Convergence in mixed reality-virtuality environments : facilitating natural user behavior

This thesis addresses the subject of converging real and virtual environments to a combined entity that can facilitate physiologically complying interfaces for the purpose of training. Based on the mobility and physiological demands of dismounted soldiers, the base assumption is that greater immersion means better learning and potentially higher training transfer. As the user can interface with the system in a natural way, more focus and energy can be used for training rather than for control itself. Identified requirements on a simulator relating to physical and psychological user aspects are support for unobtrusive and wireless use, high field of view, high performance tracking, use of authentic tools, ability to see other trainees, unrestricted movement and physical feedback. Using only commercially available systems would be prohibitively expensive whilst not providing a solution that would be fully optimized for the target group for this simulator. For this reason, most of the systems that compose the simulator are custom made to facilitate physiological human aspects as well as to bring down costs. With the use of chroma keying, a cylindrical simulator room and parallax corrected high field of view video see-though head mounted displays, the real and virtual reality are mixed. This facilitates use of real tool as well as layering and manipulation of real and virtual objects. Furthermore, a novel omnidirectional floor and thereto interface scheme is developed to allow limitless physical walking to be used for virtual translation. A physically confined real space is thereby transformed into an infinite converged environment. The omnidirectional floor regulation algorithm can also provide physical feedback through adjustment of the velocity in order to synchronize virtual obstacles with the surrounding simulator walls. As an alternative simulator target use, an omnidirectional robotic platform has been developed that can match the user movements. This can be util