Project Immersive Decision Theater

Prof. Dr. Bernd Fröhlich
M.Sc. Tony Zöppig
M.Sc. Ephraim Schott

In today’s fast-paced and interconnected world, making effective decisions in domains such as politics, sustainable development, large-scale infrastructure planning, or crisis response requires a deep understandingof complex systems and their dynamic interdependencies. To make the right decisions, stakeholders must quickly grasp intricate relationships, integrate expert knowledge from remote locations, visualize cascading effects, and simulate potential outcomes. Immersive environments offer a powerful medium for supporting such high-stakes decision-making processes, enabling distributed decision-makers to collaboratively experience, explore, and evaluate complex scenarios through interactive simulations and immersive visual analytics.

In our project “Immersive Decision Theater,” we aim to develop a mixed-reality application where multiple users can explore complex scenarios and gain deeper insights into decision parameters and their potential consequences. We envision this as a space where decision-makers, domain experts, and affected communities can collaboratively plan, communicate, and discuss future strategies and scenarios. The platform will feature interactive representations of underlying system models, immersive visual analytics of available data sources and effective visualizations of simulated outcomes to support informed, data-driven decision-making. A central challenge lies in enabling natural communication and collaboration between collocated and distributed VR users, ensuring mutual understanding and supporting decision processes through immersive simulation.

Finding solutions to complex problems in distributed immersive environments raises several research questions. These include how to spatially organize diverse information sources and corresponding data visualizations within the virtual decision theater, how to ensure coherent and meaningful experiences for both collocated and remote participants and how to enable fluid transitions between different content layers, presentation forms, and user perspectives, e.g. by transitioning between the real and virtual worlds.

To address these challenges, you will learn to design and implement social mixed reality applications using Unity3D and C#. Furthermore, you will explore advanced multi-user interaction concepts by experimenting with world-in-miniatures, mixed-reality transitions, visualizing data in a spatial context and many others. Programming and interaction design will be central components of the project; therefore, we recommend a strong background in VR development with Unity and C#, and/or solid experience in designing user interactions for social immersive environments.

Objectives

• Design and conceptualize a decision theater that supports multiple perspectives on complex scenarios.
• Implement strategies and techniques to interact with and explore the scenario and its underlying data.
• Address potential conflicts between collocated and spatially or temporally distributed users.
• (Optional) Integrate simulation frameworks that react on changes in the virtual model.

Solid software programming / scripting experience (e.g. C#, C++, Python). Experience in Unity is very helpful. Successful completion of the Virtual Reality course is recommended.

The final assessment of your work will be conducted based on the project contributions of every team member, including:

• Quality and innovation of your practical results
• Active participation in the project during and in between weekly meetings
• Intermediate and final project presentations
• Documentation