A telepresence environment for concurrent life-cycle design and construction

Construction projects normally involve transient 'virtual organisations', where a multidisciplinary project team works together on the design and construction of a facility. Many of these participants often work independently while taking decisions that inevitably affect others. The research described in the thesis involved examining the adoption of concurrent engineering (CE) principles by the construction industry as a way to reduce the problems posed by the fragmentation of the industry, and to enhance its competitiveness. An important aspect of concurrent engineering in construction is the need for effective communication of design information between all members of the project team and across all stages of the constructed facility's life-cycle. The thesis describes the development of a communications infrastructure for Concurrent Life-Cycle Design and Construction. [Continues.

Collaborative virtual reality platform for visualizing space data and mission planning

This paper presents the system architecture of a collaborative virtual environment in which distributed multidisciplinary teams involved in space exploration activities come together and explore areas of scientific interest of a planet for future missions. The aim is to reduce the current challenges of distributed scientific and engineering meetings that prevent the exploitation of their collaborative potential, as, at present, expertise, tools and datasets are fragmented. This paper investigates the functional characteristics of a software framework that addresses these challenges following the design science research methodology in the context of the space industry and research. An implementation of the proposed architecture and a validation process with end users, based on the execution of different use cases, are described. These use cases cover relevant aspects of real science analysis and operation, including planetary data visualization, as the system aims at being used in future European missions. This validation suggests that the system has the potential to enhance the way space scientists will conduct space science research in the future

Authenticated Digital Avatars on Metaverse by Cyber Security Procedures

Metaverse is the  next generation Internet, aims to build a fully immersive, hyper spatiotemporal and self sustaining virtual shared space for humans to play, work, shop and socialize. In metaverse, users are  represented as digital avatars and using identity, user can shuttle across various virtual worlds (i.e., sub-metaverses) to experience a digital life, as well as make digital creations and economic interactions supported by physical infrastructures and the metaverse engine. Virtual reality headsets are the main devices used to access the Metaverse. Privacy and security concerns of the metaverse. The users need to verify their identity to log into the metaverse platforms, and the security of this phase becomes vital. In this paper, the user authentication methods such as Information-based authentication, biometric based authentication, and multi-model methods are reviewed and compared in terms of users security but in some cases these methods are failed to secure from cyber attacks. In this paper, we proposed,Token-based authentication method to enhance the security for the users to access and work on  the virtual environment

Compute- and Data-Intensive Networks: The Key to the Metaverse

The worlds of computing, communication, and storage have for a long time been treated separately, and even the recent trends of cloud computing, distributed computing, and mobile edge computing have not fundamentally changed the role of networks, still designed to move data between end users and pre-determined computation nodes, without true optimization of the end-to-end compute-communication process. However, the emergence of Metaverse applications, where users consume multimedia experiences that result from the real-time combination of distributed live sources and stored digital assets, has changed the requirements for, and possibilities of, systems that provide distributed caching, computation, and communication. We argue that the real-time interactive nature and high demands on data storage, streaming rates, and processing power of Metaverse applications will accelerate the merging of the cloud into the network, leading to highly-distributed tightly-integrated compute- and data-intensive networks becoming universal compute platforms for next-generation digital experiences. In this paper, we first describe the requirements of Metaverse applications and associated supporting infrastructure, including relevant use cases. We then outline a comprehensive cloud network flow mathematical framework, designed for the end-to-end optimization and control of such systems, and show numerical results illustrating its promising role for the efficient operation of Metaverse-ready networks

Assemble.live: Designing for Schisms in Large Groups in Audio/Video Calls

Although new communication technologies have compressed the space and latency between participants, leading to new forms of computer mediated interaction that scale with the number of participants [Klein, 1999], there still exist no audio/video calling solutions that can accommodate the type of group conversation that takes place in a group of four or more. Groups of this size frequently schism, forming two or more sub-conversations with their own independently operating turn taking systems [Egbert, 1997]. This paper proposes that traditional audio/video calling fails to accommodate schisms because a) there is no way to signal intended recipiency, b) there exists only one, largely blocking audio channel, and c) leaving and joining audio/video calls is too difficult to schism. A solution is developed called assemble.live that uses enables users to move throughout a virtual room, and is designed to enable multiple sub-conversations to emerge. From a few recorded sessions of use, it is clear that while this enables multiple conversations to emerge, its affordances for signaling intended recipiency are insufficient

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Metaverse

Non peer reviewe

Social Loafing Impact on Collaboration in 3D Virtual Worlds: An Empirical Study

Collaboration is increasingly distributed and influenced by the technologies involved in the workspace. 3D Virtual Worlds (VWs) are rich and promising collaboration tools that provide highly interactive environments. Several researchers and practitioners are particularly interested in the potential of these new media to support collaborative practices. However, the literature does not provide yet satisfactory and accurate response to companies about impacts of these technologies’ use for professional collaboration purposes. The present research attempts to address this gap and looks at this effect more closely. This research in progress presents the research model and research methodology used. The research model hypothesizes social loafing as substantial factor that determines team members’ involvement in knowledge sharing and application processes. In the future, this empirical study suggests quantitative assessment of the impact of 3D virtual world use in workspace on knowledge sharing and knowledge application

GauHuman: Articulated Gaussian Splatting from Monocular Human Videos

We present, GauHuman, a 3D human model with Gaussian Splatting for both fast training (1 ~ 2 minutes) and real-time rendering (up to 189 FPS), compared with existing NeRF-based implicit representation modelling frameworks demanding hours of training and seconds of rendering per frame. Specifically, GauHuman encodes Gaussian Splatting in the canonical space and transforms 3D Gaussians from canonical space to posed space with linear blend skinning (LBS), in which effective pose and LBS refinement modules are designed to learn fine details of 3D humans under negligible computational cost. Moreover, to enable fast optimization of GauHuman, we initialize and prune 3D Gaussians with 3D human prior, while splitting/cloning via KL divergence guidance, along with a novel merge operation for further speeding up. Extensive experiments on ZJU_Mocap and MonoCap datasets demonstrate that GauHuman achieves state-of-the-art performance quantitatively and qualitatively with fast training and real-time rendering speed. Notably, without sacrificing rendering quality, GauHuman can fast model the 3D human performer with ~13k 3D Gaussians.Comment: project page: https://skhu101.github.io/GauHuman/; code: https://github.com/skhu101/GauHuma

An application service provider infrastructure for shared workspaces in Internet-based collaborative design

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-107).For architectural, engineering and construction projects involving transient 'virtual organizations' composed of non-collocated team-members, the adoption of concurrent design principles is seen as vital. An important aspect of concurrent design is the need for an effective communications infrastructure between team members. Traditionally, such communication has been handled through person-to-person meetings, however the complexity of modern projects has grown and as a result, reliance on new information and communications technologies is becoming increasingly necessary. Hence, within a concurrent design setting, there is the need for an integrated information and collaboration environment that will create a persistent shared workspace to support interaction between project personnel throughout all phases of the project. This research explores computer-supported mechanisms for enhancing distributed design collaboration. The goal of this thesis is to develop a set of requirements, system architecture and an early system prototype to facilitate computer-supported collaboration among distributed teams. The prototype will consist of a persistent shared workspace system built from the integration of complementary collaborative applications. These applications are the CAIRO system, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the VNC system developed at the Olivetti Research Laboratory.by Jaime Solari.S.M

THEORETICAL MODEL OF MEDIATED SHARED SPACE FOR SUPPORTING INFORMAL INTERACTION AT A DISTANCE

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH