7,397 research outputs found
Impact of Imaging and Distance Perception in VR Immersive Visual Experience
Virtual reality (VR) headsets have evolved to include unprecedented viewing quality. Meanwhile, they have become lightweight, wireless, and low-cost, which has opened to new applications and a much wider audience. VR headsets can now provide users with greater understanding of events and accuracy of observation, making decision-making faster and more effective. However, the spread of immersive technologies has shown a slow take-up, with the adoption of virtual reality limited to a few applications, typically related to entertainment. This reluctance appears to be due to the often-necessary change of operating paradigm and some scepticism towards the "VR advantage". The need therefore arises to evaluate the contribution that a VR system can make to user performance, for example to monitoring and decision-making. This will help system designers understand when immersive technologies can be proposed to replace or complement standard display systems such as a desktop monitor.
In parallel to the VR headsets evolution there has been that of 360 cameras, which are now capable to instantly acquire photographs and videos in stereoscopic 3D (S3D) modality, with very high resolutions. 360° images are innately suited to VR headsets, where the captured view can be observed and explored through the natural rotation of the head. Acquired views can even be experienced and navigated from the inside as they are captured.
The combination of omnidirectional images and VR headsets has opened to a new way of creating immersive visual representations. We call it: photo-based VR. This represents a new methodology that combines traditional model-based rendering with high-quality omnidirectional texture-mapping. Photo-based VR is particularly suitable for applications related to remote visits and realistic scene reconstruction, useful for monitoring and surveillance systems, control panels and operator training.
The presented PhD study investigates the potential of photo-based VR representations. It starts by evaluating the role of immersion and userâs performance in today's graphical visual experience, to then use it as a reference to develop and evaluate new photo-based VR solutions. With the current literature on photo-based VR experience and associated user performance being very limited, this study builds new knowledge from the proposed assessments.
We conduct five user studies on a few representative applications examining how visual representations can be affected by system factors (camera and display related) and how it can influence human factors (such as realism, presence, and emotions). Particular attention is paid to realistic depth perception, to support which we develop target solutions for photo-based VR. They are intended to provide users with a correct perception of space dimension and objects size. We call it: true-dimensional visualization.
The presented work contributes to unexplored fields including photo-based VR and true-dimensional visualization, offering immersive system designers a thorough comprehension of the benefits, potential, and type of applications in which these new methods can make the difference.
This thesis manuscript and its findings have been partly presented in scientific publications. In particular, five conference papers on Springer and the IEEE symposia, [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], and one journal article in an IEEE periodical [6], have been published
Teleoperation Methods for High-Risk, High-Latency Environments
In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM) can enable larger-scale and longer-lived infrastructure projects in space, with interest ranging from commercial entities to the US government. Servicing, in particular, has the potential to vastly increase the usable lifetimes of satellites. However, the vast majority of spacecraft on low Earth orbit today were not designed to be serviced on-orbit. As such, several of the manipulations during servicing cannot easily be automated and instead require ground-based teleoperation.
Ground-based teleoperation of on-orbit robots brings its own challenges of high latency communications, with telemetry delays of several seconds, and difficulties in visualizing the remote environment due to limited camera views. We explore teleoperation methods to alleviate these difficulties, increase task success, and reduce operator load.
First, we investigate a model-based teleoperation interface intended to provide the benefits of direct teleoperation even in the presence of time delay. We evaluate the model-based teleoperation method using professional robot operators, then use feedback from that study to inform the design of a visual planning tool for this task, Interactive Planning and Supervised Execution (IPSE). We describe and evaluate the IPSE system and two interfaces, one 2D using a traditional mouse and keyboard and one 3D using an Intuitive Surgical da Vinci master console. We then describe and evaluate an alternative 3D interface using a Meta Quest head-mounted display. Finally, we describe an extension of IPSE to allow human-in-the-loop planning for a redundant robot. Overall, we find that IPSE improves task success rate and decreases operator workload compared to a conventional teleoperation interface
A Benchmark Comparison of Visual Place Recognition Techniques for Resource-Constrained Embedded Platforms
Autonomous navigation has become a widely researched area of expertise over the past few years, gaining a massive following due to its necessity in creating a fully autonomous robotic system. Autonomous navigation is an exceedingly difficult task to accomplish in and of itself. Successful navigation relies heavily on the ability to self-localise oneself within a given environment. Without this awareness of oneâs
own location, it is impossible to successfully navigate in an autonomous manner. Since its inception Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has become one of the most widely researched areas of autonomous navigation. SLAM focuses on self-localization within a mapped or un-mapped environment, and constructing or updating the map of oneâs surroundings. Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is an essential part of any SLAM system. VPR relies on visual cues to determine oneâs location within a mapped environment.
This thesis presents two main topics within the field of VPR. First, this thesis presents a benchmark analysis of several popular embedded platforms when performing VPR. The presented benchmark analyses six different VPR techniques
across three different datasets, and investigates accuracy, CPU usage, memory usage, processing time and power consumption. The benchmark demonstrated a clear relationship between platform architecture and the metrics measured, with platforms of the same architecture achieving comparable accuracy and algorithm efficiency.
Additionally, the Raspberry Pi platform was noted as a standout in terms of algorithm efficiency and power consumption.
Secondly, this thesis proposes an evaluation framework intended to provide information about a VPR techniqueâs useability within a real-time application. The approach
makes use of the incoming frame rate of an image stream and the VPR frame rate, the rate at which the technique can perform VPR, to determine how efficient VPR techniques would be in a real-time environment. This evaluation framework determined that CoHOG would be the most effective algorithm to be deployed in a real-time environment as it had the best ratio between computation time and accuracy
RGB-Only Reconstruction of Tabletop Scenes for Collision-Free Manipulator Control
We present a system for collision-free control of a robot manipulator that
uses only RGB views of the world. Perceptual input of a tabletop scene is
provided by multiple images of an RGB camera (without depth) that is either
handheld or mounted on the robot end effector. A NeRF-like process is used to
reconstruct the 3D geometry of the scene, from which the Euclidean full signed
distance function (ESDF) is computed. A model predictive control algorithm is
then used to control the manipulator to reach a desired pose while avoiding
obstacles in the ESDF. We show results on a real dataset collected and
annotated in our lab.Comment: ICRA 2023. Project page at https://ngp-mpc.github.io
Accurate Eye Tracking from Dense 3D Surface Reconstructions using Single-Shot Deflectometry
Eye-tracking plays a crucial role in the development of virtual reality
devices, neuroscience research, and psychology. Despite its significance in
numerous applications, achieving an accurate, robust, and fast eye-tracking
solution remains a considerable challenge for current state-of-the-art methods.
While existing reflection-based techniques (e.g., "glint tracking") are
considered the most accurate, their performance is limited by their reliance on
sparse 3D surface data acquired solely from the cornea surface. In this paper,
we rethink the way how specular reflections can be used for eye tracking: We
propose a novel method for accurate and fast evaluation of the gaze direction
that exploits teachings from single-shot phase-measuring-deflectometry (PMD).
In contrast to state-of-the-art reflection-based methods, our method acquires
dense 3D surface information of both cornea and sclera within only one single
camera frame (single-shot). Improvements in acquired reflection surface
points("glints") of factors are easily achievable. We show the
feasibility of our approach with experimentally evaluated gaze errors of only
demonstrating a significant improvement over the current
state-of-the-art
La traduzione specializzata allâopera per una piccola impresa in espansione: la mia esperienza di internazionalizzazione in cinese di Bioretics© S.r.l.
Global markets are currently immersed in two all-encompassing and unstoppable processes: internationalization and globalization. While the former pushes companies to look beyond the borders of their country of origin to forge relationships with foreign trading partners, the latter fosters the standardization in all countries, by reducing spatiotemporal distances and breaking down geographical, political, economic and socio-cultural barriers. In recent decades, another domain has appeared to propel these unifying drives: Artificial Intelligence, together with its high technologies aiming to implement human cognitive abilities in machinery. The âLanguage Toolkit â Le lingue straniere al servizio dellâinternazionalizzazione dellâimpresaâ project, promoted by the Department of Interpreting and Translation (ForlĂŹ Campus) in collaboration with the Romagna Chamber of Commerce (ForlĂŹ-Cesena and Rimini), seeks to help Italian SMEs make their way into the global market. It is precisely within this project that this dissertation has been conceived. Indeed, its purpose is to present the translation and localization project from English into Chinese of a series of texts produced by Bioretics© S.r.l.: an investor deck, the company website and part of the installation and use manual of the Aliquis© framework software, its flagship product. This dissertation is structured as follows: Chapter 1 presents the project and the company in detail; Chapter 2 outlines the internationalization and globalization processes and the Artificial Intelligence market both in Italy and in China; Chapter 3 provides the theoretical foundations for every aspect related to Specialized Translation, including website localization; Chapter 4 describes the resources and tools used to perform the translations; Chapter 5 proposes an analysis of the source texts; Chapter 6 is a commentary on translation strategies and choices
Autonomous Rock Instance Segmentation for Extra-Terrestrial Robotic Missions
The collection and analysis of extra-terrestrial matter
are two of the main motivations for space exploration missions.
Due to the inherent risks for participating astronauts during
space missions, autonomous robotic systems are often consid-
ered as a promising alternative. In recent years, many (in-
ter)national space missions containing rovers to explore celestial
bodies have been launched. Hereby, the communication delay as
well as limited bandwidth creates a need for highly self-governed
agents that require only infrequent interaction with scientists at
a ground station. Such a setting is explored in the ARCHES mis-
sion, which seeks to investigate different means of collaboration
between scientists and autonomous robots in extra-terrestrial
environments. The analog mission focuses a team of hetero-
geneous agents (two Lightweight Rover Units and ARDEA, a
drone), which together perform various complex tasks under
strict communication constraints. In this paper, we highlight
three of these tasks that were successfully demonstrated during
a one-month test mission on Mt. Etna in Sicily, Italy, which was
chosen due to its similarity to the Moon in terms of geological
structure. All three tasks have in common, that they leverage an
instance segmentation approach deployed on the rovers to detect
rocks within camera imagery. The first application is a map-
ping scheme that incorporates semantically detected rocks into
its environment model to safely navigate to points of interest.
Secondly, we present a method for the collection and extraction of in-situ samples with a rover, which uses rock detection to localize relevant candidates to grasp. For the third task, we show the usefulness of stone segmentation to autonomously conduct a spectrometer measurement experiment. We perform a throughout analysis of the presented methods and evaluate our experimental results. The demonstrations on Mt. Etna show that our approaches are well suited for navigation, geological analysis, and sample extraction tasks within autonomous robotic extra-terrestrial missions
Simultaneous Multiparametric and Multidimensional Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging
No abstract available
AI: Limits and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence
The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence
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