VE: Eurographics Workshop on Virtual Environments - Short Papers

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STORM: a Generic Interaction and Behavioral Model for 3D Objects and Humanoids in a Virtual Environment
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Mollet, Nicolas; Gerbaud, Stéfanie; Arnaldi, Bruno; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
We present in this paper research focused on interaction and behavior specification for 3D objects in general, including humanoids. This research is conducted in the context of a collaboration with Nexter-Group (a French military manufacturer) in order to introduce Virtual Reality (VR) in maintenance training. The use of VR environments for training is strongly stimulated by important needs of training on sensitive equipment, sometimes fragile, unavailable, costly or dangerous. Nevertheless, for the development of such applications, the re-use of existing developments is a major issue. Our research is focused on models that have been designed to achieve this reusability and standardization for the efficient development of new virtual environments. In particular, we defined a new generic model named STORM, used to describe reusable behaviors for 3D objects in general, including humanoids, and reusable interactions between those objects.
Using Proprioception as a Cue towards Effective Spatial Input in VR: a Framework for an Experimental Study
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Veit, Manuel; Capobianco, Antonio; Bechmann, Dominique; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
We developed a free form deformation application for an immersive environment in which users can interact freely by using datagloves. In this paper, we present an experimental protocol designed to investigate the contribution of proprioception and bimanual interaction on spatial input tasks in the context of our modeling application.
Advanced Inertial-Optical Tracking System for Wide Area Mixed and Augmented Reality Systems
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Wormell, Dean; Foxlin, Eric; Katzman, Patricia; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
InterSense is introducing a vastly improved version of its wide-area tracking inertial-optical tracking system (IS-1200 VisTracker). The new VisTracker technology has several enhancements including device miniaturization, an embedded image processor, improved optics, a higher resolution imaging CMOS monochrome sensor, power reduction, and ruggedization. A review of the IS-1200 architecture and new components is discussed. Examples of the IS-1200 initial deployment are given for AR applications.
Requirements for Industrial Augmented Reality Tracking Systems - an Evaluation
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Pentenrieder, Katharina; Meier, Peter; Doil, Fabian; Nölle, Stefan; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
Industrial environments often have special requirements for AR systems and features are prioritized different than in scientific applications. The Volkswagen group (VW) wants to apply an AR-guided stud welding system for smallseries and prototype production. To find the optimal tracking system for this application, an evaluation of different tracking systems was undertaken, whose results and consequences are outlined here.
A Quantitative Assessment of the Impact on Spatial Understanding of Exploring a Complex Immersive Virtual Environment using Augmented Real Walking versus Flying
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Interrante, Victoria; O'Rourke, Eleanor; Gray, Leanne; Anderson, Lee; Ries, Brian; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
When an immersive virtual environment spans an area that is larger than the available physical space for real walking, one may use an augmented walking method such as Seven League Boots to enable participants to explore the space while gaining proprioceptive feedback that is similar to what they would experience with normal walking. In this paper, we present the results of a preliminary experiment in which we seek to quantitatively assess the extent to which participants are able to make more accurate spatial judgments about the locations of previously-seen targets in a complicated virtual city environment, experienced using a head-mounted display, after traveling to them using augmented real walking ( boots ) versus virtual walking enabled by a button press on a hand-held wand. In a series of trials, we ask participants to follow paths of increasing complexity from a home base to different hidden targets in the environment and back. At each endpoint, with the path markings turned off, we ask participants to point, through the intervening alleyway walls, to the location they believe they started from. Participants are able to make real turns with their bodies in both locomotion conditions, however they are able to make real forward movement only under the augmented walking condition. Each participant completes eight trials under each locomotion condition, with the target locations and the order of experiencing each method counterbalanced between participants. In data collected from six participants so far, we are finding that the median angle error is significantly greater, overall, in the wand locomotion condition than in the boots locomotion condition, and that the errors tend to increase, overall, as the path complexity increases (from two segments to four segments) in the wand locomotion condition but not in the boots locomotion condition.
Improved 3D Interactive Devices for Passive and Active Stereo Virtual Environments
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Wormell, Dean; Foxlin, Eric; Katzman, Patricia; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
This paper introduces a new set of tracking devices for 3D virtual environment interaction and reviews enhancements including device miniaturization, power reduction, and ruggedization. The goal of these improvements was to reduce size and weight of head-worn tracking devices for use with passive-stereo immersive display systems, whose polarized glasses are much smaller than LCD shutter glasses and therefore require smaller tracking sensors. The major changes include a 2-fold reduction in the size and weight of the wearable sensor devices and improvement of wireless tracking capability and battery life.
Coordinate System Transformations for Imitation of Goal-Directed Trajectories in Virtual Humans
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Amor, Heni Ben; Weber, Matthias; Heumer, Guido; Jung, Bernhard; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
The goal of this work is to record human hand trajectories during goal-oriented reaching behaviors in immersive VR for later imitation by a virtual human. It is desirable that the used trajectory representation generalizes over different positions and orientations of the target object. To this end, this work investigates trajectory representations in two neurophysiologically inspired coordinate systems. Results show that natural looking movement can be preserved as real motion capture data is used as a basis for these calculations.
Monocular Head Tracking for Desktop Virtual Environments
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Korkalo, Otto; Takala, Tapio; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
We present an approach to head tracking to be applied in desktop virtual environments. The system is able to estimate both the position and orientation of the user s head using only monocular view. In our approach, the edge of the front face of shutter or polarization glasses is detected, and the pose is estimated using algorithm based on planar homographies. The solution is based on marker configuration made up from lines, whose intersection points are used to estimate the pose. Instead of using planar square markers common in augmented reality applications, we take the advantage of the natural shape of the virtual reality glasses. In this paper, we describe our system set-up and detail the steps to implement the algorithm. In addition, we compare the proposed approach to well-known solution. The system performs real-time in a standard laptop computer.
An Approach to the Evaluation of Ownership Management Techniques in Collaborative Virtual Environments
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Garcia, Arturo; Molina, José P.; Steed, Anthony; Martínez, Diego; González, Pascual; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
Several ownership management techniques have been proposed for maintaining consistency, one of the main factors in Collaborative Virtual Environments. However, few studies address the effect that network latency has on these mechanisms, as it can influence both the development of the tasks by users and their view of the system. This paper describes an experiment that tackles this issue, and shows how users get frustrated and tend to think that the system is not reliable as the amount of latency increases.
vrLib: A Designer Oriented Interaction and 3D User Interface Library
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Sternberger, Ludovic; Brandel, Sylvain; Bechmann, Dominique; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
In this paper we propose vrLib, a toolkit which aims to make 3D graphical user interface and interaction very easy to design in virtual environments. This project provides well known and new interaction techniques and ready to use widgets, which are totally hardware independent. The main contribution allows to elaborate complex 3D user interfaces in same way it is done in 2D. This toolkit provides adaptive interaction, which means interaction techniques can automatically adapt their behavior to 2D and 3D widgets. This short paper describes the vrLib architecture for construction of 3D interactive applications.
Real-time Reconstruction of PseudoWide-angle Images with an Approximating Depth Model
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Honda, Kenji; Hashimoto, Naoki; Sato, Makoto; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
Recently, interactive contents with high quality images are widely used in various areas. One of the ways that makes the contents more realistic is displaying them as covering viewer's field-of-view. However, the view-angle of the existent contents are not enough for covering the large display surfaces because they are based on household TV monitors whose target view-angle is about 30 degrees. In order to achieve realistic feeling of being in that content, we have to enlarge the view-angle of these images in real-time. So, in this research, we propose a technique that reconstructs wide view-angle images by extracting peripheral images from time-series image frames in realtime. A simple 3-D model approximating target scenes contributes to, achieving real-time processing and reduction of uncomfortable feeling with distortions of the reconstructed peripheral images. We apply this method to an actual game content, and consider the quality of image and its processing time. By using that implementation, we perform objective and subjective evaluations, and confirm the effectiveness for enhancing the fun of the content itself.
Augmentation of Visualisation Using Sonification: A Case Study in Computational Fluid Dynamics
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Kazakevich, Maryia; Boulanger, Pierre; Bischof, Walter F.; Garcia, M.; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
Advances in computer processing power and networking over the past few years have brought significant changes to the modeling and simulation of complex phenomena. Problems that formerly could only be tackled in batch mode, with their results being visualized afterwards, can now be monitored using graphical means while in progress. In certain cases, it is even possible to alter parameters of the computation while it is running, depending on what the scientist perceives in the current visual output. This ability to monitor and change parameters of the computational process at any time and from anywhere is called computational steering. Combining this capability with advanced multi-modal tools to explore the data produced by these systems are key to our approach. We present an advanced multi-modal interface where sonification and 3D visualization are used in a computational steering environment specialized to solve real-time Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) problems. More specifically, this paper describes and experimentally proves how sonification of CFD data can be used to augment 3D visualization.
Rendering on Tiled Displays using Advanced Stream Caching
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Lorenz, Mario; Brunnett, Guido; Heinz, Marcel; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
To render complex scenes on tiled displays efficiently modifications to the Chromium framework have been proposed that lead to significant lower processor and memory load on the client and a very effective utilization of available network bandwidth. To avoid redundant transmissions of identical command sequences that are generated by the application a transparent stream cache can be used that accelerates the multicast communication channel. It can be profiled that applications that do not use display lists or VBO s to control the rendering put a heavy load on the client host because the cache control has to compute a checksum for the identification of repeated command sequences. In this paper we analyse the possibilities to improve the stream caching for unmodified GL applications. As our main result we introduce a new GL extension to control the stream cache with minimally modified applications.
A Unified Multi-Surface, Multi-ResolutionWorkspace with Camera-Based Scanning and Projector-Based Illumination
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Johnson, Tyler; Fuchs, Henry; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
Research in the area of projector- and camera-augmented office environments has demonstrated the use of cameras as desktop scanning devices, shown the benefits of using multiple display devices for focus and context information, and advocated display on multiple surfaces for visualization of multi-dimensional data. In this paper, we describe how the implementation of these ideas can be unified to simplify the creation of a workspace that combines them.
A Single Chip DLP Projector for Stereoscopic Images of High Color Quality and Resolution
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Hopp, Armin; Havemann, Sven; Fellner, Dieter W.; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
We present a novel stereoscopic projection system. It combines all the advantages of modern single-chip DLP technology attractive price, great brightness, high contrast, superior resolution and color quality with those of active stereoscopy: invariance to the orientation of the user and an image separation of nearly 100%. With a refresh rate of 60 Hz per eye (120 Hz in total) our system is flicker-free even for sensitive users. The system permits external projector synchronisation which allows to build up affordable stereoscopic multi-projector systems, e.g., for immersive visualisation.
A Lightweight ID-Based Extension for Marker Tracking Systems
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Flohr, Daniel; Fischer, Jan; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
The estimation of the position and orientation of the digital video camera is a central challenge in video seethrough augmented reality. Many augmented reality applications solve this problem with the help of markerbased methods, which analyze artificial fiducials in the images of the real environment, e.g., using the widespread ARToolKit library. Among the drawbacks of conventional marker tracking is the necessity to manually define marker patterns. Badly chosen patterns have a negative impact on tracking performance. Although improved methods for automatic marker generation have been described, manually controlled marker tracking is still widely used in many applications for practical reasons. In this paper, we describe a lightweight drop-in extension for IDbased marker tracking. Our system makes it possible to automatically generate a large number of tracking fiducials identified by unique numerical IDs. The created marker patterns consists of large monochrome patches, which improves the recognition rate and tracking performance compared to typical manually defined fiducials. Due to the design of our extension, only minimal adaptations are required in order to add ID-based tracking to existing augmented reality software. We discuss experimental results demonstrating the improved pattern recognition and describe an example application.
Interactive Social Displays
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Pfeiffer, Thies; Latoschik, Marc Erich; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
The mediation of social presence is one of the most interesting challenges of modern communication technology. The proposed metaphor of Interactive Social Displays describes new ways of interactions with multi-/crossmodal interfaces prepared for a psychologically augmented communication. A first prototype demonstrates the application of this metaphor in a teleconferencing scenario.
Evaluating the Effects of Haptics on Presence while Traveling in a Desktop Virtual Environment
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Jorissen, Pieter; Vanacken, Lode; Lamotte, Wim; Coninx, Karin; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
Virtual reality applications seek to fully immerse participants into their virtual world experience. The investigation of how stimuli on the different senses influence the users is therefore crucial. As navigation is one of the most ubiquitous tasks in virtual environments, studying the influence of haptics on user presence is a necessity for future applications. This work presents an empirical study on the role of haptics during travel in a desktop virtual environment. Three techniques were compared in respect to task performance, perceived task performance, perceived presence and mental and physical workload. While our results indicate that haptics has a positive influence on participant s perceived presence and performance, his total workload remains constant. Furthermore, we show that these findings apply to both experienced and unexperienced virtual environment users.
Functional Reactive Virtual Reality
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Blom, Kristopher J.; Beckhaus, Steffi; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
In this paper we introduce a VR system extension that focuses on the creation of interactive, dynamic Virtual Environments. The extension uses the recently developed programming concept, Functional Reactive Programming. This paradigm focuses on an explicit and more natural concept of time in the modeling of dynamics, without sacrificing interactivity. We present an implementation that embeds the Functional Reactive Programming concept into a basic Virtual Reality system, VR Juggler.
Gait Parameters while Walking in a Head-mounted Display Virtual Environment and the Real World
(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Mohler, Betty J.; Campos, Jennifer L.; Weyel, Michael B.; Bülthoff, Heinrich H.; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
Full-body motion tracking data was collected for six subjects during free walking. Each participant was asked to walk to a previously seen target under four experimental conditions: eyes closed within the real world, eyes closed wearing a head-mounted display (HMD), eyes open in the real world, and eyes open wearing a HMD. We report three gait parameters for each of these four conditions: stride length, walking velocity, and head-trunk angle. This data reveals that these gait parameters within a HMD virtual environment (VE) are different than those in the real world. A person wearing a HMD and backpack walks slower, and takes a shorter stride length than they do in a comparable real world condition. In addition, head-trunk angle while walking to a target on the ground plane is lowest when walking with eyes open in a HMD VE.

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