This paper explores the development and adoption of AI-based formative feedback in the context of biweekly reports in an engineering Capstone program. Each student is required to write a short report detailing their individual accomplishments over the past two weeks, which is then assessed by their advising professor. An LLM-powered tool was developed to provide students with personalized feedback on their draft reports, guiding them toward improved completeness and quality. Usage data across two rounds revealed an initial barrier to adoption, with low engagement rates. However, students who engaged in the AI feedback system demonstrated the ability to use it effectively, leading to improvements in the completeness and quality of their reports. Furthermore, the tool’s task-parsing capabilities provided a novel approach to identify potential student organizational tasks and deliverables. The findings suggest initial skepticism toward the tool with a limited adoption within the studied context, however, they also highlight the potential for AI-driven tools to provide students and professors valuable insights and formative support.

Immersive 3D Virtual Environments (VE) have become affordable for many research centers. However, a complete solution needs several integration steps to be fully operational. Some of these steps are difficult to accomplish and require an uncommon combination of different skills. This tutorial presents the most recent techniques developed to address this problem, from displays to software tools. The hardware in a typical VR installations combines projectors, screens, speakers, computers, tracking and I/O devices. The tutorial will discuss hardware options, explaining their advantages and disadvantages. We will cover design decisions from basic software and hardware design, through user tracking, multimodal human-computer interfaces and acoustic rendering, to how to administrate the whole solution. Additionally, we will provide an introduction to existing tracking technologies, explaining how the most common devices work, while focusing on infrared optical tracking. Finally, we briefly cover integration software and middleware developed for most VE settings.

Abstract To achieve a full‐scale simulation of a pyrite mine, a highly immersive environment becomes necessary and this research has led to a complex system enabling users to walk through a virtual mine in real time, presenting all the behaviours present in such environment. Some of the problems encountered are the tunnels behaviours, including highly contrasted images due to the presence of the head light, narrow paths, elevators, sound reverberation and tunnels texture shades. The use of immersive virtual reality enables the generation of high‐quality simulations, because it is possible to control several feedback mechanisms such as the degree of luminance of produced imagery and spatial sound. In this research, a projection infrastructure and tracking system were specified and developed, aiming at producing the best results for this kind of simulation. To achieve our purposes, distributed algorithms were developed to run in a cluster solution that drives a four‐sided CAVE‐like environment. The complete production pipeline is presented, ranging from the developed authoring techniques, enabling fast production of new content for the simulation, to the tracking techniques produced for the improvement of the interaction.

One of the main objectives in engineering departments of large industries is the implementation of integrated information systems to manage their projects' life cycle. EnViron (environment for virtual objects navigation) is an application motivated by the demand to use virtual reality (VR) in large industrial engineering models generated by CAD tools. EnViron's main goal is to offer 3D visualization resources for CAD models with enough realism to be used for virtual prototyping, collaborative design review, change management systems and training, among other activities.

This paper introduces a dynamic work balancing algorithm, based on work stealing, for time-constrained parallel octree carving. The performance of the algorithm is proved and confirmed by experimental results where the algorithm is applied to a real-time 3D modeling from multiple video streams. Compared to classical work stealing, the proposed algorithm enforces a relaxed width first octree carving that enables to stop computations at anytime while ensuring a balanced carving.

International audience

In the late 90’s the emergence of high performance 3D commodity graphics cards opened the way to use PC clusters for high performance Virtual Reality (VR) applications. Today PC clusters are broadly used to drive multi projector immersive environments. In this paper, we survey the different approaches that have been developed to use PC clusters for VR applications. We review the most common software tools that enable to take advantage of the power of clusters. We also discuss some new trends.