A Framework for Designing 3d Virtual Environments

The process of design and development of virtual environments can be supported by tools and frameworks, to save time in technical aspects and focusing on the content. In this paper we present an academic framework which provides several levels of abstraction to ease this work. It includes state-of-the-art components we devised or integrated adopting open-source solutions in order to face specific problems. Its architecture is modular and customizable, the code is open-source.\u

Human-display interaction technology: Emerging remote interfaces for pervasive display environments

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.We're living in a world where information processing isn't confined to desktop computers - it's being integrated into everyday objects and activities. Pervasive computation is human centered: it permeates our physical world, helping us achieve goals and fulfill our needs with minimum effort by exploiting natural interaction styles. Remote interaction with screen displays requires a sensor-based, multimodal, touchless approach. For example, by processing user hand gestures, this paradigm removes constraints requiring physical contact and permits natural interaction with tangible digital information. Such touchless interaction can be multimodal, exploiting the visual, auditory, and olfactory senses.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia and Amper Sistemas, SA

Virtual Exploration of Underwater Archaeological Sites : Visualization and Interaction in Mixed Reality Environments

This paper describes the ongoing developments in Photogrammetry and Mixed Reality for the Venus European project (Virtual ExploratioN of Underwater Sites, http://www.venus-project.eu). The main goal of the project is to provide archaeologists and the general public with virtual and augmented reality tools for exploring and studying deep underwater archaeological sites out of reach of divers. These sites have to be reconstructed in terms of environment (seabed) and content (artifacts) by performing bathymetric and photogrammetric surveys on the real site and matching points between geolocalized pictures. The base idea behind using Mixed Reality techniques is to offer archaeologists and general public new insights on the reconstructed archaeological sites allowing archaeologists to study directly from within the virtual site and allowing the general public to immersively explore a realistic reconstruction of the sites. Both activities are based on the same VR engine but drastically differ in the way they present information. General public activities emphasize the visually and auditory realistic aspect of the reconstruction while archaeologists activities emphasize functional aspects focused on the cargo study rather than realism which leads to the development of two parallel VR demonstrators. This paper will focus on several key points developed for the reconstruction process as well as both VR demonstrators (archaeological and general public) issues. The ?rst developed key point concerns the densi?cation of seabed points obtained through photogrammetry in order to obtain high quality terrain reproduction. The second point concerns the development of the Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) demonstrators for archaeologists designed to exploit the results of the photogrammetric reconstruction. And the third point concerns the development of the VR demonstrator for general public aimed at creating awareness of both the artifacts that were found and of the process with which they were discovered by recreating the dive process from ship to seabed

Automatic Model Based Dataset Generation for Fast and Accurate Crop and Weeds Detection

Selective weeding is one of the key challenges in the field of agriculture robotics. To accomplish this task, a farm robot should be able to accurately detect plants and to distinguish them between crop and weeds. Most of the promising state-of-the-art approaches make use of appearance-based models trained on large annotated datasets. Unfortunately, creating large agricultural datasets with pixel-level annotations is an extremely time consuming task, actually penalizing the usage of data-driven techniques. In this paper, we face this problem by proposing a novel and effective approach that aims to dramatically minimize the human intervention needed to train the detection and classification algorithms. The idea is to procedurally generate large synthetic training datasets randomizing the key features of the target environment (i.e., crop and weed species, type of soil, light conditions). More specifically, by tuning these model parameters, and exploiting a few real-world textures, it is possible to render a large amount of realistic views of an artificial agricultural scenario with no effort. The generated data can be directly used to train the model or to supplement real-world images. We validate the proposed methodology by using as testbed a modern deep learning based image segmentation architecture. We compare the classification results obtained using both real and synthetic images as training data. The reported results confirm the effectiveness and the potentiality of our approach.Comment: To appear in IEEE/RSJ IROS 201

Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement

From ‘hands up’ to ‘hands on’: harnessing the kinaesthetic potential of educational gaming

Traditional approaches to distance learning and the student learning journey have focused on closing the gap between the experience of off-campus students and their on-campus peers. While many initiatives have sought to embed a sense of community, create virtual learning environments and even build collaborative spaces for team-based assessment and presentations, they are limited by technological innovation in terms of the types of learning styles they support and develop. Mainstream gaming development – such as with the Xbox Kinect and Nintendo Wii – have a strong element of kinaesthetic learning from early attempts to simulate impact, recoil, velocity and other environmental factors to the more sophisticated movement-based games which create a sense of almost total immersion and allow untethered (in a technical sense) interaction with the games’ objects, characters and other players. Likewise, gamification of learning has become a critical focus for the engagement of learners and its commercialisation, especially through products such as the Wii Fit. As this technology matures, there are strong opportunities for universities to utilise gaming consoles to embed levels of kinaesthetic learning into the student experience – a learning style which has been largely neglected in the distance education sector. This paper will explore the potential impact of these technologies, to broadly imagine the possibilities for future innovation in higher education