We describe an architecture for coping with latency and asynchrony of multisensory events in interactive virtual environments. We propose to decompose multisensory interactions into a series of discrete, perceptually significant events, and structure the application architecture within this event-based context. We analyze the sources of latency, and develop a framework for event prediction and scheduling. Our framework decouples synchronization from latency, and uses prediction to reduce latency when possible. We evaluate the performance of the architecture using vision-based motion sensing and multisensory rendering using haptics, sounds, and graphics. The architecture makes it easy to achieve good performance using commodity off-the-shelf hardware.

Enacting and capturing real motion for all potential scenarios is prohibitively expensive; hence, there is a great demand to synthetically generate realistic human motion. However, it is a central challenge in character animation to synthetically generate a large sequence of smooth human motion. We present a novel, database-centric solution to address this challenge. We demonstrate a method of generating long sequences of motion by performing various similarity-based "joins" on a database of captured motion sequences. This article illustrates our system (MoDB) and showcases the process of encoding captured motion into relational data and generating realistic motion by concatenating sub-sequences of the captured data according to feasibility metrics. The demo features an interactive character that moves towards user-specified targets; the character 's motion is generated by relying on the real time performance of the database for indexing and selection of feasible sub-sequences.

We describe an efficient algorithm for the simulation of large sets of non-convex rigid bodies. The algorithm finds a simultaneous solution for a multi-body system that is linear in the total number of contacts detected in each iteration. We employ a novel contact model that uses mass, location, and velocity information from all contacts, at the moment of maximum compression, to constrain rigid body velocities. We also develop a new friction model in the configuration space of rigid bodies. These models are used to compute the feasible velocity and the frictional response of each body. Implementation is simple and leads to a fast rigid body simulator that computes steps on the order of seconds for simulations involving over one thousand non-convex objects in high contact configurations.