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Item Recreational Motion Simulation: A New Frontier for Virtual Worlds Research(The Eurographics Association, 2021) Williams, Benjamin; Headleand, Christopher J.; Xu, Kai and Turner, MartinMotion simulation is a developing field which continues to grow with the recent incline in commercial virtual reality. Whilst the majority of motion simulation research focuses on flight simulation and training, its utility in recreational settings is often overlooked. Despite this lack of research, the use of motion simulators for recreational purposes spans decades, and is still today one of the most popular applications of motion simulator devices. Furthermore, with the recent development of low-cost motion simulation platforms, consumers have begun to use these devices in the home. Research regarding motion simulation and its effects in recreational experiences is needed now more than ever, and in this position paper we outline several reasons for its importance.Item Study of the Influence of User Characteristics on the Virtual Reality Presence(The Eurographics Association, 2018) Mayor, Jesús; Sánchez, Alberto; Raya, Laura; García-Fernández, Ignacio and Ureña, CarlosIn recent years, virtual reality has grown a lot in different areas of application, including ludic, social and research, being used by a large and growing number of users with different profiles. Presence is one of the most distinctive and important features of a virtual reality experience. The aim of this article is to study the most suitable areas of application for users and to analyze the influence of different characteristics of the user's profile in the perceived presence. We have tested the interest applications indicated by 159 subjects and we have designed an immersive virtual reality experience, testing the behavior and performance of 48 users. The results obtained show that gender can influence the perceptual sensation of presence in these types of virtual environments.Item A Virtual Character Posing System based on Reconfigurable Tangible User Interfaces and Immersive Virtual Reality(The Eurographics Association, 2018) Cannavò, A.; Lamberti, F.; Livesu, Marco and Pintore, Gianni and Signoroni, AlbertoComputer animation and, particularly, virtual character animation, are very time consuming and skill-intensive tasks, which require animators to work with sophisticated user interfaces. Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) already proved to be capable of making character animation more intuitive, and possibly more efficient, by leveraging the affordances provided by physical props that mimic the structure of virtual counterparts. The main downside of existing TUI-based animation solutions is the reduced accuracy, which is due partly to the use of mechanical parts, partly to the fact that, despite the adoption of a 3D input, users still have to work with a 2D output (usually represented by one or more views displayed on a screen). However, output methods that are natively 3D, e.g., based on virtual reality (VR), have been already exploited in different ways within computer animation scenarios. By moving from the above considerations and by building upon an existing work, this paper proposes a VR-based character animation system that combines the advantages of TUIs with the improved spatial awareness, enhanced visualization and better control on the observation point in the virtual space ensured by immersive VR. Results of a user study with both skilled and unskilled users showed a marked preference for the devised system, which was judged as more intuitive than that in the reference work, and allowed users to pose a virtual character in a lower time and with a higher accuracy.Item An Approach to the Decomposition of Solids with Voids via Morse Theory(The Eurographics Association, 2023) Pareja-Corcho, Juan; Montoya-Zapata, Diego; Moreno, Aitor; Cadavid, Carlos; Posada, Jorge; Arenas-Tobon, Ketzare; Ruiz-Salguero, Oscar; Banterle, Francesco; Caggianese, Giuseppe; Capece, Nicola; Erra, Ugo; Lupinetti, Katia; Manfredi, GildaThe decomposition of solids is a problem of interest in areas of engineering such as feature recognition or manufacturing planning. The problem can be stated as finding a set of smaller and simpler pieces that glued together amount to the initial solid. This decomposition can be guided by geometrical or topological criteria and be applied to either surfaces or solids (embedded manifolds). Most topological decompositions rely on Morse theory to identify changes in the topology of a manifold. A Morse function f is defined on the manifold and the manifold's topology is studied by studying the behaviour of the critical points of f . A popular structure used to encode this behaviour is the Reeb graph. Reeb graph-based decompositions have proven to work well for surfaces and for solids without inner voids, but fail to consider solids with inner voids. In this work we present a methodology based on the handle-decomposition of a manifold that can encode changes in the topology of solids both with and without inner voids. Our methodology uses the Boundary Representation of the solid and a shape similarity criteria to identify changes in the topology of both the outer and inner boundary(ies) of the solid. Our methodology is defined for Morse functions that produce parallel planar level sets and we do not consider the case of annidated solids (i.e. solids within other solids). We present an algorithm to implement our methodology and execute experiments on several datasets. Future work includes the testing of the methodology with functions different to the height function and the speed up of the algorithm's data structure.Item Modelling the Fluid-Boundary Interaction in SPH(The Eurographics Association, 2018) Perea, Juan J.; Cordero, Juan M.; García-Fernández, Ignacio and Ureña, CarlosSmoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a numerical method based on mutually interacting meshfree particles, and has been widely applied to fluid simulation in Computer Graphics. Originally SPH does not define the behaviour of the particle system in the contour, so the different variants of SPH have been solving this deficiency with different techniques. Some of these techniques are based on fictitious forces, specular particles or semi-analytic fields. However, all these proposals present a drawback, that are may introduce additional inaccuracy as a divergent behaviour of the particle dynamics or an artificial separation between the fluid limits and the contour. To solve these limitations at this paper presents a new technique based on contour particles that are used during simulation to model the interaction with the fluid. The use of contour particles had already been used in other works to construct the contour like a particle layer. That solution presents problems especially when increasing the complexity of the contour shape. In addition, unlike other techniques, this paper presents an additional advantage, the possibility of obtaining all the dynamic magnitudes for improving efficiency and versatility.Item Extracting Ordered Iso-Geodesic Points on the Mesh(The Eurographics Association, 2020) Tortorici, Claudio; Werghi, Naoufel; Berretti, Stefano; Biasotti, Silvia and Pintus, Ruggero and Berretti, StefanoThe mesh manifold is one of the most used modalities for representing 3D objects. Although it provides a fully connected not oriented structure, it has some drawback when compared to the grid of pixels of a still image. Indeed, mesh manifolds do not hold any order information, neither locally nor globally, which makes some operation computationally expensive or even impossible. To unleash its potential and to benefit from its capability of representing the 3D information, further advancements have to be made in order to allow basic operations (i.e., convolution) and effective descriptor extraction. In this paper, we present our preliminary study on a new approach to extract Iso-Geodesic points on a mesh manifold. The approach can be applied in various applications, from feature extraction, to convolution operation and mesh reconstruction. It also revealed to be robust to variations of mesh surface and tessellation, providing an effective geodesic distance approximation.Item Yocto/GL: A Data-Oriented Library For Physically-Based Graphics(The Eurographics Association, 2019) Pellacini, Fabio; Nazzaro, Giacomo; Carra, Edoardo; Agus, Marco and Corsini, Massimiliano and Pintus, RuggeroIn this paper we present Yocto/GL, a software library for computer graphics research and education. The library is written in C++ and targets execution on the CPU, with support for basic math, geometry and imaging utilities, path tracing and file IO. What distinguishes Yocto/GL from other similar projects is its minimalistic design and data-oriented programming style, which makes the library readable, extendible, and efficient. We developed Yocto/GL to meet our need, as a research group, of a simple and reliable codebase that lets us experiment with ease on research projects of various kind. After many iterations carried out over a few years, we settled on a design that we find effective for our purposes. In the hope of making our efforts valuable for the community, we share our experience in the development and make the library publicly available.Item Cylindrical Transform Slicing of Revolute Parts with Overhangs for Laser Metal Deposition(The Eurographics Association, 2022) Montoya-Zapata, Diego; Moreno, Aitor; Ortiz, Igor; Ruiz-Salguero, Oscar; Posada, Jorge; Posada, Jorge; Serrano, AnaIn the context of Laser Metal Deposition (LMD), temporary support structures are needed to manufacture overhanging features. In order to limit the need for supports, multi-axis machines intervene in the deposition by sequentially repositioning the part. Under multi-axis rotations and translations, slicing and toolpath generation represent significant challenges. Slicing has been partially addressed by authors in multi-axis LMD. However, tool-path generation in multi-axis LMD is rarely touched. One of the reasons is that the required slices for LMD may be strongly non-developable. This fact produces a significant mismatch between the tool-path speeds and other parameters in Parametric space vs. actual Euclidean space. For the particular case of developable slices present in workpieces with cylindrical kernel and overhanging neighborhoods, this manuscript presents a methodology for LMD tool path generation. Our algorithm takes advantage of existing cylindrical iso-radial slicing by generating a path in the (?, z) parameter space and isometrically translating it into the R3 Euclidean space. The presented approach is advantageous because it allows the path-planning of complex structures by using the methods for conventional 2.5-axis AM. Our computer experiments show that the presented approach can be effectively used in manufacturing industrial/mechanical pieces (e.g., spur gears). Future work includes the generation of the machine g-code for actual LMD equipment.Item An Interactive Tuning Method for Generator Networks Trained by GAN(The Eurographics Association, 2022) Zhou, Mengyuan; Yamaguchi, Yasushi; Cabiddu, Daniela; Schneider, Teseo; Allegra, Dario; Catalano, Chiara Eva; Cherchi, Gianmarco; Scateni, RiccardoThe recent studies on GAN achieved impressive results in image synthesis. However, they are still not so perfect that output images may contain unnatural regions. We propose a tuning method for generator networks trained by GAN to improve their results by interactively removing unexpected objects and textures or changing the object colors. Our method could find and ablate those units in the generator networks that are highly related to the specific regions or their colors. Compared to the related studies, our proposed method can tune pre-trained generator networks without relying on any additional information like segmentation-based networks. We built the interactive system based on our method, capable of tuning the generator networks to make the resulting images as expected. The experiments show that our method could remove only unexpected objects and textures. It could change the selected area color as well. The method also gives us some hints to discuss the properties of generator networks which layers and units are associated with objects, textures, or colors.Item Recognising Specific Foods in MRI Scans Using CNN and Visualisation(The Eurographics Association, 2020) Gardner, Joshua; Al-Maliki, Shatha; Lutton, Évelyne; Boué, François; Vidal, Franck; Ritsos, Panagiotis D. and Xu, KaiThis work is part of an experimental project aiming at understanding the kinetics of human gastric emptying. For this purpose magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images of the stomach of healthy volunteers have been acquired using a state-of-art scanner with an adapted protocol. The challenge is to follow the stomach content (food) in the data. Frozen garden peas and petits pois have been chosen as experimental proof-of-concept as their shapes are well defined and are not altered in the early stages of digestion. The food recognition is performed as a binary classification implemented using a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Input hyperparameters, here image size and number of epochs, were exhaustively evaluated to identify the combination of parameters that produces the best classification. The results have been analysed using interactive visualisation. We prove in this paper that advances in computer vision and machine learning can be deployed to automatically label the content of the stomach even when the amount of training data is low and the data imbalanced. Interactive visualisation helps identify the most effective combinations of hyperparameters to maximise accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score, leaving the end-user evaluate the possible trade-off between these metrics. Food recognition in MRI scans through neural network produced an accuracy of 0.97, precision of 0.91, recall of 0.86 and F1 score of 0.89, all close to 1.