In fields like military aviation, virtual assistance is crucial to manage the overwhelming amount of information pilots deal with, reducing their workload. This study seeks to determine the key factors for effective collaboration between pilots and assistants, focusing on embodiment and communication style, which may vary based on the situation criticality. A pilot evaluation show that both embodiment and communication style should be adapted to operational context, especially critical ones (i.e. presence of VA after a loss of consciousness and task oriented communication style during combat phases).

This paper presents an extended reality (XR) application designed to raise awareness about coastal flooding risks linked to climate change. Built from open-source geospatial data and high-resolution photogrammetry surveyed by the team, the user is able to explore climate scenarios by combining global projections from the IPCC with local sea-level data. The experience offers model-scale interaction and immersive first-person navigation.

One huge advantage of Augmented Reality (AR) is its numerous possibilities of displaying information in the physical world, especially when applying Situated Analytics (SitA). AR devices and their respective interaction techniques allow for supplementary guidance to assist an operator carrying out complex procedures such as medical diagnosis and surgery, for instance. Their usage promotes user autonomy by presenting relevant information when the operator may not necessarily possess expert knowledge of every procedure and may also not have access to external help such as in a remote or isolated situation (e.g., International Space Station, middle of an ocean, desert).

Historians use spatio-temporal navigation for their models and studies of historical evolutions and events. Their findings can then be exhibited in cultural mediation centers or museums. The latter, both to facilitate the transmission of knowledge and to make their exhibitions more attractive, are now exploiting new technologies. Indeed, digital systems allow, among other things, visitors to navigate spatially and temporally in virtual reconstructions of historical environments. We propose to combine these virtual representations with a tangible interface to provide visitors with an immersive experience and engaging interactions. To do so, we have set up a co-design process involving cultural mediation actors (museum directors, historians, etc.). The result is SABLIER, a tangible interactor to navigate through space and time based on the interaction metaphors and natural affordance of an hourglass. Finally, we have conducted an evaluation of the acceptability of our interactor, whose results are positive.

International audience

In a medical environment, coordination between medical staff is imperative. In cases in which a human doctor or medical coordinator is not present, patient care, particularly from non-experts, becomes more difficult. The difficulty increases when care is completed at a remote site, for example, on a manned mission to Mars. Communication capability from medical experts on Mars is limited. To address this problem, a medical assistant remote system is proposed to act as a coordinator between the humans present and the remote medical experts. A virtual agent assuming such a role will accept feedback from both, running the situation without errors and additional stress. Leadership styles will be employed by the agent to develop trust and perception of competence among its followers. Additionally, prediction of behaviour and situational changes by both medical professionals and by the agent are necessary in order to combat a 10-minute latency affecting communication between Earth and Mars.

This research work introduce virtual embodied tutors in Virtual Environments for learning devoted to learning of procedures for industrial systems. We present a communicative behavior which, integrated in pedagogical scenario, permits on the one hand to realize the pedagogical communicative actions at a semantic level (e.g., the tutor explains the goal of an action) and on the other hand to realize such actions through human-like communicative channels (i.e., the virtual tutor's voice, facial expressions and gestures). The communicative behavior relies on a taxonomy of questions in order to interpret the learner's communicative actions and to generate the tutor's own questions.

Virtual reality is a frequently used tool in vocational training. Nevertheless, its efficiency has not been systematically tested. The main goal of this study is to assess the effectiveness of a virtual environment (VE) for learning a complex procedure in the biomedical domain. Two experiments were performed. The first one assessed internal validity of the VE, which is the effectiveness of using a VE in the process of learning a new procedure. The second one tested external validity of the VE, which is the participants’ ability to reproduce the acquired skills in a real context. We find that internal and external validity must be evaluated before using a virtual environment in long-term procedure learning. The results of such evaluations are a basis for future experiments aiming to optimize learning conditions in a VE and transferring the acquired skills in a real context.

Training to learn the use and maintenance of biomedical devices have various constraints. In order to complete these trainings, we proposed to use virtual reality based on pedagogical scenarios and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). In this paper, we first established the existing pedagogical scenario models and ITS. Subsequently we presented our proposal of a formal model based on the concept of learning organization by extension of UML in order to describre some pedagogical scenario and ITS. The use of this model is illustrated by an application of a virtual biomedical analyzer with the aim of learning the technical procedures of the device. Finally, we performed two experiments in order to verify the efficiency of virtual reality training.

International audience

Wind turbines (WT) are socially controversial because of their visual and acoustic impacts on landscape. Virtual reality (VR) is here proposed - thanks to immersion and interaction potentialities - as an immersive and multisensory approach in order to assess WT impacts. For that, a comparison between a real park and the same virtual one is needed to evaluate VR for landscape impacts restitution. The parks are evaluated using an urban path-based method (perception in motion): the real walking is simulated by a Wiimote in vitro. The results, while very similar to the in situ study show the limits of the lack of free motion.

To provide for its needs, the French Navy plans to build a second aircraft carrier. With this intention, the navy draws up a list of its functional requirements and delegates to DCNS the development of the technical specifications focusing on the fact that the ship fulfills those requirements. The principal difficulty lies in the specification of the aviation management on the aircraft carrier. In this paper, we describe GASPAR, a virtual-reality application developped in order to simulate different configurations of the future aircraft carrier and test their viability. We first introduce AR´EVI and MASCARET, the librairires upon which the application is built, then we present the application. Finally, we present some results that GASPAR has validated about the ship.

In the following, by considering the communication and the interaction within collaborative multi-cultural virtual environments as the most important motivational dimensions of user (children in particular) experience, we discuss the use of two metaphors, the virtual theater and the virtual classroom, in order to support collaborative learning. The educational virtual environment is presented as a shared informational agent-based space from both modeling (structure and evolution point of views) and technical (implementation) perspectives. The cooperation within the environment is preserved by interfering with virtual actors. Current implementations are based on a client-server architecture. VEHA API is used for environment description, VRML, C++, and Java are used as modeling and programming languages, and AReVi as graphical rendering and interaction API. Supplementary ARToolkit is used for hand-made marker-based interaction

This paper presents an educational distributed virtual reality-based environment for children called EVE-Environnement Virtuel pour Enfants. EVE is used in elementary schools from different countries as a supplementary tool in teaching children to read. This virtual environment supports cooperation among members of a dispersed team engaged in a shared context. By the mean of their avatars, which are special cases of agents, children are allowed to interact and to give decisions using cooperative mechanisms. The virtual environment architecture is reactive agent-based. The FCM-like dynamic action planning mechanism assures the agent's adaptability to its environmental changes. It also allows the pedagogical agent to adapt its behaviour to the child's actions. The implementation is based on a client-server architecture, VRML and C++ as languages and AReVi as graphical rendering API.

This study concerns virtual environments for training in operational conditions. The principal developed idea is that these environments are heterogeneous and open multi-agent systems. The MASCARET model is proposed to organize the interactions between agents and to provide them reactive, cognitive and social abilities to simulate the physical and social environment. The physical environment represents, in a realistic way, the phenomena that learners and teachers have to take into account. The social environment is simulated by agents executing collaborative and adaptive tasks. These agents realize, in team, procedures that they have to adapt to the environment. The users participate to the training environment through their avatar. In this article, we explain how we integrated in MASCARET models necessary to the creation of Intelligent Tutoring System. We notably incorporate pedagogical strategies and pedagogical actions. We present pedagogical agents. To validate our model, the SECUREVI application for fire-fighters training is developed.

Our purpose is, in medium term, to detect in air images, characteristic shapes and objects such as airports, industrial plants, planes, tanks, trucks, ... with great accuracy and low rate of mistakes. However, we also want to value whether the link between neural networks and multi-agent systems is relevant and effective. If it appears to be really effective, we hope to use this kind of technology in other fields. That would be an easy and convenient way to depict and to use the agents' knowledge which is distributed and fragmented. After a first phase of preliminary tests to know if agents are able to give relevant information to a neural network, we verify that only a few agents running on an image are enough to inform the network and let it generalize the agents' distributed and fragmented knowledge. In a second phase, we developed a distributed architecture allowing several multi-agents systems running at the same time on different computers with different images. All those agents send information to a "multi neural networks system" whose job is to identify the shapes detected by the agents. The name we gave to our project is Jarod.