Maintenance in electrical substation equipment involves several daily risks to the worker. When carrying out the maintenance of a large equipment, a truck is assigned to the task. It is not any place that the truck has the ability to travel, nor the workers have the free transition through the place. The objective of this work is to develop a Genetic Algorithm to solve the problem, to create a route where the level of danger is low and does not pose a risk to the health of the worker. To test the genetic algorithm, a substation virtual environment was used where the dimensions and distances are reliable for a real environment. In order to do so, the map division strategy and the creation of individuals with variable sizes were applied. The results were satisfactory, obtaining a route from the point of departure and the point of arrival.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) has become ever more prominent within the area of healthcare. Studies show that it is the most common cause of dementia in older adults. In addition, a large percentage of patients and their caregivers still face enormous challenges concerning treatment and the performing of everyday tasks. Forgetfulness and location awareness are recurrent symptoms. On the other hand, smartphones have become a more common feature of their daily lives. Therefore, this paper presents a mobile application to help individuals diagnosed in the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease to identify objects and people. In addition, it can track the location of an AD individual, since they frequently become disoriented and lost. The application presented herein proposes an accessible interface, based on Augmented Reality techniques that uses speech commands for different features: time reminders for taking medicine, identification of which medicine to be taken, people recognition from photos, among others. In addition tests revealed a promising interface using voice recognition and a feasibility of locating individuals using the caregiver's mobile application.

The use of Virtual Environments in system control operation, in particular power systems (power generation and propagation), provides new paradigms to daily activities of monitoring and controlling. The existence of a three-dimensional geometric model, true to the real structures, when used to develop Virtual Reality systems, allows the acquisition of mental models that improve communication between Control Room and field operators. Besides this, it enables the conception of simulators and training environments. This paper proposes a methodology of creating scene graphs applied to electric power substations during model groups' creation phase, in order to automate the virtual scenes replication.

The emerging of BIM (Building Information Modeling) techniques will change traditional procedures of design and maintenance for electric substations. In addition, Computational Holography, supported by wearable computers, has the potential to allow simultaneous engineering work, based on mixed reality and computer vision capabilities. It is believed that this set of tools will increase engineering design decisions. In this work, we propose a set of techniques to support a complete substation design, which is created by using BIM concepts that explore the Holographic world benefices. Experiments have shown that the coupling of these techniques has the potential to reduce the learning curve of the users, since it changes the way of collaboration among different professional specialists considering simulation intents.

The profits and benefits offered by Virtual Reality technology had drawn attention of professionals from several scientific fields, including the power systems', either for training or maintenance. For this purpose, 3D modeling is evidently pointed out as an imperative process for the conception of a Virtual Environment. Before the complexity of Hydroelectric Power Plants and Virtual Reality's contribution for the Industrial area, planning the tridimensional construction of the virtual environment becomes necessary. Thus, this paper presents modeling techniques applicable to several hydroelectric structures, aiming to optimize the 3D construction of the target complexes.

In this work, an electric power energy utility company, called CEMIG, is a research partner with more than 50 electric substations, whose operation can be improved by using virtual environments. Therefore, time to model all these substations, with a high-level of required photorealism, is a critical issue. To achieve this goal, this paper presents a pertinent and appropriate methodology. First, data is retrieved from field components (CADs, satellite images, manufacturer sheets etc.) to model suitable electric components by means of dimensioning and angles. Next, rules such as cable connectors positioning and monitoring of the quantity of polygons (low-poly) are established. In addition, since each electric substation has circuit arrangements composed of different electric components, a pattern recognition tool is applied to extract information from 2D basic plants in order to generate automatic positioning of components within a virtual substation. Also, considering the need for control and monitoring of the electric system, in real time, a set of interface templates are provided to support direct access to data from supervisory system (SCADA), without the loss of immersion and navigation which are imperative for Virtual Reality applications. In the very first trials used for generating a virtual electric substation a lot of work and time was spent by our research team. After the establishment of the proposed methodology, results show that the time to generate new substations was reduced by the order of 83%.

This work's purpose is to investigate the use of Augmented Reality techniques on telerehabilitation, applied to wheelchair users training. In this scenario, using a computer with unconventional devices, the user will be connected to a remote training space and will be able to issue commands, in order to accomplish the execution of training exercises. The telerehabilitation environment should reproduce the main challenges faced by wheelchair users in their daily activities.

Augmented Reality combined with adaptive hypermedia plays an important role on providing effective information visualization systems. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive architecture model in order to provide adaptive information visualization systems with augmented reality. We also provide a novel visual metaphor for real-valued, low-dimensional data with optimal values for each feature inspired on the pseudo-flower metaphor.

This research demonstration presents an integrated hardware and software platform developed for controlling electric substations, through a virtual environment. Each 3D substation is integrated with the supervision, data acquisition and control center of a real electric energy company. Today, this is pursued on a 2D diagram, lacking intuitiveness. VRCEMIG explores techniques to provide deeper immersion and intuitive interactions in order to support not only training for future employees, but also real time operation. During the demonstration visitors will be able to use different devices such as joystick, gamepad and VR glasses to navigate and operate an electric substation (for training purposes only). This substation belongs to the Brazilian company CEMIG, a research partner.

This demonstration allows the visitors to use assorted technologies to motion capture devices for uses in virtual rehabilitation. We presented the MixCap Middleware, developed to blend different types of motion capture technologies and to accomplish in one data format for biomechanical analysis. The Middleware, together with the associated prototypes were developed for use by health professionals who have low cost tracking movement equipment.

This paper presents a set of algorithms to efficiently support geometric constraint satisfaction during engineering design. Based upon an incremental graph construction approach, these algorithms satisfy each new inserted constraint by exploiting the degrees of freedom of the involved geometric entities. The objective is to avoid satisfying the entire constraint set from scratch due to a new constraint insertion. A prototype system has been developed and is presented to demonstrate the flexibility gained by the proposed incremental algorithms.