Recently virtual reality (VR) technology has been widely distributed, but VR interaction devices supported in web environments are limited compared with in the traditional VR environment. In the traditional VR environment, the Virtual-Reality Peripheral Network (VRPN) provides a device-independent and network-transparent interface. To promote the development of WebVR applications with various interaction devices, a method like VRPN is required in the web environment as well. In this paper, we propose a webizing method for human interface devices and related events that serves as either VRPN messages or HTML DOM events to deal with interaction events.

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.

With steady growth in the deployment of sensor networks and widespread usage of mobile devices, the production of geo-referenced data is increasing exponentially, while analysis of the data typically uses a variety of application services on the Internet for activities such as logging and driving. This geo-referenced content needs to be classified and organized according to user interest for location-based decision-making. In this study, we define a user interest model and propose a method for organizing and presenting content based on the model. Our approach reconstructs geo-referenced content from a variety of sources based on points of interest organized by the user interest model. We present typical cases of using the proposed method, including a theme park resort, personal weather stations, and travel planning to show how the proposed method facilitates user decision-making based on the geo-referenced content.

This demonstration shows a novel approach for Webizing mobile augmented reality, which uses HTML as its content structure, and its real-life use cases. Insight is a mobile AR Web browser that executes HTML5-based AR applications. By extending physical objects and places with a uniform resource identifier (URI), we could build objects of interest for mobile AR application as document object model (DOM) elements and control their behavior and user interactions through DOM events in standard HTML documents. A new CSS media type is defined to augment virtual objects to the physical objects. In this model, we introduce the concept of PLACE, which is the model of a physical space in which the user can be located. With this approach, mobile AR applications can be seamlessly developed as common HTML documents under the current Web eco-system. The advantages of the webized mobile AR, which is able to utilize all kind of Web resources without reworking, and its high productivity due to the seamless development of AR contents in HTML documents are shown with real-life use cases in various domains, such as shopping, entertainment, education, and manufacturing.

Information presentation techniques are important in augmented reality applications as they are in the traditional desktop user interface (WIMP) and web user interface [6]. This paper introduces view management for a web-based augmented reality mobile platform. We use a webized mobile AR browser called Insight that provides separation of the application logic, including the tracking engine and AR content, so that the view management logic and contents are easy to reuse. In addition, the view management is able to accommodate in-situ context of an AR application.

This paper presents a content structure to build mobile AR applications in HTML5 to achieve a clean separation of mobile AR contents from their application logic to scale like the web. By extending POIs (Point of Interest) to objects and places with Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), we could build objects of interest for mobile AR application as DOM (Document Object Model) elements and control their behavior and user interactions through DOM events. Using our content structure, a mobile AR applications can be developed as normal HTML documents seamlessly under current web eco-system.

UXeLATE2012 is the 1st International ACM Workshop on User Experience in e-Learning and Augmented Technologies in Education in conjunction with the ACM International Multimedia Conference (MM'12) at Nara, Japan. The workshop has a half day program, with a selection of six papers, and one keynote talk of a recognized expert in the field of usability, mobile technology and education.

We propose a novel method to enhance a family of ICP(iterative closest point) algorithms by updating velocity. Even though ICP algorithms play a dominant role in a model based tracking, it is difficult to avoid an accumulated tracking error during a continuous motion. It is because that typical ICP algorithms assumes that each of the point in one scan are measured simultaneously while most of the available rangefinders measure each point sequentially. Hence conventional ICP algorithms are prone to be erroneous under a fast motion and an accumulated error during the motion cannot be ignored in many cases. In our approach, we estimate a velocity of a rangefinder numerically over ICP iterations. As a result, distortion of a scan due to the motion can be compensated using estimated velocity. In addition, outliers are effectively rejected during the iteration of velocity update, which means that more accurate and robust motion is trackable. Also we verify a performance and an accuracy of our method by demonstrating simulation and real-world experiment results.

We are currently developing a new tour guide service on mobile phone using augmented reality. Among the components for the service, in-situ annotation is one of the most important components for capturing of lots of personal experiences in the form of digital multimedia during his/her trip. Our in-situ annotation system provides several pieces of functionality that include recording MART (Mobile Augmented Reality based Tour) media format, transmitting the recorded media and retrieving the related experiences of others. MART media data should be easy for users to store, interchange and manage. Additionally, it can integrate various types of media, such as video, audio, GPS data, motion, 2D/3D graphics and annotated texts. For this, we define a new format for MART media, called MART-MAF, which can compose MPEG standards and non-MPEG standards for various kinds of media.

Recent advanced interface technologies allow the user to interact with different spaces such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Ubiquitous Computing (UC) spaces. Previously, human computer interaction (HCI) issues in VR, AR and UC have been largely carried out in separate communities. Here, we combine these three interaction spaces into a single interaction space, called Tangible Space. We propose the VARU framework which is designed for rapid prototyping of a tangible space application. It is designed to provide extensibility, flexibility and scalability. Depending on the available resources, the user could interact with either the virtual, physical or mixed environment. By having the VR, AR and UC spaces in a single platform, it gives us the possibility to explore different types of collaboration across the different spaces. As a result, we present our prototype application which is built using the VARU framework.

The UPnP (universal plug and play) defines an architecture for pervasive peer-to-peer network connectivity of intelligent appliances. It shares the service oriented architecture with emerging Web service technology, and has many advantages for future robot middleware such as automatic discovery of services and accommodation of dynamic distributed computing environment. However, the UPnP needs some additional features for being used as a robot middleware. This paper discusses them, and presents some requirements when developing a UPnP SDK for robot middleware as well. This paper also presents an experimental result of applying the UPnP to robot components

This paper describes an augmented reality (AR) multimodal interface that uses speech and paddle gestures for interaction. The application allows users to intuitively arrange virtual furniture in a virtual room using a combination of speech and gestures from a real paddle. Unlike other multimodal AR applications, the multimodal fusion is based on the combination of time-based and semantic techniques to disambiguate a users speech and gesture input. We describe our AR multimodal interface architecture and discuss how the multimodal inputs are semantically integrated into a single interpretation by considering the input time stamps, the object properties, and the user context.

This paper presents an approach to utilize UPnP as a middleware for robots. It describes the advantages of UPnP by comparing UPnP with TAO CORBA that was used in a few robot development projects. In order to consider real situation, we select a sample robot architecture, and examine the possibility of UPnP as a robot middleware with the robot architecture. This paper shows how UPnP architecture can be applied to building a robot in the view of software architecture, message mapping, realtime, network selection, performance, memory footprint, and deployment issues.

This paper concerns extracting 3D motion information from a 3D input device in real time focused to enabling effective human-computer. interaction. In particular, we develop a novel algorithm for extracting 6 degrees-of-freedom motion information from a 3D input device by employing an epipolar geometry of stereo camera, color, motion, and structure information, free from requiring the aid of camera calibration object. To extract 3D motion, we first determine the epipolar geometry of stereo camera by computing the perspective projection matrix and perspective distortion matrix. We then incorporate the proposed “Motion Adaptive Weighted Unmatched Pixel Count” algorithm performing color transformation, unmatched pixel counting, discrete Kalman filtering, and principal component analysis. The extracted 3D motion information can be applied to controlling virtual objects or aiding the navigation device that controls the viewpoint of a user in virtual reality setting. Since the stereo vision-based 3D input device is wireless, it provides users with a means for more natural and efficient interface, thus effectively realizing a feeling of immersion.

Recently we have built the largest Virtual Reality (VR) theatre in the world for the Kyongju World Culture EXPO 2000. Unlike single user VR systems, the VR theatre is characterized by a single shared screen and controlled by a kind of tightly coupled user inputs from several hundreds of people in the audience. The large computer-generated stereo images by the huge cylindrical screen provide the immersive feeling augmenting the physical audience space with of 3D virtual space. In addition to the visual immersion, the theatre provides 3D audio, vibration and olfactory display as well as keypads for the audience in their seats interactively controlling the virtual environment. This paper introduces the issues raised and addressed during the design of making such a versatile VR theatre, production and presentation of the virtual heritage at Kyongju, one thousand years ago.

Recently we have built a VR(Virtual Reality) theater in Kyongju, Korea. It combines the advantages of VR and IMAX theater. The VR theater can be characterized by a single shared screen and by multiple inputs from several hundreds of people. In this case, multi-user interaction is different from that of networked VR systems and must be reconsidered. This paper defines the multi-user interaction in such a VR theater as Audience Interaction, and discusses key issues for the implementation of the Audience Interaction. This paper also presents a real implementation example in the Kyongju VR theater.

The goal of this paper is to optimize interest management for the scalability of networked virtual environments. To remove the needless load of co-presence, the interest manager restricts the consistency of shared virtual space by means of relevance. We propose multi-resolution spatial model (MRSM) for the optimization of an interest manager, which pays attention to all participants in order to determine the limitation of consistency. They enable an interest manager to control the granularity of relevance filtering without disturbing co-presence. When an interest manager realize relevance against the movements of players, MRSM supports the detection of avatar's location and the estimation of relevance at different cost according to level-of-detail. And, this paper presents an algorithm that applies the size of neighbor to the modification of level-of-detail while the efficiency is guaranteed.

We propose a mixed environment for tele-meeting between a real human and computer-generated virtual humans. For the natural interactions among the participants, the mixed environment is augmented by the visual and aural cues that are crucial for tele-meeting. As the real and virtual worlds are seamlessly coupled, the proposed system can give the participants the sense of tele-presence. The system may be applied to immersive tele-meeting, tele-education, and interactive TV programs.

In this paper, we propose a novel virtual studio system in which an anchor in the virtual set interacts with televiewers as if they were sharing the same environment. A televiewer participates in the virtual studio environment by sensing and controlling a dummy head equipped with camera, speaker and microphones. The dummy head acts as a surrogate televiewer, providing the viewpoint experienced by the televiewer via a video camera and the sound experienced by the televiewer via microphone in its head. The anchor can not only interact with the virtual set elements but also share the physical studio with the surrogate televiewers. A televiewer with a head-mounted display (HMD) may feel immersed in the virtual studio environment seamlessly combining the virtual set elements with the real studio elements and interact with the anchor and vice versa. The proposed system consists of Interactive Virtual Studio (IVS) environment and Immersive Televiewer Environment (ITE) in which all the physical elements are collected and managed through IVS and the seamlessly mixed virtual and real elements are experienced via ITE. The essential idea is to have a dual universe where what makes a natural interface only physically should remain as physical and what makes easier to represent virtually should remain virtual and these two parallel universe should be coordinated seamlessly to provide the proper mix of the virtual and real mixed reality experience. In practice, this new interactive virtual studio for the immersive tele-meeting environment may be applied to the production of interactive TV program, tele-conferencing, tele-education and others.