our cities and their waterways. Similar to autonomous cars, the Roboat will need to learn how to interact with people.

Virtual Reality can help to discover how people react to new technologies that are still being developed and investigate how citizens will interact with the technology. A one day workshop was held for researchers at the Senseable City Lab to prototype and ideate possible use cases for Roboat. The workshop used a human centred design toolkit, called Tiles IoT Toolkit, to develop novel user cases. The researchers then translated these use cases into a Virtual Reality environment where they could immediately prototype and discover how to improve their ideas. To learn more about immersive ideation process click here.