Objectives of the school

Virtual and Physical Prototyping is recognized as a practice useful for the reduction of the development costs of industrial products. Such prototypes are anticipation of a product shape-function that does not exist in reality yet, but that appears and behaves as it were real. Therefore, a Virtual and Physical Prototype simulates how a product looks like and how it works, and can be used to test how users use and interact with it, etc.
Virtual and Physical Prototypes can be multisensory and multimodal. Research outcomes of recent years and the enormous improvements in price and performances in ICT technology have enabled the realization of complex prototypes integrating real-time, immersive, mixed or augmented, visual interaction, as well as haptic, sonic and olfactory interaction.

Creating effective Virtual Prototypes requires interdisciplinary skills, which go beyond engineering and IT disciplines, and include crucial disciplines related to human aspects such as human factors, human perception, etc.

The aim of the Summer School is to offer Ph.D. students the possibility to gain knowledge and make a practical experience on those topics related to Virtual and Physical Prototyping.
Specifically, the 8th edition of the school will focus on the following topics:

- Multisensory Interaction Design, User Experience Design
- Haptic, sound and olfactory technologies and related interaction modalities

A case study will be proposed by Adidas company and consists in a backpack. The students will learn how to use virtual and physical prototyping methods and technologies for transforming a conventional backpack into an interactive one, offering users the possibility to make new experiences when using the backpack.

How to participate

The 8th edition of the Summer School will take place at Polifactory, Durando campus of Politecnico di Milano on July 10-14 2017.

The maximum number of students admitted to the VP Summer School is 30.

The Ph.D. students will be recognized 5 credits (CFU).

The participation of the students of the Ph.D. Doctorate School of the Politecnico di Milano is free of charge. Participation is by registration sent via e-mail to the local organizer together with a presentation letter, Francesco Ferrise by June 30th.


See previous editions here:

1st Summer School
2nd Summer School
3rd Summer School
4th Summer School
5th Summer School
6th Summer School
7th Summer School