Haptic feedback is proposed in sewing machine operations with the objective of reducing errors in seam allowance. Similar to the lane departure warning system in modern cars, such modality of feedback is expected to alert the operator in real-time and improve the performance of the human control system. A traditional sewing machine was outfitted with a camera, a single board computer, and an eccentric motor. Experimental results demonstrate the potential for deployment of such systems in apparel manufacturing industries and provide opportunities for greater inclusion of people with disabilities in the workforce.

Existing research strongly supports that educational video games have beneficial impacts on student engagement, motivation, and learning outcomes. However, more still needs to be done to understand the best ways to apply well designed educational games in classroom contexts. This study examines the differences in student engagement between two educational game approaches applied as extra credit opportunities in an online asynchronous computer organization and architecture course at a mid-western R1 university. The study evaluated the relative efficacy of a singular game with one overarching narrative versus multiple games with different narratives where the two treatments both cover the same learning content.

This paper explores a novel approach to model strategies for flattening wrinkled cloth learning from humans. A human participant study was conducted where the participants were presented with various wrinkle types and tasked with flattening the cloth using the fewest actions possible. A camera and Aruco marker were used to capture images of the cloth and finger movements, respectively. The human strategies for flattening the cloth were modeled using a supervised regression neural network, where the cloth images served as input and the human actions as output. Before training the neural network, a series of image processing techniques were applied, followed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to extract relevant features from each image and reduce the input dimensionality. This reduction decreased the model's complexity and computational cost. The actions predicted by the neural network closely matched the actual human actions on an independent data set, demonstrating the effectiveness of neural networks in modeling human actions for flattening wrinkled cloth.

Educational games have found use in the classroom environment, and research suggests that well-designed games have motivational and educational benefits. But often games are individually crafted to fill a need in a specific assignment with no relation to other parts of the course or any other games used to assist teaching in the course. We are examining the question of whether or not educational content in a game tied more closely together through a common narrative is beneficial to student motivation to complete the educational content. To investigate this, we have developed a game with a common narrative to tie together a set of assignments in a circuitry course to then compare to the same set of assignments spread across three games containing different narratives.

We examined background characteristics of virtual reality participants in order to determine correlations to cybersickness. As 3D media and new VR display technologies from companies such as Occulus and Sony become more popular, the incidence of cybersickness is likely to increase. Understanding the impact of individual backgrounds on susceptibility can help shed light on which individuals are more likely to be impacted. Past history of motion sickness and video game play have the best predictive power of cybersickness of the factors studied. A model to estimate the likelihood of cybersickness using background characteristics is posed.

Theatre Engine is a three-phase project exploring the integration of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet computers as user interaction mechanisms for live theatrical performances. This paper describes the technical details for the first performance in the series: Transitions, including system design, user interface details, and lessons learned. The user activities are described in the context of manipulations and the effects of those manipulations. The concept of blurring the distinction between real and virtual is explored. The prototype integrates Android-based mobile devices, servers, projection screens, and modern theatrical lighting with live musicians and dancers, allowing the audience to become a part of the presentation.

The attention funnel is a general purpose AR interface technique that interactively guides the attention of a user to any object, person, or place in space. The technique utilizes dynamic perceptual affordances to draw user attention "down" the funnel to the target location. Attention funnel can be used to cue objects completely out of sight including objects behind the user, or occluded by other objects or walls.An experiment evaluating user performance with the attention funnel and other conventional AR attention directing techniques found that the attention funnel increased the consistency of the user's search by 65%, increased search speed by 22%, and decreased mental workload by 18%. The attention funnel has potential applicability as a general 3D cursor or cue in a wide array of spatially enabled mobile and AR systems, and for applications where systems can support users in visual search, object awareness, and emergency warning in indoor and outdoor spaces.

Geometry compression is the compression of the 3D geometric data that provides a computer graphics system with the scene description necessary to render images. Geometric data is quite large and, therefore, needs effective compression methods to decrease the transmission and storage bit requirements. A large amount of research has focused on static geometry compression, but only limited research has addressed animated geometry compression, the compression of temporal sequences of geometry data. This paper proposes an octree-based motion representation method that can be applied to compress animated geometric data. In our approach, 3D animated sequences can be represented with a compression factor of over 100, with slight losses in animation quality. Paper focuses on compressing vertex positions for all the frames. In the proposed approach, only two consecutive frames to generate a small set of motion vectors that represent the motion from the previous frame to the current frame is used. The motion vectors are used to predict the vertex positions for each frame except the first frame. The process generates a hierarchical octree motion representation for each frame. Quantization and an adaptive arithmetic coder are used to achieve further data reduction. The simple and efficient decompression of this approach makes it suitable for real time applications.

In this paper, we introduce QMR/PR, a flexible QoS-sensitive routing framework for mobile ad hoc networks, which addresses the problems caused by mobility-induced route failures. QMR/PR combines packet-interleaving using multipath routing and packet-level forward error correction. A particularly promising feature is its ability to significantly reduce both random and correlated packet losses, a critical issue for real-time applications. To provide accurate and reliable performance evaluation results, we have integrated QMR/PR into the QualNet simulation software, allowing us to conduct an extensive performance evaluation in a realistic networking architecture including all layers of the protocol stack. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and show that, compared to single-path routing, QMR/PR can reduce packet loss by 42-84 percent depending on the networking environment (e.g, node mobility, frequency of path failures), while simultaneously reducing routing overhead.

Optical see-through head-mounted displays (OSTHMDs) have many advantages in augmented reality application, but their utility in practical applications has been limited by the complexity of calibration. Because the human subject is an inseparable part of the eye-display system, previous methods for OSTHMD calibration have required extensive manual data collection using either instrumentation or manual point correspondences and are highly dependent on operator skill. This paper describes display-relative calibration (DRC) for OSTHMDs, a new two phase calibration method that minimizes the human element in the calibration process and ensures reliable calibration. Phase I of the calibration captures the parameters of the display system relative to a normalized reference frame and is performed in a jig with no human factors issues. The second phase optimizes the display for a specific user and the placement of the display on the head. Several phase II alternatives provide flexibility in a variety of applications including applications involving untrained users.

Although there has been much speculation about the potential of Augmented Reality (AR), there are very few empirical studies about its effectiveness. This paper describes an experiment that tested the relative effectiveness of AR instructions in an assembly task. Task information was displayed in user's field of view and registered with the workspace as 3D objects to explicitly demonstrate the exact execution of a procedure step. Three instructional media were compared with the AR system: a printed manual, computer assisted instruction (CAI) using a monitor-based display, and CAI utilizing a head-mounted display. Results indicate that overlaying 3D instructions on the actual work pieces reduced the error rate for an assembly task by 82%, particularly diminishing cumulative errors - errors due to previous assembly mistakes. Measurement of mental effort indicated decreased mental effort in the AR condition, suggesting some of the mental calculation of the assembly task is offloaded to the system.

Optical see-through head-mounted displays (HMDs) are less commonly used because they are difficult to accurately calibrate. In this article, we report a user study to compare the accuracy of 4 variants of the SPAAM calibration method. Among the 4 variants, Stylus-marker calibration, where the user aligns a crosshair projected in the HMD with a tracked stylus tip, achieved the most accurate result. A decomposition and analysis of the calibration matrices from the trials is performed and the characteristics of the computed calibration matrices are examined. A physiological engineering point of view is also discussed to explain why calibrating optical see-through HMD is so difficult for users.

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are an emerging class of network architectures that are characterized by their highly dynamic topology, limited resources (i.e., bandwidth and power), and lack of fixed infrastructure. The primary motivation for such networks is increased flexibility and mobility. Random node mobility along with various other factors such as network size and traffic intensity may be very dynamic, resulting in unpredictable variations in the overall network performance. This study centers on investigating and quantifying the effects of various factors and their two-way interactions on the overall performance of ad hoc networks. This study contributes to the modeling and development of adaptive ad hoc protocols (routing, medium access control, scheduling and buffer management). Using 2/sup k/r factorial experimental design, we isolate and quantify the effects of five factors: node speed, pause-time, network size, number of traffic sources, and type of routing (source versus distributed), that affect the performance of ad hoc networks. Specifically, this paper evaluates the impact of these factors on the following performance metrics: throughput, average routing overhead, and power consumption. Our study was conducted using a library-based simulator for sequential and parallel simulation of wireless networks.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of spatially overlaid instructions using augmented reality (AR) in an assembly task compared with other traditional media. Results indicate that overlaying 3D instructions on the workspace reduce error rate by 82%, particularly cumulative errors. Measurement of mental effort also suggests some of the mental workload is offloaded to the computer.

This paper describes a keyframe summarization method for client-server applications. This technique is designed for applications where a camera is collecting content on a continuous basis that must be transmitted in a summarized form to a remote database server over wireless network. The system combines three keyframe selection methods including a novel fast motion-based selection method, keyframe pooling and clustering for bandwidth control, and network bandwidth estimation.

msmcT Functional hia~etic Resonance tiagery (~~) is a new' medical ima=tig technology pro~ti~mg tictional, as opposed to natomicd, mapptig of the human brain.The promise of this non-invasive technique has opened new' ch~enges for mdtimedia researchers.A the fieId of human functional neurotia=tig e~lodes and the technology of ~W advmces, computational techniques for expertient control, subject stimu~ generation, and joint stimti-activation tiaetig are Iachg.host computational work h= focused on impro~tig the analysis of the brab S=S.Tti paper describes eomputiationa~mechanisms for the dehery md tiactig of multimedia stimti and a correlation framework for stimti and brain responses.NIediaStim, a new integrated data co~ection fraework for stimuIus tracking $hat k currently under development. NlediaSfi etiends the stimti paradi=m to composite multimedia presentations. To stiulate a real-tie sitiation as reafitica~y as possible, it is tiportant to stidy the brainPerrnksion lo ma}:edigi~alor hard copies of fl or part of thk ~!;ork for personal or classroom use k granted ;I:ithout fee pro~,ided ~ha~copies are not made or distributed for profit or commertizl ada~antage, and fiat copies bear this no:i~and ~heftil titation on the firs!page.To copy oihen!.k~lo repub~i~to post on senrers or 10 redistribute 10 lis~, requires prior specific perrnksion anifor a fee.

This paper presents a decomposition of the affine transformation matrix into three matrix operations consisting of only skew and scaling in a single dimension. This decomposition allows the presentation of a new algorithm for separable affine image warping. The algorithm is a three-pass approach incorporating only scaling, translation, and skew in a single dimension in each pass. The three-pass approach prevents the problem of decreased image resolution in intermediate images. The result is an algorithm with improved resulting image quality in conjunction with higher performance.

No abstract available.