Search

In the recent years, usage of the third-person perspective (3PP) in virtual training methods has become increasingly viable and despite the growing interest in virtual reality and graphics underlying third-person perspective usage, not many studies have systematically looked at the dynamics and differences between the third and first-person perspectives (1PPs). The current study was designed to quantify the differences between the effects induced by training participants to the third-person and first-person perspectives in a ball catching task. Our results show that for a certain trajectory of the stimulus, the performance of the participants post3PP training is similar to their performance postnormal perspective training. Performance post1PP training varies significantly from both 3PP and the normal perspective.

In this paper, we propose to increase realism and complexity of haptic applications for Virtual Reality and CAD applications. To achieve this goal, we use a Haptic Workstation which allows to acquire the posture and position of both hands, and to apply forces on the fingertips and wrists. We propose techniques to calibrate and improve the comfort of these kinds of devices in order to integrate them into Virtual Environments. However, a two-handed haptic device does not present only advantages. Indeed, It is much more complicated to compute forces on two hand models, than on a single point or fingertip. For this reason, we propose a framework to optimize this computation.

Heading perception of an aircraft becomes uneasy under disturbing spatial disorientation for a single pilot performing the daily tasks inherent to a long term flight. Sleepiness, movements and other activities introduced by vital function necessity reduce the attention and the awareness of the current aircraft situation. This paper presents the development of a system which aims at decreasing the attention needs for maintaining an aircraft’s attitude and take corrective action when the autopilot goes off bound. An embedded system has been integrated in the pilot’s clothing. It sends vibro-tactile feedback to the pilot when his aircraft becomes off balance. The system also dynamically localizes the position of the actuators in order to insure a feedback constant in space independently form the pilot posture and movements. A series of tests have been conducted to validate the interest of this localization by showing a slight improvement in the response time needed to take corrective action. By increasing the pilot’s own feeling about his plane’s orientation, the system provides a complementary tool to improve exhausting long flight conditions.

Degradation of the visual system can lead to a dramatic reduction of mobility by limiting a person to his sense of touch and hearing. This paper presents the development of an obstacle detection system for visually impaired people. While moving in his environment the user is alerted to close obstacles in range. The system we propose detects an obstacle surrounding the user by using a multi-sonar system and sending appropriate vibrotactile feedback. The system aims at increasing the mobility of visually impaired people by offering new sensing abilities.

Expressive facial animation synthesis of human like characters has had many approaches with good results. MPEG-4 standard has functioned as the basis of many of those approaches. In this paper we would like to lay out the knowledge of some of those approaches inside an ontology in order to support the modeling of emotional facial animation in virtual humans (VH). Inside this ontology we will present MPEG-4 facial animation concepts and its relationship with emotion through expression profiles that utilize psychological models of emotions. The ontology allows storing, indexing and retrieving prerecorded synthetic facial animations that can express a given emotion. Also this ontology can be used a refined knowledge base in regards to the emotional facial animation creation. This ontology is made using Web Ontology Language and the results are presented as answered queries. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.

This paper presents a sketching system for 3D organic shapes modeling and animation using virtual reality devices. On the hardware side, it is based on the Haptic Workstation™ which conveys force feedback on the user arms (upper body limbs), and a head mounted display to present the 3D generated images. On the software side, we use implicit surfaces modeling techniques such as metaballs. In fact, designers feel well comfortable with this kind of primitives due to their ability in the organic shapes creation such as virtual humans. The proposed system provides an efficient alternative to produce advanced 3D shapes sketching

International audience; Functional design aims at assisting the designer during all the design process, from specifications to manufacturing, even beyond that. One of the key stages of this process is the translation of functions into shapes. In this article, we first study a pragmatic method used to design moulds of foundry. Then, we introduce a theoretical method whose drawback is to generate a too huge solutions space of shapes to be industrially applied. From this comparison, we propose an intermediate approach, called mixed method. It consists in applying the theoretical method by integrating some expert knowledge of the foundry in order to obtain a reasonably wide solutions space automatically.

We present an interface for navigating digital collections based on a one-dimensional analog control and a data visualization based on old analog radios. Our system takes advantage of inertial control to browse a large data collection in a compelling way, reducing the complexity of similar interfaces present in both desktop-based and portable media players. This vintage radio interface has been used to navigate a digital music collection. We have compared the proposed interface with the current most popular hardware, the iPod. The results of user tests with 24 participants are presented and discussed. The insights gained are encouraging enough to continue the development of one-dimensional analog controls for content discovery and retrieval.

The last ten years have seen an explosion in the diversity of digital-life devices, e.g. music and video players. However, the interaction paradigm to use these devices has remained mostly unchanged. Remote controls are still the most common way to manage a digital-life device. Moreover, the interaction between devices themselves is still very limited and rarely addressed by a remote control interface. We present in this paper a study of tangible drag-and-drop, a remote control interface based on the well-known paradigm coming from the graphical user interface. This interaction technique aims at reducing the gap between the digital and physical worlds, enabling the transfer of digital data from one device to another. To validate such a concept, we present two prototypes, along with user studies and a general discussion about the tangible drag-and-drop technique.

In order to be believable, embodied conversational agents (ECAs) must show expression of emotions in a consistent and natural looking way across modalities. The ECA has to be able to display coordinated signs of emotion during realistic emotional behaviour. Such a capability requires one to study and represent emotions and coordination of modalities during non-basic realistic human behaviour, to define languages for representing such behaviours to be displayed by the ECA, to have access to mono-modal representations such as gesture repositories. This chapter is concerned about coordinating the generation of signs in multiple modalities in such an affective agent. Designers of an affective agent need to know how it should coordinate its facial expression, speech, gestures and other modalities in view of showing emotion. This synchronisation of modalities is a main feature of emotions.

Over the years, different approaches have been explored to build effective learning methods in virtual reality but the design of effective 3D manipulation techniques still remains an important research problem. To this end, it is important to quantify behavioral and brain mechanisms underlying the geometrical mappings of the body with the environment and external objects, both within the virtual environments (VE), the real world and relative to each other. The successful mapping of such interactions entails the study of fundamental components of these interactions, such as the origin of the visuo-spatial perspective (1PP, 3PP) and how they contribute to the user's performance in the virtual environments. Here, we report data using a novel set-up exposing participants - during free navigation - with a scene view from either 3PP or the habitual first-person perspective (1PP).

News aggregators are widely used to read RSS feeds but they require the user to be in front of a screen. While moving, people usually do not have any display, or very small ones. Moreover, they need to perform actions to get access to the news: download a tool, choose to generate audio files from the news, and send them to e.g. an MP3 player. We propose in this paper a system that automatically detects when the user leaves the computer room and directly sends the trans-coded news onto the user Smartphone. All the aggregated news are then transmitted to the user who can listen to them without any action. We present in this paper such a system and the very promising results we obtained after testing it.

In this paper we present a telerehabilitation system aiming to help physiotherapists on the shoulder and elbow treatment. Our system is based on a two-arm haptic force feedback to avoid excessive efforts and discomfort with the spinal column and is remotely controlled by smart phone. The validation of our system, with the help of muscular effort measurements (EMG) and supervised by a physiotherapist, provides very promising results.

Pre-existing researches [Salamin et al. 2006] showed that Third-Person Perspective (3PP) enhances user navigation in 3D virtual environments by reducing proprio-perception issues. Nevertheless, this approach has shown drawbacks related to occlusions and adaptation time. The perspective proposed in this paper - our Improved Third-Person Perspective (i-3PP) - does allow the user to see through his/her body in order to fix 3PP limitations like occlusions. As gamers prefer using 3PP for moving actions and the First-Person Perspective (1PP) for fine operations, we verify if this behavior is extensible to simulations in augmented and virtual reality. Finally we check if the i-3PP would be preferred to the other perspectives for any action.