Today smells are used for communicating information about products as household cleaners and food. However, smells can be also applied to any kind of products. Several researches have focused on integrating smells in virtual environments. The research questions addressed in this work concern whether Virtual Prototypes, including the sense of smell, can be used for evaluating products as effectively as studies performed in real environments, and whether smells can increase the users' sense of presence in the virtual environment. For this purpose, an experimental framework including a wearable olfactory display has been developed, and experimental tests have been performed.

The study of new systems for supporting upper limb rehabilitation is of primary importance, due to the high number of people in need of rehabilitation and the limited effectiveness of most of the current systems. The research work described in this paper proposes a VR system for upper-limb rehabilitation that is immersive, is based on hand gestures to interact with virtual objects, and which can deliver odours when a goal is reached.

The preliminary study described in this paper is about the assessment of the control parameters of a non-grounded haptic device giving kinaesthetic stimuli to indicate to the user a direction to follow to reach a target location. The haptic sensation is created by tilting one or more rotating flywheels along an axis, controlling the direction and the amount of tilt, the velocity of the tilt (during the pulse and the repositioning of the flywheel), the frequency of pulses. The current prototype has only one flywheel and is able to tilt along a single axis, thus indicating only “right” or “left” direction. The experiments performed with the prototype allowed us to define a set of requirements (torque produced, duration of the stimuli) for a more complex prototype (2 flywheels and 2 DOF) to be developed and tested as future work.

This paper describes a framework based on a publish/subscribe paradigm for interprocess communication based on XML messages sent over a TCP/IP connection. The framework manages the exchange of data within the clients of a system and permits the definition of a specific behavior for each client using a finite-state machine approach. Whilst the server-side of the framework is able to receive and dispatch events and data, the client-side of the framework is modeled as a finite-state machine able to perform state transitions after receiving the correct message. This architecture permits the loose-coupling between producers and consumers of data and the bidirectional mapping between the design of the behavior of a system and its implementation.

The construction of a truly USER-FRIENDLY CAD system requires the acquisition and management of a tremendous amount of information which cannot be. and must not be. directly requested from the user, but which has to be obtained by intelligently interpreting the sequence of operations performed by him. The system described here is out forward as a USERFRIENDLY tool for the definition. storage and modification of technical drawings in parametric form. The system that has been implemented (GIPS Graphic Interactive Parametric System) assists the user during the steps of definition and modification. taking advantage of the abiIity to interpret the procedure the user follows in describing the object he wants to design.

This paper describes an interactive drafting system based on two dimensional primitives and logic operators.