An efficient telemetry system for restoring sight

PhD ThesisThe human nervous system can be damaged as a result of disease or trauma, causing conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. Most people try pharmaceuticals as a primary method of treatment. However, drugs cannot restore some cases, such as visual disorder. Alternatively, this impairment can be treated with electronic neural prostheses. A retinal prosthesis is an example of that for restoring sight, but it is not efficient and only people with retinal pigmentosa benefit from it. In such treatments, stimulation of the nervous system can be achieved by electrical or optical means. In the latter case, the nerves need to be rendered light sensitive via genetic means (optogenetics). High radiance photonic devices are then required to deliver light to the target tissue. Such optical approaches hold the potential to be more effective while causing less harm to the brain tissue. As these devices are implanted in tissue, wireless means need to be used to communicate with them. For this, IEEE 802.15.6 or Bluetooth protocols at 2.4GHz are potentially compatible with most advanced electronic devices, and are also safe and secure. Also, wireless power delivery can operate the implanted device. In this thesis, a fully wireless and efficient visual cortical stimulator was designed to restore the sight of the blind. This system is likely to address 40% of the causes of blindness. In general, the system can be divided into two parts, hardware and software. Hardware parts include a wireless power transfer design, the communication device, power management, a processor and the control unit, and the 3D design for assembly. The software part contains the image simplification, image compression, data encoding, pulse modulation, and the control system. Real-time video streaming is processed and sent over Bluetooth, and data are received by the LPC4330 six layer implanted board. After retrieving the compressed data, the processed data are again sent to the implanted electrode/optrode to stimulate the brain’s nerve cells

Triangle Dropping: An occluded-geometry predictor for energy-efficient mobile GPUs

This article proposes a novel micro-architecture approach for mobile GPUs aimed at early removing the occluded geometry in a scene by leveraging frame-to-frame coherence, thus reducing the overall energy consumption. Mobile GPUs commonly implement a Tile-Based Rendering (TBR) architecture that differentiates two main phases: the Geometry Pipeline, where all the geometry of a scene is processed; and the Raster Pipeline, where primitives are rendered in a framebuffer. After the Geometry Pipeline, only non-culled primitives inside the camera’s frustum are stored into the Parameter Buffer, a data structure stored in DRAM. However, among the non-culled primitives there is a significant amount that are rendered but non-visible at all, resulting in useless computations. On average, 60% of those primitives are completely occluded in our benchmarks. Despite TBR architectures use on-chip caches for the Parameter Buffer, about 46% of the DRAM traffic still comes from accesses to such buffer. The proposed Triangle Dropping technique leverages the visibility information computed along the Raster Pipeline to predict the primitives’ visibility in the next frame to early discard those that will be totally occluded, drastically reducing Parameter Buffer accesses. On average, our approach achieves overall 14.5% energy savings, 28.2% energy-delay product savings, and a speedup of 20.2%.This work has been supported by the CoCoUnit ERC Advanced Grant of the EU’s Horizon 2020 program (grant no. 833057), the Spanish State Research Agency (MCIN/AEI) under grant PID2020-113172RB-I00 (AEI/FEDER, EU), and the ICREA Academia program. D. Corbalán-Navarro has been also supported by a PhD research fellowship from the University of Murcia’s “Plan Propio de Investigación.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Superar el límite de la pantalla:el futuro integrado del diseño industrial e innovación de la interfaz

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Bellas Artes, leída el 27-11-2019The goals of this thesis are to streamline the design process of CDDs for both theirhardware and software, simplify the process of their conception, creation andproduction, motivate the design and interactive innovations for the next generationof CDDs.Starting with the process of investigating the design history of CDDs, we noticed theincreasing bi-directional influence between the graphical interface design and theindustrial design of these products. We started to work on the hypothesis:“A connection point between classical industrial design theories and moderninnovations in the world of interface design can be found, and the future of CDDrequires a universal design system for both its hardware and software.”In order to put our hypothesis into practice, it is important to clarify the generic andspecific objectives...El fin de esta tesis es mejorar el proceso de diseño de DDC tanto para su hardware como para su software, simplificar el proceso de concepción, creación y producción,así como motivar el diseño y las innovaciones interactivas para la próxima generación de DDC. Comenzando con un proceso de investigación que respete la historia del diseño de los DDC, notamos un incremento en la influencia bidireccional entre el diseño de interfaz gráfica y el diseño industrial de estos productos. Trabajamos sobre esta hipótesis: “Se puede encontrar un punto de conexión entre las teorías clásicas de diseño industrial y las innovaciones modernas en el mundo del diseño de interfaz. El futuro de los DDC requiere un sistema de diseño unificado para ambos: hardware y software.”Para poner nuestra hipótesis en práctica, es importante aclarar los objetivos genéricos y específicos...Fac. de Bellas ArtesTRUEunpu

U-DiVE: Design and evaluation of a distributed photorealistic virtual reality environment

This dissertation presents a framework that allows low-cost devices to visualize and interact with photorealistic scenes. To accomplish this task, the framework makes use of Unity’s high-definition rendering pipeline, which has a proprietary Ray Tracing algorithm, and Unity’s streaming package, which allows an application to be streamed within its editor. The framework allows the composition of a realistic scene using a Ray Tracing algorithm, and a virtual reality camera with barrel shaders, to correct the lens distortion needed for the use on an inexpensive cardboard. It also includes a method to collect the mobile device’s spatial orientation through a web browser to control the user’s view, delivered via WebRTC. The proposed framework can produce low-latency, realistic and immersive environments to be accessed through low-cost HMDs and mobile devices. To evaluate the structure, this work includes the verification of the frame rate achieved by the server and mobile device, which should be higher than 30 FPS for a smooth experience. In addition, it discusses whether the overall quality of experience is acceptable by evaluating the delay of image delivery from the server up to the mobile device, in face of user’s movement. Our tests showed that the framework reaches a mean latency around 177 (ms) with household Wi-Fi equipment and a maximum latency variation of 77.9 (ms), among the 8 scenes tested.Esta dissertação apresenta um framework que permite que dispositivos de baixo custo visualizem e interajam com cenas fotorrealísticas. Para realizar essa tarefa, o framework faz uso do pipeline de renderização de alta definição do Unity, que tem um algoritmo de rastreamento de raio proprietário, e o pacote de streaming do Unity, que permite o streaming de um aplicativo em seu editor. O framework permite a composição de uma cena realista usando um algoritmo de Ray Tracing, e uma câmera de realidade virtual com shaders de barril, para corrigir a distorção da lente necessária para usar um cardboard de baixo custo. Inclui também um método para coletar a orientação espacial do dispositivo móvel por meio de um navegador Web para controlar a visão do usuário, entregue via WebRTC. O framework proposto pode produzir ambientes de baixa latência, realistas e imersivos para serem acessados por meio de HMDs e dispositivos móveis de baixo custo. Para avaliar a estrutura, este trabalho considera a verificação da taxa de quadros alcançada pelo servidor e pelo dispositivo móvel, que deve ser superior a 30 FPS para uma experiência fluida. Além disso, discute se a qualidade geral da experiência é aceitável, ao avaliar o atraso da entrega das imagens desde o servidor até o dispositivo móvel, em face da movimentação do usuário. Nossos testes mostraram que o framework atinge uma latência média em torno dos 177 (ms) com equipamentos wi-fi de uso doméstico e uma variação máxima das latências igual a 77.9 (ms), entre as 8 cenas testadas

Interaction Design in Virtual Reality Game Using Arduino Sensors

Virtual reality (VR) is the use of computer simulation to produce a virtual world, providing users with a variety of sensory simulation, which enables users to feel as though they are in the virtual world. Currently, mature three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics technology can present realistic 3D visual effects. However, system interaction is still mainly through specific interactive devices for system control, such as the Vive controller for HTC Vive. In order to enable the user to control the game intuitively, this study employed a currently popular Arduino technology to carry out design of interactive control devices for virtual reality. The interaction design in this study is based mainly on a virtual reality baseball game. To let users carry out swings more intuitively in the baseball game, this study used actual baseball bat–installed sensors, called “Arduino baseball bat,” as a replacement for the VR joystick. The implemented system was roughly divided into two components: a transmitter system module on the bat and a receiver system module connecting to the server host. According to the results, our system cannot only realistically display 3D visual effects, but the Arduino baseball bat can also provide intuitive real-time game interaction for the user