TOWARDS GESTURE-BASED MULTI-USER INTERACTIONS IN COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

We present a virtual reality (VR) setup that enables multiple users to participate in collaborative virtual environments and interact via gestures. A collaborative VR session is established through a network of users that is composed of a server and a set of clients. The server manages the communication amongst clients and is created by one of the users. Each user's VR setup consists of a Head Mounted Display (HMD) for immersive visualisation, a hand tracking system to interact with virtual objects and a single-hand joypad to move in the virtual environment. We use Google Cardboard as a HMD for the VR experience and a Leap Motion for hand tracking, thus making our solution low cost. We evaluate our VR setup though a forensics use case, where real-world objects pertaining to a simulated crime scene are included in a VR environment, acquired using a smartphone-based 3D reconstruction pipeline. Users can interact using virtual gesture-based tools such as pointers and rulers

Viewing the Future? Virtual Reality In Journalism

Journalism underwent a flurry of virtual reality content creation, production and distribution starting in the final months of 2015. The New York Times distributed more than 1 million cardboard virtual reality viewers and released an app showing a spherical video short about displaced refugees. The Los Angeles Times landed people next to a crater on Mars. USA TODAY took visitors on a ride-along in the "Back to the Future" car on the Universal Studios lot and on a spin through Old Havana in a bright pink '57 Ford. ABC News went to North Korea for a spherical view of a military parade and to Syria to see artifacts threatened by war. The Emblematic Group, a company that creates virtual reality content, followed a woman navigating a gauntlet of anti- abortion demonstrators at a family planning clinic and allowed people to witness a murder-suicide stemming from domestic violence.In short, the period from October 2015 through February 2016 was one of significant experimentation with virtual reality (VR) storytelling. These efforts are part of an initial foray into determining whether VR is a feasible way to present news. The year 2016 is shaping up as a period of further testing and careful monitoring of potential growth in the use of virtual reality among consumers

Design and Evaluation of Neurosurgical Training Simulator

Surgical simulators are becoming more important in surgical training. Consumer smartphone technology has improved to allow deployment of VR applications and are now being targeted for medical training simulators. A surgical simulator has been designed using a smartphone, Google cardboard 3D glasses, and the Leap Motion (LM) hand controller. Two expert and 16 novice users were tasked with completing the same pointing tasks using both the LM and the medical simulator NeuroTouch. The novice users had an accuracy of 0.2717 bits (SD 0.3899) and the experts had an accuracy of 0.0925 bits (SD 0.1210) while using the NeuroTouch. Novices and experts improved their accuracy to 0.3585 bits (SD 0.4474) and 0.4581 bits (SD 0.3501) while using the LM. There were some tracking problems with the AR display and LM. Users were intrigued by the AR display and most preferred the LM, as they found it to have better usability

Exploring Oculus Rift: A Historical Analysis of the ‘Virtual Reality’ Paradigm

This paper will first provide background information about Virtual Reality in order to better analyze its development throughout history and into the future. Next, this essay begins an in-depth historical analysis of how virtual reality has developed prior to 1970, a pivotal year in Virtual Reality history, followed by an exploration of how this development paradigm shifted between the 1970\u27s and the turn of the century. The historical analysis of virtual reality is concluded by covering the modern period from 2000-present. Finally, this paper examines the layout of the virtual reality field in respect to he history and innovations presented

Merged reality for everyone

This article addresses some interesting challenges and business opportunities within the promising merged reality ecosystem, which offers the vision of bringing together virtual, augmented and physical realities, seamlessly. The article also links the current status of this field with exploratory research and development work carried out by Altice Labs.Altice Labsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Virtual Reality Interfaces for Product Design: Finding User Interface solutions for design creation within Virtual Reality

The focus of Virtual Reality has gone from research to widespread adoption in entertainment and practical directions, like automotive design and architectural visualization. With that, we have to take into consideration the best way to give in-experience control to the user and the interaction within the interface. Recent studies explore the ergonomic considerations and zones of content for VR interfaces. But Virtual Reality interaction design has a long way to go and nowadays is done mainly like a projection of 2D screens, with planar interfaces in the 3D space, almost ignoring the immersive potential of the Virtual Reality medium (Alger 2015; Google Developers 2017). Designers that work with 3D objects might find it difficult to make design decisions and validate their concepts based on context and empathy. To help with this, they often prototype, which can take a great deal of time and effort. Virtual reality can be a tool that improves the process and gives the designer an unconstrained and flexible canvas. By reimagining interactions for Virtual Reality, this thesis aims to create interface tools that help designers explore shape and manipulate their designs

Exploring the Front Touch Interface for Virtual Reality Headsets

In this paper, we propose a new interface for virtual reality headset: a touchpad in front of the headset. To demonstrate the feasibility of the front touch interface, we built a prototype device, explored VR UI design space expansion, and performed various user studies. We started with preliminary tests to see how intuitively and accurately people can interact with the front touchpad. Then, we further experimented various user interfaces such as a binary selection, a typical menu layout, and a keyboard. Two-Finger and Drag-n-Tap were also explored to find the appropriate selection technique. As a low-cost, light-weight, and in low power budget technology, a touch sensor can make an ideal interface for mobile headset. Also, front touch area can be large enough to allow wide range of interaction types such as multi-finger interactions. With this novel front touch interface, we paved a way to new virtual reality interaction methods