From March 5 to 9, 2018, Forum8 hosted the Arcbazar & UC-win/Road Asia Seminar in Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai. The Arcbazar is a crowdsourcing website for architecture design competition and is based in Massachusetts. In this seminar, Mr. Imdat As, the CEO and Founder of Arcbazar, delivered keynote lectures, and we introduced the "Arcbazar Support Service". This service is the collaboration of Arcbazar and the "self simple assessment support website" and the "ProjectVR" by using VR-Cloud®.

In the beginning, Mr. Imdat explained the overview of Arcbazar and how to use it to a total of more than 50 participants in 3 cities. According to him, a problem in the design market worth more than 2.4 billion dollars in the whole world is that clients cannot get so many good designs easily since the designing service itself is expensive and they don't have the resource to seek design solutions from designers outside of their local geography. In the Arcbazar, on the other hand, clients themselves can crowdsource designs from around the world by launching a design competition with specifications and requirements such as the purpose of the project, a timeline, and an award. This method allows clients to obtain more ideas at a reasonable price, Mr. Imdat emphasized. After that, he explained in detail about the design categories in Arcbazar, the proportion of participants by country, and how to launch a competition.

In the latter half of the seminar, we introduced the overview of simple self assessment and the voluntary environmentally-friendly activities publicized and initiated by Japanese Ministry of Environment, and then showed a demonstration of the UC-win/Road Environmental Assessment plug-in and explained its functions intuitively. In Seoul, we received a deep question about the plug-in's ability to evaluate solar refection in UC-win/Road, which indicated the participants' high interest in environmental impact assessment. After a little break, we introduced the new features of UC-win/Road, cooperation with the related devices, and the customized systems. In addition, we showed the Arcbazar website and a demonstration of VR-Cloud® to introduce and elaborate on real world examples of ProjectVR including the Obama Presidential Center competition and the TAKANAWA House competition. In Shanghai, we also did the demo of evacuation analysis and modeling software EXODUS and the server construction for big data since many participants were involved in architecture.

Against a backdrop of the business agreement with Arcbazar made in January 2016, Forum8 is assisting in the popularization of Arcbazar in the Asian market and supporting the actual projects and design competitions. In addition, Arcbazar is planning to implement a new function that allows clients to connect with local designers. We will continue to provide the "Arcbazar Support Service" and host the self simple assessment support website as we improve our VR services linked with Arcbazar.

takanawa-house.pdf