Body-centric locomotion in Virtual Reality (VR) involves multiple factors, including the point of view, avatar representations, tracked body parts for locomotion control and transfer functions that map body movement to the displacement of the virtual viewpoint. Understanding the role of these factors in evoking a plausible walking experience using within- or between-subject experimental designs based on questionnaires and/or objective measurements can be time-consuming and challenging due to the interrelated effects of these factors. This study employed the subjective matching method to evaluate the sense of plausible walking experience during body-centric locomotion in VR. Five relevant factors that may affect locomotion experience were identified by analyzing existing studies, i.e., point of view, the avatar appearance, body parts for locomotion control, transfer functions and the coefficients of transfer functions. A virtual locomotion experiment with these five factors based on subjective matching was conducted. Results showed that participants regarded the point of view as the most critical factor for walking experience enhancement, followed by body parts, transfer functions, the coefficients of transfer functions and finally the avatar appearance. Additionally, participants’ preferences for different body parts and the coefficients of transfer functions affected the choice of transfer functions. These results could serve as the guidelines for virtual locomotion experience design that involves combinations of multiple factors and can help achieve a plausible walking experience in VR.

To allow more rapid and accurate accesses in the virtual reality browsing interfaces, an amphitheater layout with varying egocentric distance-based item sizing (EDIS) is presented, and items at different egocentric distances with sizes proportional to the distances are placed. The effects of EDIS variations on the retrieval and recall performance depend on the distance configurations. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 showed that small and medium EDIS variations gave efficient trial completions in near-field distance perception for small and medium item sets. For large-item sets, the further items in the amphitheater layout may lie beyond the near-field distance perception. We therefore adopt additional 3D visual landmarks in the amphitheater layout (Experiment 4); while both the location-fixed and user-defined 3D pins greatly improved completion and accuracy performance, they showed no significant difference between them, indicating that location-fixed landmarks would be suffice. These findings suggest the use of spatial and visual landmarks for effective VR browsing interfaces.

Most Virtual Reality1(VR) applications are dedicated to providing a realistic response to users. Prior works have argued that the importance of credibility or believability to evoke realistic responses. However, there are few empirical works focused on the concept of believability itself. This work further explores the evoke-condition of believability from the views of sensory and perceptual aspects. Sensory believability refers to the actions supported by the Virtual Environment (VE) match with common sense, whereas perceptual believability refers to the behaviors supported by the VE are consistent with the expectation formed during interactions or from prior experiences. Towards the end, an experiment that examines the sensory (rock appearance, environmental visual scene, environmental sound) and perceptual (dynamic behavior) factors of consistency on believable response in a virtual rock climbing environment was conducted. The results showed that the consistency of dynamics features contributed the most to perceptual believability, followed by a higher level of rock appearance along with climbing actions, even with the medium level of the environmental visual scene. In contrast, the medium and higher level of environmental visual scene contributed the most to sensory believability. This study suggests the sensory and perceptual consistency together could evoke the believable response in action feedback loop for VR.

The well-known “fat finger” issue limits the interaction performance of trajectory-based finger gestures. To alleviate this issue, this work focuses on the possibility of using additional continuous auditory feedback to assist trajectory-based finger gestures. First, the experiment validated that, with the visual feedback only, the bare fingertip led to more errors in drawing of intersectional points, endpoints of closed gestures, and gestural length and shape variability compared to when the finger-attached pen was used. Then, we designed different types of auditory feedback (discrete beep, static, gradual) to provide additional information on the spatial relationship between finger-contact point and the endpoints or intersections of predefined gestures. An experiment that evaluates the effects of individual or combination of designed auditory feedback on trajectory-based finger gestures was conducted. These results show a few differences between them. However, a combination of gradual (amplitude and frequency) continuous sound and beep reached the highest drawing accuracy for trajectory-based finger gestures, which is similar to that of a finger-attached pen. This research offers insights and implications for the future design of continuous auditory feedback on small touchscreens.

Abstract Asynchronous collaboration for a networked virtual environment (NVE) has emerged as a promising area in collaborative computer‐aided design applications. The concept of asynchronous collaboration is a sequential collaboration of temporal processes in an NVE where the participants are not required to be present at the time of the collaboration. Conflicts in asynchronous collaboration occur because the preceding task of a participant can influence the output of the ensuing task of another participant. The conflicted tasks must be modified manually. However, it requires considerable time and effort to resolve conflicts in a sequential collaboration. In this paper, we present an asynchronous collaborative framework that converts the conflict states of the shared objects into approximately resolved states. We develop a novel approximate resolution algorithm using a task‐based modeling mechanism to resolve the asynchronous conflicts with their corresponding tasks. Moreover, we propose a visual relation editor for convenient management. The participants can set flexible relations among shared objects using the proposed visual editor. The proposed approximate resolution approach can significantly reduce the average resolution time and the number of required manual task resolutions in a virtual environment compared to a manual resolution approach. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Background subtraction is a basic step for a variety of multimedia applications such as live video, traffic monitoring, communication system, interactive learning space, etc. Many approaches have been proposed for this problem, but the need for lower cost approaches still exists. In this paper, a relatively low-cost background-subtraction method is proposed, using background sets with image- and color-space reduction. The background sets are used to detect objects from dynamic backgrounds, which contain waves, trees, and fountains. The image space is reduced to deal with jittered and unsteady frames, e.g., the input from handheld mobile devices. The color space is reduced to compensate for color noise, e.g., the scattered RGB values of a digital camera. To reduce the cost, a combination of color-space reduction and hash-table look-up operations are used. The results compared with other methods show the feasibility of our method; moreover, it can be useful in mobile or embedded environments.

We introduce a method for using multiple devices as windows for interacting with 3-D virtual environment. Motivation of our work has come from generating collaborative workspace with multiple devices which can be found in our daily lives, like desktop PC and mobile devices. Provided with life size virtual environment, each device shows a scene of 3-D virtual space on its position and direction, and users would be able to perceive virtual space in more immersive way with it. By adopting mobile device to our system, users not only see outer space of stationary screen by relocating their mobile device, but also have personalized view in working space. To acquiring knowledge of device's pose and orientation, we adopt vision-based approaches. For the last, we introduce an implementation of a system for managing multiple device and letting them have synchronized performance.

The objective of this research is the rapid reconstruction of ancient buildings of historical importance using a single image. The key idea of our approach is to reduce the infinite solutions that might otherwise arise when recovering a 3D geometry from 2D photographs. The main outcome of our research shows that the proposed methodology can be used to reconstruct ancient monuments for use as proxies for digital effects in applications such as tourism, games, and entertainment, which do not require very accurate modeling. In this article, we consider the reconstruction of ancient Mughal architecture including the Taj Mahal. We propose a modeling pipeline that makes an easy reconstruction possible using a single photograph taken from a single view, without the need to create complex point clouds from multiple images or the use of laser scanners. First, an initial model is automatically reconstructed using locally fitted planar primitives along with their boundary polygons and the adjacency relation among parts of the polygons. This approach is faster and more accurate than creating a model from scratch because the initial reconstruction phase provides a set of structural information together with the adjacency relation, which makes it possible to estimate the approximate depth of the entire structural monument. Next, we use manual extrapolation and editing techniques with modeling software to assemble and adjust different 3D components of the model. Thus, this research opens up the opportunity for the present generation to experience remote sites of architectural and cultural importance through virtual worlds and real-time mobile applications. Variations of a recreated 3D monument to represent an amalgam of various cultures are targeted for future work.

Abstract AirScope is a micro‐scale modeling system as well as a micro‐scale air quality monitoring system, which comprises as a micro‐scale air quality management system. Importance of micro‐scale air monitoring is rising due to the concern about environment near residential places. Traditional monitoring methods are providing overall air quality indexes. However, these methods have limited functionalities to provide air quality of near my house or where I am now. In this paper, we are trying to overcome the limitation of traditional methods by using ubiquitous sensor network (USN). AirScope consists of computational fluid dynamics based air quality modeling, USN‐based sensor monitoring, and multi‐modal interaction platform. We present a brief overview of AirScope and several aspects of constructed initial indoor test environment with a few validity tests. The proposed system will be extended to an outdoor real‐world testbed with most of modern urban elements. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

U-City is a city where diverse public information is provided through IT technology. In the past, IT infrastructure for public information was not considered in city planning. However, in recent construction of new cities, this kind of infrastructure is becoming necessary. Safety, transportation, and weather information are gathered and provided to residents through the Internet, mobile devices, etc [1]. To provide this kind of information, local governments operates U-City control center, and there is an issue of increased operating cost of the city. To solve this problem, U-City business platform is designed which can incorporate diverse commercial services. Different from public information platform, a private sector can participate and provide services. This work suggests Business Service Platform (BSP) system structure where USN-based services can be provided in U-City business platform. Then, USN-based service applications are introduced on U-City platform. Business Service Platform (BSP) is a service platform of U-City for services in a private sector, and provides overall functionalities required for the creation, distribution, and billing. A service provider for U-City can develop a new application using BSP. It can also register, distribute, and handle billing using functionalities of BSP. BSP started with a target advertisement service related to public transportation information as its initial service, however USN technology in diverse areas are expected to be applied to BSP in the future. To apply such diverse USN to BSP, a general framework should be provided to integrate USN, and a system is needed that each service provider can control. In this demo, we will explain U-City service platform, which will be deployed at CHEONGRA zone of Korea, and how it is integrated to USN to provide healthcare, smart grid services, and finally major system components.

Abstract In this research, we propose a method to adapt the interfaces and interaction processes of heterogeneous devices. The proposed method models the interaction capability of the devices. The interaction is modeled by categorizing elementary actions and measuring its effect in semantic behaviors. With this model, an interaction process can be modified to a given device by changing sequence of elementary actions for each behavior. In the pilot test, we showed the possibility of interaction adaptation for different situations. With the proposed adaptation mechanism, interface and interaction can be modeled for the device independently and can be transferred over different interaction environments. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract Real‐time simulation of fur is a key element in many virtual reality applications. However, it is still difficult to simulate effects of fur animation in real‐time. In this paper, we propose an interactive fur simulation method, to calculate effects of external forces, such as wind and gravity, and direct manipulation for real‐time interactive animation. The proposed method consists of two layered textures for rendering. The first texture represents volumes of fur, and the second texture covers and laps the edge of the first texture. Our approach unifies these two structures using a shared vertex array to enhance rendering performance. We modify the shared vertex array with external force simulations and render it into the graphics pipeline. The proposed method is applied to virtual fashion design and 3D story telling as an example. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, we present a framework for micro-scale air quality monitoring and sensor management system. The developed system is validated in a preliminary test environment. The test result shows that it is feasible to adopt sensor networks for micro-scale monitoring. In the future, enhancements on the VR core modules will also be investigated such as enhanced interaction devices, mobile sensors, and display devices. Finally, we will also build web-based information portal to be used by citizens whenever the information is needed.

In molecular modeling, it is quite useful to exercise real-time rendering of solvent-accessible surfaces for three dimensional models. The real-time rendering helps researchers in analyzing three dimensional structures and behaviors of molecular simulations. The researchers can determine whether critical parts of molecular models are correctly visualized and properly combined at right locations. However, it is quite difficult to render solvent-accessible surfaces in real-time using conventional molecular modeling tools. It is because the surfaces are visualized as isosurfaces which express chemical information and three dimensional positions. In this paper, we propose a method which facilitates real-time rendering of solvent-accessible surfaces for three dimensional molecular models. We evaluated real-time interactivity of our method with molecular models. Therefore, researchers can observe and manipulate solvent-accessible surfaces of three dimensional molecular models in real-time.

Abstract In this paper, we present a believable interaction mechanism for manipulation multiple objects in ubiquitous/augmented virtual environment. A believable interaction in multimodal framework is defined as a persistent and consistent process according to contextual experiences and common‐senses on the feedbacks. We present a tabletop interface as a quasi‐tangible framework to provide believable processes. An enhanced tabletop interface is designed to support multimodal environment. As an exemplar task, we applied the concept to fast accessing and manipulating distant objects. A set of enhanced manipulation mechanisms is presented for remote manipulations including inertial widgets, transformable tabletop, and proxies. The proposed method is evaluated in both performance and user acceptability in comparison with previous approaches. The proposed technique uses intuitive hand gestures and provides higher level of believability. It can also support other types of accessing techniques such as browsing and manipulation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper we present a discussion about believability for Virtual Environments, emotional simulation and also Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). We will discuss about the definition of believability and the three elements of believability environments (immersion, presentation and interaction). We also present a discussion about believability and interfaces. Finally, ECA, emotional and personnality simulation are explained and presented.

The goal of the research is creation of an adaptation mechanism for the delivery of three-dimensional content. The adaptation of content, for various network and terminal capabilities - as well as for different user preferences, is a key feature that needs to be investigated. Current state-of-the art research of the adaptation shows promising results for specific purpose and limited types of content but still it is not well adaptable for the massive heterogeneous environments. We present a method for transmitting adapted thee-dimensional contents to multiple target devices. We present some theoretical and practical methods for adapting three-dimensional contents, which includes shapes and animation. We also discuss practical details to the integration of our methods into MPEG-21 and MPEG-4 architectures.

To present three-dimensional data both in heavy and light-weight clients, an adaptation scheme is required. Current state-of-the art research shows promising results for specific purposes but it is still not well adoptable for light-weight clients such as mobile devices. In this research, we present a method for transmitting adapted 3D content to multiple target devices. To accomplish this goal, we devised a clustered representation of a multi-resolution model that is flexible, simple, efficient, and works with the MPEG-21 adaptation mechanism.

Article A multiresolution control method using view directional feature Share on Authors: HyungSeok Kim Department of Computer Science, KAIST YooSungGoo, Taejon, Korea Department of Computer Science, KAIST YooSungGoo, Taejon, KoreaView Profile , Soon Ki Jung Department of Computer Engineering, Kyungpook National University PookGoo, Taegu, Korea Department of Computer Engineering, Kyungpook National University PookGoo, Taegu, KoreaView Profile , KwangYun Wohn Department of Computer Science, KAIST, YooSungGoo, Taejon Department of Computer Science, KAIST, YooSungGoo, TaejonView Profile Authors Info & Claims VRST '98: Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technologyNovember 1998 Pages 163–169https://doi.org/10.1145/293701.293723Online:02 November 1998Publication History 3citation863DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads863Last 12 Months2Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access