In a virtual reality (VR) environment, where visual stimuli predominate over other stimuli, the user experiences cybersickness because the balance of the body collapses due to self-motion. Accordingly, the VR experience is accompanied by unavoidable sickness referred to as visually induced motion sickness (VIMS). In this article, our primary purpose is to simultaneously estimate the VIMS score by referring to the content and calculate the temporally induced VIMS sensitivity. To seek our goals, we propose a novel architecture composed of two consecutive networks: 1) neurological representation and 2) spatiotemporal representation. In the first stage, the network imitates and learns the neurological mechanism of motion sickness. In the second stage, the significant feature of the spatial and temporal domains is expressed over the generated frames. After the training procedure, our model can calculate VIMS sensitivity for each frame of the VR content by using the weakly supervised approach for unannotated temporal VIMS scores. Furthermore, we release a massive VR content database. In the experiments, the proposed framework demonstrates excellent performance for VIMS score prediction compared with existing methods, including feature engineering and deep learning-based approaches. Furthermore, we propose a way to visualize the cognitive response to visual stimuli and demonstrate that the induced sickness tends to be activated in a similar tendency, as done in clinical studies.

Space planning is one of the popular applications of VR technology including interior design, architecture design, and factory layout. In order to provide easier and efficient methods to accommodate physical objects into virtual space under plan, we suggest applying mixed reality (MR) interface. Our MR system consists of a video see-through display with a touch screen interface, mounted on a mobile platform, and we use screen space 3D manipulations to arrange virtual objects within the MR scene. Investigating the interface with our prototype implementation, we are convinced that our system will help users to design spaces in more easy and effective way.

In this paper, we introduce a method for design evaluation of mobile devices using virtual reality based prototypes. For this, we present technologies for a classification of design parameters and for visualizing mobile devices with high quality 3D data. Also, we describe an implementation method for natural simulation and interaction of product functions.

We present a virtual reality (VR) system that simulates the situation of ship block spray painting. The system was developed under demands from ship building industry for training purpose. We designed an immersive stereo display platform, a realistic spray painting rendering technique and intuitive user interface to match with the real working environment. The system is currently under user-test in the ship building company with receiving positive responses.

Visual information has the greatest effect among five senses of human. Therefore, the satisfaction of visual information for representing virtual environments is necessary for good results in information acquisition, virtual training, virtual prototyping, etc. Recently, although there have been a large variety of display systems, there is no such a fully immersive and clearly projected display with high-resolution. In this paper, we describe a hemispherical display which supports a fully immersive experience and high-resolution images. In our display system for generating high-resolution images, a virtual scene image is divided into several pieces those are rendered by a PC cluster and projected with multiple projectors. In this paper, we also describe the PC cluster and projectors designed for optimized performance and a convenient control.

We propose an EMG-based mouse control method for helping the tetraplegic use computer by teeth-clenching. In this paper, we investigate useful actions and muscles as a means of the input method for the tetraplegic and a method of processing EMG signals for the purpose of controlling mouse control from the recognized patterns. Also, we developed a prototype system for acquiring and processing such EMGs based upon the specifications obtained from the study. Our experimental result shows that the proposed method shows promise of controlling the position of a mouse pointer and clicking mouse buttons in an operating system. In fact, our prototype system offers a great deal of convenience in wearing the prototype on a user’s forehead. We verified our result by comparing the performance of the proposed system to that of a conventional mouse.

This paper presents a generalized framework for dynamic simulation realized in a prototype simulator called the Interactive Generalized Motion Simulator (I-GMS), which can simulate motions of multirigid-body systems with contact interaction in virtual environments. I-GMS is designed to meet two important goals: generality and interactivity. By generality, we mean a dynamic simulator which can easily support various systems of rigid bodies, ranging from a single free-flying rigid object to complex linkages such as those needed for robotic systems or human body simulation. To provide this generality, we have developed I-GMS in an object-oriented framework. The user interactivity is supported through a haptic interface for articulated bodies, introducing interactive dynamic simulation schemes. This user-interaction is achieved by performing push and pull operations via the PHANToM haptic device, which runs as an integrated part of I-GMS. Also, a hybrid scheme was used for simulating internal contacts (between bodies in the multirigid-body system) in the presence of friction, which could avoid the nonexistent solution problem often faced when solving contact problems with Coulomb friction. In our hybrid scheme, two impulse-based methods are exploited so that different methods are applied adaptively, depending on whether the current contact situation is characterized as "bouncing" or "steady." We demonstrate the user-interaction capability of I-GMS through on-line editing of trajectories of a 6-degree of freedom (dof) articulated structure.

This paper introduces a hybrid scheme for simulating rigid bodies in contact. We use an adaptive strategy for handling two different contact situations, 'bouncing' and 'steady'. To handle contact for rigid bodies, we use two impulse-based methods to explicitly or implicitly compute impulses due to collision impact. These two methods are used so that different impulse methods are applied adaptively depending on the contact situations. Our experiments show that our simple adaptive simulation scheme enables efficient and physically-correct dynamic simulation involving rigid-body contacts with Coulomb friction. This adaptive scheme was incorporated into our dynamic simulator, called I-GMS, which supports various types of simulations. We demonstrate the simulation results of our scheme using a ball falling on a flat surface in three dimensions.

This paper introduces I-GMS, a dynamic simulator that accommodates various systems of rigid bodies, ranging from a single free flying rigid object to complex linkages such as those needed for robotic systems or human body simulation. I-GMS's object-oriented design provides a generic framework for representing various types of rigid body systems, and exploits virtual functions to apply common kinematic and dynamic functionalities to them. Moreover, I-GMS supports interactive simulation so that it easily incorporates user-input for the on-line editing and modification of trajectories. User-interaction is achieved with the PHANToM haptic device which runs as an integrated part of I-GMS. We demonstrate I-GMS's capability to simulate general multi-rigid-body systems through examples that include a free-falling sphere, a robot manipulator, and a human body model with 36 degrees of freedom (dof). We present a simple example of interactive simulation for a 3-dof robot manipulator.

Describes an interactive dynamic simulator for virtual environments which allows user interaction via a haptic interface. The interactive simulation is performed in our testbed dynamic simulator I-GMS (Interactive Generalized Motion Simulator), which has been developed in an object-oriented framework for simulating motions of free bodies and complex linkages such as those needed for robotic systems or human body simulation. User interaction is achieved by performing push and pull operations via the PHANToM haptic device which runs as on integrated part of I-GMS. We demonstrate the user interaction capability of I-GMS through online editing of trajectories for a 6-DOF robot manipulator.