Harmonize: a shared environment for extended immersive entertainment

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications are very diffuse nowadays. Moreover, recent technology innovations led to the diffusion of commercial head-mounted displays (HMDs) for immersive VR: users can enjoy entertainment activities that fill their visual fields, experiencing the sensation of physical presence in these virtual immersive environments (IEs). Even if AR and VR are mostly used separately, they can be effectively combined to provide a multi-user shared environment (SE), where two or more users perform some specific tasks in a cooperative or competitive way, providing a wider set of interactions and use cases compared to immersive VR alone. However, due to the differences between the two technologies, it is difficult to develop SEs offering a similar experience for both AR and VR users. This paper presents Harmonize, a novel framework to deploy applications based on SEs with a comparable experience for both AR and VR users. Moreover, the framework is hardware-independent and it has been designed to be as much extendable to novel hardware as possible. An immersive game has been designed to test and to evaluate the validity of the proposed framework. The assessment of the system through the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire and the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ) shows a positive evaluation

Value Propositions in the Internet of Things: A Taxonomy of B2B Smart Services

Connected and smart products give rise to smart services that leverage their advanced capabilities and promise profitable business models. However, many companies in the Internet of Things domain are still struggling to incorporate smart services into their portfolios, and more research is needed to facilitate service innovation and adoption. We, therefore, identify common characteristics of the value propositions of B2B smart services and summarize them in a taxonomy. The taxonomy development follows established methods and is based on a systematic literature review and the study of 100 empirical objects. To confirm the validity of our findings, we conduct two ex-post evaluations. Our research provides descriptive knowledge about B2B smart services that can serve as a foundation for further research on smart service innovation

Designing Attention-Centric Notification Systems: Five HCI Challenges

Through an examination of the emerging domain of cognitive systems, with a focus on attention-centric cognitive systems used for notification, this document explores the human-computer interaction challenges that must be addressed for successful interface design. This document asserts that with compatible tools and methods, user notification requirements and interface usability can be abstracted, expressed, and compared with critical parameter ratings; that is, even novice designers can assess attention cost factors to determine target parameter levels for new system development. With a general understanding of the user tasks supported by the notification system, a designer can access the repository of design knowledge for appropriate information and interaction design techniques (e.g., use of color, audio features, animation, screen size, transition of states, etc), which have analytically and empirically derived ratings. Furthermore, usability evaluation methods, provided to designers as part of the integrated system, are adaptable to specific combinations of targeted parameter levels. User testing results can be conveniently added back into the design knowledge repository and compared to target parameter levels to determine design success and build reusable HCI knowledge. This approach is discussed in greater detail as we describe five HCI challenges relating to cognitive system development: (1) convenient access to basic research and guidelines, (2) requirements engineering methods for notification interfaces, (3) better and more usable predictive modeling for pre-attentive and dual-task interfaces, (4) standard empirical evaluation procedures for notification systems, and (5) conceptual frameworks for organizing reusable design and software components. This document also describes our initial work toward building infrastructure to overcome these five challenges, focused on notification system development. We described LINK-UP, a design environment grounded on years of theory and method development within HCI, providing a mechanism to integrate interdisciplinary expertise from the cognitive systems research community. Claims allow convenient access to basic research and guidelines, while modules parallel a lifecycle development iteration and provide a process for requirements engineering guided by this basic research. The activities carried out through LINK-UP provide access to and interaction with reusable design components organized based on our framework. We think that this approach may provide the scientific basis necessary for exciting interdisciplinary advancement through many fields of design, with notification systems serving as an initial model. A version of this document will appear as chapter 3 in the book Cognitive Systems: Human Cognitive Models in Systems Design edited by Chris Forsythe, Michael Bernard, and Timothy Goldsmith resulting from a workshop led by the editors in summer 2003. The authors are grateful for the input of the workshop organizers and conference attendees in the preparation of this document

Genetic Programming for Smart Phone Personalisation

Personalisation in smart phones requires adaptability to dynamic context based on user mobility, application usage and sensor inputs. Current personalisation approaches, which rely on static logic that is developed a priori, do not provide sufficient adaptability to dynamic and unexpected context. This paper proposes genetic programming (GP), which can evolve program logic in realtime, as an online learning method to deal with the highly dynamic context in smart phone personalisation. We introduce the concept of collaborative smart phone personalisation through the GP Island Model, in order to exploit shared context among co-located phone users and reduce convergence time. We implement these concepts on real smartphones to demonstrate the capability of personalisation through GP and to explore the benefits of the Island Model. Our empirical evaluations on two example applications confirm that the Island Model can reduce convergence time by up to two-thirds over standalone GP personalisation.Comment: 43 pages, 11 figure

The augmented reality framework : an approach to the rapid creation of mixed reality environments and testing scenarios

Debugging errors during real-world testing of remote platforms can be time consuming and expensive when the remote environment is inaccessible and hazardous such as deep-sea. Pre-real world testing facilities, such as Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL), are often not available due to the time and expense necessary to create them. Testing facilities tend to be monolithic in structure and thus inflexible making complete redesign necessary for slightly different uses. Redesign is simpler in the short term than creating the required architecture for a generic facility. This leads to expensive facilities, due to reinvention of the wheel, or worse, no testing facilities. Without adequate pre-real world testing, integration errors can go undetected until real world testing where they are more costly to diagnose and rectify, e.g. especially when developing Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs). This thesis introduces a novel framework, the Augmented Reality Framework (ARF), for rapid construction of virtual environments for Augmented Reality tasks such as Pure Simulation, HIL, Hybrid Simulation and real world testing. ARF’s architecture is based on JavaBeans and is therefore inherently generic, flexible and extendable. The aim is to increase the performance of constructing, reconfiguring and extending virtual environments, and consequently enable more mature and stable systems to be developed in less time due to previously undetectable faults being diagnosed earlier in the pre-real-world testing phase. This is only achievable if test harnesses can be created quickly and easily, which in turn allows the developer to visualise more system feedback making faults easier to spot. Early fault detection and less wasted real world testing leads to a more mature, stable and less expensive system. ARF provides guidance on how to connect and configure user made components, allowing for rapid prototyping and complex virtual environments to be created quickly and easily. In essence, ARF tries to provide intuitive construction guidance which is similar in nature to LEGOR pieces which can be so easily connected to form useful configurations. ARF is demonstrated through case studies which show the flexibility and applicability of ARF to testing techniques such as HIL for UUVs. In addition, an informal study was carried out to asses the performance increases attributable to ARF’s core concepts. In comparison to classical programming methods ARF’s average performance increase was close to 200%. The study showed that ARF was incredibly intuitive since the test subjects were novices in ARF but experts in programming. ARF provides key contributions in the field of HIL testing of remote systems by providing more accessible facilities that allow new or modified testing scenarios to be created where it might not have been feasible to do so before. In turn this leads to early detection of faults which in some cases would not have ever been detected before

Improving Business Processes with the Internet of Things - A Taxonomy of IIoT Applications

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) paradigm constitutes the connection of uniquely identifiable things to the internet in an industrial context. It provides disruptive capabilities and value propositions, especially for the management and improvement of business processes. To exploit these, many companies have already implemented manifold IIoT applications along their value chain activities aiming at beneficial Business Process Improvements (BPI). However, research on IIoT-based BPI is low on theoretical insights. To add to the descriptive knowledge of the IIoT, a structured synoptic view and classification scheme are required. The work at hand addresses this need by providing a taxonomy of IIoT-based BPI applications. Based on the combination of an inductive and deductive research methodology, the created taxonomy consists of six dimensions, seven subdimensions, and 40 characteristics. The taxonomy is evaluated on a sample of 30 IIoT applications from the literature and 10 real-life applications from a market-leading company

Enhanced Virtuality: Increasing the Usability and Productivity of Virtual Environments

Mit stetig steigender Bildschirmauflösung, genauerem Tracking und fallenden Preisen stehen Virtual Reality (VR) Systeme kurz davor sich erfolgreich am Markt zu etablieren. Verschiedene Werkzeuge helfen Entwicklern bei der Erstellung komplexer Interaktionen mit mehreren Benutzern innerhalb adaptiver virtueller Umgebungen. Allerdings entstehen mit der Verbreitung der VR-Systeme auch zusätzliche Herausforderungen: Diverse Eingabegeräte mit ungewohnten Formen und Tastenlayouts verhindern eine intuitive Interaktion. Darüber hinaus zwingt der eingeschränkte Funktionsumfang bestehender Software die Nutzer dazu, auf herkömmliche PC- oder Touch-basierte Systeme zurückzugreifen. Außerdem birgt die Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Anwendern am gleichen Standort Herausforderungen hinsichtlich der Kalibrierung unterschiedlicher Trackingsysteme und der Kollisionsvermeidung. Beim entfernten Zusammenarbeiten wird die Interaktion durch Latenzzeiten und Verbindungsverluste zusätzlich beeinflusst. Schließlich haben die Benutzer unterschiedliche Anforderungen an die Visualisierung von Inhalten, z.B. Größe, Ausrichtung, Farbe oder Kontrast, innerhalb der virtuellen Welten. Eine strikte Nachbildung von realen Umgebungen in VR verschenkt Potential und wird es nicht ermöglichen, die individuellen Bedürfnisse der Benutzer zu berücksichtigen. Um diese Probleme anzugehen, werden in der vorliegenden Arbeit Lösungen in den Bereichen Eingabe, Zusammenarbeit und Erweiterung von virtuellen Welten und Benutzern vorgestellt, die darauf abzielen, die Benutzerfreundlichkeit und Produktivität von VR zu erhöhen. Zunächst werden PC-basierte Hardware und Software in die virtuelle Welt übertragen, um die Vertrautheit und den Funktionsumfang bestehender Anwendungen in VR zu erhalten. Virtuelle Stellvertreter von physischen Geräten, z.B. Tastatur und Tablet, und ein VR-Modus für Anwendungen ermöglichen es dem Benutzer reale Fähigkeiten in die virtuelle Welt zu übertragen. Des Weiteren wird ein Algorithmus vorgestellt, der die Kalibrierung mehrerer ko-lokaler VR-Geräte mit hoher Genauigkeit und geringen Hardwareanforderungen und geringem Aufwand ermöglicht. Da VR-Headsets die reale Umgebung der Benutzer ausblenden, wird die Relevanz einer Ganzkörper-Avatar-Visualisierung für die Kollisionsvermeidung und das entfernte Zusammenarbeiten nachgewiesen. Darüber hinaus werden personalisierte räumliche oder zeitliche Modifikationen vorgestellt, die es erlauben, die Benutzerfreundlichkeit, Arbeitsleistung und soziale Präsenz von Benutzern zu erhöhen. Diskrepanzen zwischen den virtuellen Welten, die durch persönliche Anpassungen entstehen, werden durch Methoden der Avatar-Umlenkung (engl. redirection) kompensiert. Abschließend werden einige der Methoden und Erkenntnisse in eine beispielhafte Anwendung integriert, um deren praktische Anwendbarkeit zu verdeutlichen. Die vorliegende Arbeit zeigt, dass virtuelle Umgebungen auf realen Fähigkeiten und Erfahrungen aufbauen können, um eine vertraute und einfache Interaktion und Zusammenarbeit von Benutzern zu gewährleisten. Darüber hinaus ermöglichen individuelle Erweiterungen des virtuellen Inhalts und der Avatare Einschränkungen der realen Welt zu überwinden und das Erlebnis von VR-Umgebungen zu steigern

Articulated Object Tracking from Visual Sensory Data for Robotic Manipulation

Roboti juhtimine liigestatud objekti manipuleerimisel vajab robustset ja täpsetobjekti oleku hindamist. Oleku hindamise tulemust kasutatakse tagasisidena vastavate roboti liigutuste arvutamisel soovitud manipulatsiooni tulemuse saavutamiseks. Selles töös uuritakse robootilise manipuleerimise visuaalse tagasiside teostamist. Tehisnägemisele põhinevat servode liigutamist juhitakse ruutplaneerimise raamistikus võimaldamaks humanoidsel robotil läbi viia objekti manipulatsiooni. Esitletakse tehisnägemisel põhinevat liigestatud objekti oleku hindamise meetodit. Me näitame väljapakutud meetodi efektiivsust mitmel erineval eksperimendil HRP-4 humanoidse robotiga. Teeme ka ettepaneku ühendada masinõppe ja serva tuvastamise tehnikad liigestatud objekti manipuleerimise markeerimata visuaalse tagasiside teostamiseks reaalajas.In order for a robot to manipulate an articulated object, it needs to know itsstate (i.e. its pose); that is to say: where and in which configuration it is. Theresult of the object’s state estimation is to be provided as a feedback to the control to compute appropriate robot motion and achieve the desired manipulation outcome. This is the main topic of this thesis, where articulated object state estimation is solved using visual feedback. Vision based servoing is implemented in a Quadratic Programming task space control framework to enable humanoid robot to perform articulated objects manipulation. We thoroughly developed our methodology for vision based articulated object state estimation on these bases.We demonstrate its efficiency by assessing it on several real experiments involving the HRP-4 humanoid robot. We also propose to combine machine learning and edge extraction techniques to achieve markerless, realtime and robust visual feedback for articulated object manipulation