A Novel Approach For Collaborative Interaction with Mixed Reality in Value Engineering

Design and engineering in real-world projects is often influenced by reduction of the problem definition, trade-offs during decision-making, possible loss of information and monetary issues like budget constraints or value-for-money problems. In many engineering projects various stakeholders take part in the project process on various levels of communication, engineering and decision-making. During project meetings and VE sessions between the different stakeholder’s, information and data is gathered and put down analogue and/or digitally, consequently stored in reports, minutes and other modes of representation. Results and conclusions derived from these interactions are often influenced by the user’s field of experience and expertise. Personal stakes, idiosyncrasy, expectations, preferences and interpretations of the various project parts could have implications, interfere or procrastinate non-functionality and possible rupture in the collaborative setting and process leading to diminished prospective project targets, requirements and solutions. We present a hybrid tool as a Virtual Assistant (VA) during a collaborative Value Engineering (VE) session in a real-world design and engineering case. The tool supports interaction and decision-making in conjunction with a physical workbench as focal point (-s), user-interfaces that intuit the user during processing. The hybrid environment allows the users to interact un-tethered with real-world materials, images, drawings, objects and drawing instruments. In course of the processing captures are made of the various topics or issues at stake and logged as iterative instances in a database. Real-time visualization on a monitor of the captured instances are shown and progressively listed in the on-screen user interface. During or after the session the stakeholders can go through the iterative time-listing and synthesize the instances according to i.e. topic, dominance, choice or to the degree of priority. After structuring and sorting the data sets the information can be exported to a data or video file. All stakeholders receive or have access to the data files and can track-back the complete process progression. The system and information generated affords reflection, knowledge sharing and cooperation. Redistribution of data sets to other stakeholders, management or third parties becomes more efficient and congruous. Our approach we took during this experiment was to [re]search the communication, interaction and decision-making progressions of the various stakeholders during the VE-session. We observed the behavioral aspects during the various stages of user interaction, following the decision making process and the use of the tool during the course of the session. We captured the complete session on video for analysis and evaluation of the VE process within a hybrid design environment

Augmented Reality in Information Systems Research: A Systematic Literature Review

Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the most prominent emerging technologies recently. This increase in recognition has happened predominantly because of the success of the smartphone game Pokémon Go . But research on AR is not a new strand of literature. Especially computer scientists investigate different technological solutions and areas of application for almost 30 years. This systematic literature review aims at analyzing, synthesizing and categorizing this strand of research in the information systems (IS) domain. We follow an established methodology for conducting the literature review ensuring rigor and replicability. We apply a keyword and backward search resulting in 28 and 118 articles, respectively. Results are categorized with regard to the focus of the research and the domain of the application being investigated. We show that research on user behavior is underrepresented in the current IS literature on AR compared to technical research, especially in the domains gaming and smartphone browsers

Software techniques for improving head mounted displays to create comfortable user experiences in virtual reality

Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) allow users to experience Virtual Reality (VR) with a great level of immersion. Advancements in hardware technologies have led to a reduction in cost of producing good quality VR HMDs bringing them out from research labs to consumer markets. However, the current generation of HMDs suffer from a few fundamental problems that can deter their widespread adoption. For this thesis, we explored two techniques to overcome some of the challenges of experiencing VR when using HMDs. When experiencing VR with HMDs strapped to your head, even simple physical tasks like drinking a beverage can be difficult and awkward. We explored mixed reality renderings that selectively incorporate the physical world into the virtual world for interactions with physical objects. We conducted a user study comparing four rendering techniques that balance immersion in the virtual world with ease of interaction with the physical world. Users of VR systems often experience vection, the perception of self-motion in the absence of any physical movement. While vection helps to improve presence in VR, it often leads to a form of motion sickness called cybersickness. Prior work has discovered that changing vection (changing the perceived speed or moving direction) causes more severe cybersickness than steady vection (walking at a constant speed or in a constant direction). Based on this idea, we tried to reduce cybersickness caused by character movements in a First Person Shooter (FPS) game in VR. We propose Rotation Blurring (RB), uniformly blurring the screen during rotational movements to reduce cybersickness. We performed a user study to evaluate the impact of RB in reducing cybersickness and found that RB led to an overall reduction in sickness levels of the participants and delayed its onset. Participants who experienced acute levels of cybersickness benefited significantly from this technique

AN EVALUATION OF AUGMENTED REALITY-BASED USER INTERFACES IN THE DESIGN PROCESS

The aim of this study is to evaluate the user interfaces that reflect different interaction layers in the context of Augmented Reality technology. Depending on the physical characteristics of human interaction with the computer, these layers were examined under four sections: Graphical User Interface (GUI), Tangible User Interface (TUI), Natural User Interface (NUI) and Spatial User Interface (SUI). In this context, a proposed Augmented Reality application interface has been developed to bridge the physical and digital environment. The use of AR-based applications in the design process provided a basis for evaluating the user interface in these interaction layers. In future studies, the interface and experience offered by this application have the potential to be supported by more comprehensive functions and a collaborative working environment

Understanding Users’ Capability to Transfer Information between Mixed and Virtual Reality: Position Estimation across Modalities and Perspectives

International audienceMixed Reality systems combine physical and digital worlds, with great potential for the future of HCI. It is possible to design systems that support flexible degrees of virtuality by combining complementary technologies. In order for such systems to succeed, users must be able to create unified mental models out of heterogeneous representations. In this paper, we present two studies focusing on the users' accuracy on heterogeneous systems using Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) and immersive Virtual Reality (VR) displays, and combining viewpoints (egocentric and exocentric). The results show robust estimation capabilities across conditions and viewpoints

Exploring context-sensitive collaborative augmented reality applications

In smart spaces limited amount of physical resources are available. Also, system should be able to offer relevant information according to user’s personal preferences. At the same time smart environments could serve many users with same requirement of relevancy and operate on limited resources. Sometimes it may not be possible to share resource in a way that respects all users without compromising collaboration. This thesis is focused on solving the problem of shared resource from the perspective of augmented reality. Selected standpoint is on mobile collaborative augmented reality and context-awareness. A small user study has been arranged as part of thesis to bring out information about user’s thoughts and emotions while using a simple prototype application. In addition, a small literature review about main concepts is conducted. There is a short analysis of some collaborative augmented reality applications presented based on recent literature. Results of the thesis show that even with small experiments it is possible to discover new information from users. Results also provide tentative answers to presented research questions. Main findings are that users have high expectations towards context-awareness and augmented reality technologies. They also expect applications to offer relevant, validated and also surprising information in each situation. This thesis has some evidence about suitability of augmented reality in context-aware applications that are targeted to support human-to human collaboration. With augmented reality it is possible to offer individual standpoints for users while they are inspecting limited, shared resources. Endorsement of user’s ability to monitor their environment is one challenge in large smart environments. Finally, software engineer can take user’s expectations into account when designing context-aware systems for smart environments. Also, developer could implement system that takes advantage of different human sensory modalities

Dealing with Short-Term Absence in Extended Reality Remote Collaboration in the Context of Archeological Planning

Archaeologists obtain and work with a large amount of data captured from archaeological sites. We assume a collaborative XR environment, where heterogeneous information about the excavation site is visualized, could improve the decision-making process when planning the next visit to the excavation site. Field research with archaeologists showed that interruptions during collaborative tasks are common, which is likely similar to most office environments. Current research related to collaborative XR environments does not address such issues. We believe that if collaborative XR is meant to become part of the future workplace, it has to address the problems arising from short-term absence. This Master thesis explores how short-term absence influences collaboration in synchronous distributed XR environments. We introduce the concept, purpose, and implementation of an absence agent to deal with short-term absence during collaborative tasks. We develop a collaborative XR environment to conduct a user study. The user study compares different designs of the absence agent. So far, due to an insufficient number of participants, we could not reliably determine a significance related to task performance or perception of presence