In this paper we report on an investigation of the effects of a self-avatar's visual similarity to a user's actual appearance, on their perceptions of the avatar in an immersive virtual reality (IVR) experience. We conducted a user study to examine the participant's sense of body ownership, presence and visual realism under three levels of avatar-owner visual similarity: (L1) an avatar reconstructed from real imagery of the participant's appearance, (L2) a cartoon-like virtual avatar created by a 3D artist for each participant, where the avatar shoes and clothing mimic that of the participant, but using a low-fidelity model, and (L3) a cartoon-like virtual avatar with a pre-defined appearance for the shoes and clothing. Surprisingly, the results indicate that the participants generally exhibited the highest sense of body ownership and presence when inhabiting the cartoon-like virtual avatar mimicking the outft of the participant (L2), despite the relatively low participant similarity. We present our experiment and main findings, also, discuss the potential impact of a self-avatar's visual differences on human perceptions in IVR.

The "Internet of Things (IoT)" is one of the most promising emerging technologies today. IoT refers to the concept of, if not all, many everyday objects possessing information processing power and network connectivity from which personal and context based services can be derived collectively [Perera et al, 2014]. Any useful and successful service will require on an effective and usable means for interaction, and Augmented Reality (AR) has been touted as one such ideal method. One difficulty with the proliferation of the AR technology (and associated services) is with the provision of large scale and usable contents. Useful contents and services often require recognition and tracking of a very high number of objects, and as the target objects and respective services increase, so will data redundancy and error.

Abstract With the continued technology innovation in object sensing and human motion tracking, the traditional two‐dimensional video‐based tele‐conference systems are projected to evolve into the three‐dimensional immersive and augmented reality (AR) based on which one can communicate with the teleported remote other as if present, moving and interacting naturally in the same location. One technical hurdle to this vision is the need to resolve the environmental differences and the resulting teleported avatar motion anomaly between the remote and local sites. This paper presents a novel method to first establish a spatial and object‐level match between the remote and local sites and adapts the position and motion of the teleported avatar into the local AR space according to the matched information. This results in a natural looking and spatially correct rendering of the remote user in the local augmented space and a significantly improved tele‐conference experience and communication performance. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, we present a prototype Virtual Welding Simulator, which supports interactive training of welding process by using multimodal interface that can deliver realistic experiences. The goal of this research is to overcome difficult problems by using virtual reality technology in training tasks where welding is treated as a principal manufacturing process. The system design and implementation technical issues are described including real-time simulation and visualization of welding bead, providing realistic experience through 3D multimodal interaction, presenting visual training guides for novice workers, and visual and interactive interface for training assessments. According to the results from an initial user study, the prototype VR based simulator system appears to be helpful for training welding tasks, especially in terms of providing visual training guides and instant training assessment.

In this paper, we present a visualization method of weld beads for a welding training under virtual environments. To represent virtual beads, a bead shape is defined according to the datasets which consist of bead width, height, angle, penetration acquired from real welding operations. A curve equation of bead's sectional shape is mathematical modeled, and a height map is generated according to this numerical equation, which is used for generating the bead's mesh data using its height information. Finally, virtual weld beads are visualized in real-time according to the accurately simulated results from user's input motion.

Mobile computing devices are getting popular as a platform for augmented reality (AR) application, and efficient interaction methods for mobile AR environments are considered necessary. Recently, touch interfaces are getting popular and drawing attention as a future standard interface on mobile computing devices. However, accurate touch interactions are not that easy in mobile AR environments where users tend to move and viewpoints easily get shaky. In this paper, the authors suggest a new interaction method for handheld mobile AR environments, named 'Freeze-Set-Go'. The proposed interaction method lets users to 'freeze' the real world view tentatively, and continue to manipulate virtual entities within the AR scene. According to the user experiment, the proposed method turns out to be helping users to interact with mobile AR environments using touch interfaces in a more accurate and comfortable way.

In this paper, we introduce a method for design evaluation of mobile devices using virtual reality based prototypes. For this, we present technologies for a classification of design parameters and for visualizing mobile devices with high quality 3D data. Also, we describe an implementation method for natural simulation and interaction of product functions.

Visual information has the greatest effect among five senses of human. Therefore, the satisfaction of visual information for representing virtual environments is necessary for good results in information acquisition, virtual training, virtual prototyping, etc. Recently, although there have been a large variety of display systems, there is no such a fully immersive and clearly projected display with high-resolution. In this paper, we describe a hemispherical display which supports a fully immersive experience and high-resolution images. In our display system for generating high-resolution images, a virtual scene image is divided into several pieces those are rendered by a PC cluster and projected with multiple projectors. In this paper, we also describe the PC cluster and projectors designed for optimized performance and a convenient control.