Affordances and Safe Design of Assistance Wearable Virtual Environment of Gesture

Safety and reliability are the main issues for designing assistance wearable virtual environment of technical gesture in aerospace, or health application domains. That needs the integration in the same isomorphic engineering framework of human requirements, systems requirements and the rationale of their relation to the natural and artifactual environment.To explore coupling integration and design functional organization of support technical gesture systems, firstly ecological psychologyprovides usa heuristicconcept: the affordance. On the other hand mathematical theory of integrative physiology provides us scientific concepts: the stabilizing auto-association principle and functional interaction.After demonstrating the epistemological consistence of these concepts, we define an isomorphic framework to describe and model human systems integration dedicated to human in-the-loop system engineering.We present an experimental approach of safe design of assistance wearable virtual environment of gesture based in laboratory and parabolic flights. On the results, we discuss the relevance of our conceptual approach and the applications to future assistance of gesture wearable systems engineering

Reference Resolution in Multi-modal Interaction: Position paper

In this position paper we present our research on multimodal interaction in and with virtual environments. The aim of this presentation is to emphasize the necessity to spend more research on reference resolution in multimodal contexts. In multi-modal interaction the human conversational partner can apply more than one modality in conveying his or her message to the environment in which a computer detects and interprets signals from different modalities. We show some naturally arising problems and how they are treated for different contexts. No generally applicable solutions are given

Reference resolution in multi-modal interaction: Preliminary observations

In this paper we present our research on multimodal interaction in and with virtual environments. The aim of this presentation is to emphasize the necessity to spend more research on reference resolution in multimodal contexts. In multi-modal interaction the human conversational partner can apply more than one modality in conveying his or her message to the environment in which a computer detects and interprets signals from different modalities. We show some naturally arising problems but do not give general solutions. Rather we decide to perform more detailed research on reference resolution in uni-modal contexts to obtain methods generalizable to multi-modal contexts. Since we try to build applications for a Dutch audience and since hardly any research has been done on reference resolution for Dutch, we give results on the resolution of anaphoric and deictic references in Dutch texts. We hope to be able to extend these results to our multimodal contexts later

Mixed reality participants in smart meeting rooms and smart home enviroments

Human–computer interaction requires modeling of the user. A user profile typically contains preferences, interests, characteristics, and interaction behavior. However, in its multimodal interaction with a smart environment the user displays characteristics that show how the user, not necessarily consciously, verbally and nonverbally provides the smart environment with useful input and feedback. Especially in ambient intelligence environments we encounter situations where the environment supports interaction between the environment, smart objects (e.g., mobile robots, smart furniture) and human participants in the environment. Therefore it is useful for the profile to contain a physical representation of the user obtained by multi-modal capturing techniques. We discuss the modeling and simulation of interacting participants in a virtual meeting room, we discuss how remote meeting participants can take part in meeting activities and they have some observations on translating research results to smart home environments

Agent Assistance: From Problem Solving to Music Teaching

We report on our research on agents that act and behave in a web learning environment. This research is part of a general approach to agents acting and behaving in virtual environments where they are involved in providing information, performing transactions, demonstrating products and, more generally, assisting users or visitors of the web environment in doing what they want or have been asked to do. While initially we hardly provided our agents with 'teaching knowledge', we now are in the process of making such knowledge explicit, especially in models that take into account that assisting and teaching takes place in a visualized and information-rich environment. Our main (embodied) tutor-agent is called Jacob; it knows about the Towers of Hanoi, a well-known problem that is offered to CS students to learn about recursion. Other agents we are working on assist a visitor in navigating in a virtual world or help the visitor in getting information. We are now designing a music teacher - using knowledge of software engineering and how to design multi-modal interactions, from previous projects

Agent-supported cooperative learning environments

We survey our research on (3D) virtual environments inhabited by agents that help visitors to get information and to get a tusk done. The main ideas and designs can be tuned to different applications, including information und transaction services (e-commerce), collaborative work and educational domains

Position paper on realizing smart products: challenges for Semantic Web technologies

In the rapidly developing space of novel technologies that combine sensing and semantic technologies, research on smart products has the potential of establishing a research field in itself. In this paper, we synthesize existing work in this area in order to define and characterize smart products. We then reflect on a set of challenges that semantic technologies are likely to face in this domain. Finally, in order to initiate discussion in the workshop, we sketch an initial comparison of smart products and semantic sensor networks from the perspective of knowledge technologies

Auditory environmental context affects visual distance perception

In this article, we show that visual distance perception (VDP) is influenced by the auditory environmental context through reverberation-related cues. We performed two VDP experiments in two dark rooms with extremely different reverberation times: an anechoic chamber and a reverberant room. Subjects assigned to the reverberant room perceived the targets farther than subjects assigned to the anechoic chamber. Also, we found a positive correlation between the maximum perceived distance and the auditorily perceived room size. We next performed a second experiment in which the same subjects of Experiment 1 were interchanged between rooms. We found that subjects preserved the responses from the previous experiment provided they were compatible with the present perception of the environment; if not, perceived distance was biased towards the auditorily perceived boundaries of the room. Results of both experiments show that the auditory environment can influence VDP, presumably through reverberation cues related to the perception of room size.Fil: Etchemendy, Pablo Esteban. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Acústica y Percepción Sonora; ArgentinaFil: Abregú, Ezequiel Lucas. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Acústica y Percepción Sonora; ArgentinaFil: Calcagno, Esteban. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Acústica y Percepción Sonora; ArgentinaFil: Eguia, Manuel Camilo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Acústica y Percepción Sonora; ArgentinaFil: Vechiatti, Nilda. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Acústica y Percepción Sonora; ArgentinaFil: Iasi, Federico. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Acústica y Percepción Sonora; ArgentinaFil: Vergara, Ramiro Oscar. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Acústica y Percepción Sonora; Argentin

Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all