Virtual reality

Virtual reality is still in its infancy. However, many contemporary applications already have proven virtual reality to be indispensable to everyday life. For instance, the technology of virtual product design and manufacturing makes the new products better and cheaper. The applications of VR in medicine allow doctors to diagnose a disease more accurately. Without a doubt, it has and will foster more innovative research and applications. High-resolution, low-lag and low-price systems will be the focus of future virtual reality research. The technology has been infiltrated into many application fields, involving training, medical, engineering; space exploring and communication.published_or_final_versio

Realistic and interactive high-resolution 4D environments for real-time surgeon and patient interaction

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Background: Remote consultations that are realistic enough to be useful medically offer considerable clinical, logistical and cost benefits. Despite advances in virtual reality and vision hardware and software, these benefits are currently often unrealised. Method: The proposed approach combines high spatial and temporal resolution 3D and 2D machine vision with virtual reality techniques, in order to develop new environments and instruments that will enable realistic remote consultations and the generation of new types of useful clinical data. Results: New types of clinical data have been generated for skin analysis and respiration measurement; and the combination of 3D with 2D data was found to offer potential for the generation of realistic virtual consultations. Conclusion: An innovative combination of high resolution machine vision data and virtual reality online methods, promises to provide advanced functionality and significant medical benefits, particularly in regions where populations are dispersed or access to clinicians is limited. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Real-time Human Eye Resolution Ray Tracing in Mixed Reality

Mixed reality applications require natural visualizations. Ray tracing is one of the candidates for this purpose. Real-time ray tracing is slowly becoming a reality in consumer market mixed and virtual reality. This is happening due to development in display technologies and computer hardware. Some of these examples are foveated rendering enabled high resolution displays, like Varjo mixed reality headset, and parallel computing enablers, like GPUs getting ray tracing hardware acceleration enablers, such as for example Nvidia's RTX. Currently, the challenge in ray tracing is resource need especially in mixed reality where low latency is wanted and with human eye resolution where high resolution needs are obvious. In this paper, we design and implement a novel foveated ray tracing solution called Human Eye Resolution Ray Tracer (HERR) that achieves real-time frame rates in human eye resolution in mixed reality.Peer reviewe

Applications of Virtual Reality

Information Technology is growing rapidly. With the birth of high-resolution graphics, high-speed computing and user interaction devices Virtual Reality has emerged as a major new technology in the mid 90es, last century. Virtual Reality technology is currently used in a broad range of applications. The best known are games, movies, simulations, therapy. From a manufacturing standpoint, there are some attractive applications including training, education, collaborative work and learning. This book provides an up-to-date discussion of the current research in Virtual Reality and its applications. It describes the current Virtual Reality state-of-the-art and points out many areas where there is still work to be done. We have chosen certain areas to cover in this book, which we believe will have potential significant impact on Virtual Reality and its applications. This book provides a definitive resource for wide variety of people including academicians, designers, developers, educators, engineers, practitioners, researchers, and graduate students

Effects of Sensorimotor Perturbations on Balance Performance and Electrocortical Dynamics

Humans must frequently adapt their posture to prevent loss of balance. Such balance control requires complex, precisely-timed coordination among sensory input, neural processing, and motor output. Despite its importance, our current understanding of cortical involvement during balance control remains limited by traditional neuroimaging methods, which are stationary and have poor time resolution. High-density electroencephalography (EEG), combined with independent component analysis, has become a promising tool for recording cortical dynamics during balance perturbations due to its portability and high temporal resolution. Additionally, recent improvements in immersive virtual reality headsets may provide new rehabilitative paradigms, but the effects of virtual reality on balance and cortical function remain poorly understood. In my first study, I recorded high-density EEG from healthy, young adult subjects as they walked along a beam with and without virtual reality high heights exposure. While virtual high heights did induce stress, the use of virtual reality during the task increased performance errors and EEG measures of cognitive loading compared to real-world viewing without a headset. In my second study, I collected high-density EEG from healthy young adults as they walked along a treadmill-mounted balance beam to determine the effect of a transient visual perturbation on training in virtual reality. Subjects in the perturbations group improved comparably to those that trained without virtual reality, indicating that the perturbation helped subjects overcome the negative effects of virtual reality on motor learning. The perturbation primarily elicited a cognitive change. In my third study, healthy, young adult EEG was recorded during physical pull and visual rotation perturbations to tandem walking and tandem standing. I found similar electrocortical patterns for both perturbation types, but different cortical areas were involved for each. In my fourth study, I used a phantom head to validate EEG connectivity methods based on Granger causality in a real-world environment. In general, connectivity measures could determine the underlying connections, but many were susceptible to high-frequency false positives. Using data from my third study, my fifth study analyzed corticomuscular connectivity patterns following sensorimotor balance perturbations. I found strong occipito-parietal connections regardless of perturbation type, along with evidence of direct muscular control from the supplementary motor area during the standing perturbation response. Taken together, the work presented in this dissertation greatly expands upon the current knowledge of cortical processing during sensorimotor balance perturbations and the effect of such perturbations on short-term motor learning, providing multiple avenues for future exploration.PHDBiomedical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147615/1/stepeter_1.pd