An Immersive Telepresence System using RGB-D Sensors and Head Mounted Display

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to ef- fectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The highly interactive and flexible environment can capture and sustain more student attention than the traditional classroom setting and, thus, delivers a compelling experience to the students. Our main focus here is to investigate possible solutions for the system design and implementation and devise strategies for fast, efficient computation suitable for visual data processing and network transmission. We describe the technique and experiments in details and provide quantitative performance results, demonstrating our system can be run comfortably and reliably for different application scenarios. Our preliminary results are promising and demonstrate the potential for more compelling directions in cyberlearning.Comment: IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 201

Master of Science

thesisAnimated avatars are becoming increasingly prevalent in three-dimensional virtual environments due to modern motion tracking hardware and their falling cost. As this opens up new possibilities and ways of interaction within such virtual worlds, an important question that arises is how does the presence of an avatar alter the perception and performance of an action in a virtual environment when a user interacts with an object in the virtual environment through their avatar. This research attempts to answer this question by studying the effects of presence of an animated self-avatar in an object manipulation task in a virtual environment. Two experiments were conducted as part of this research. In Experiment 1, the feasibility of an interaction system involving animated self-avatars to manipulate objects in a virtual environment was examined. It was observed that the presence of self-avatars had an affect on the performance of a subset of subjects. Male subjects with gaming experience performed similarly across both visual feedback conditions while female subjects who also had low gaming experience performed better in the condition with avatar feedback than in the condition without avatar feedback. In Experiment 2, we further analyzed the effect of presence of self-avatar visual feedback by looking at the effect of visual immersion in the virtual environment, task difficulty, and individual difference factors such as spatial ability and gaming experience. It was observed that difficult trials were completed significantly faster by subjects in the avatar feedback condition while in the case of the easy trials, there was no significant difference between performance of subjects in the avatar and sphere feedback conditions. No significant interaction was observed between visual feedback condition and either immersiveness or individual difference factors

MetaSpace II: Object and full-body tracking for interaction and navigation in social VR

MetaSpace II (MS2) is a social Virtual Reality (VR) system where multiple users can not only see and hear but also interact with each other, grasp and manipulate objects, walk around in space, and get tactile feedback. MS2 allows walking in physical space by tracking each user's skeleton in real-time and allows users to feel by employing passive haptics i.e., when users touch or manipulate an object in the virtual world, they simultaneously also touch or manipulate a corresponding object in the physical world. To enable these elements in VR, MS2 creates a correspondence in spatial layout and object placement by building the virtual world on top of a 3D scan of the real world. Through the association between the real and virtual world, users are able to walk freely while wearing a head-mounted device, avoid obstacles like walls and furniture, and interact with people and objects. Most current virtual reality (VR) environments are designed for a single user experience where interactions with virtual objects are mediated by hand-held input devices or hand gestures. Additionally, users are only shown a representation of their hands in VR floating in front of the camera as seen from a first person perspective. We believe, representing each user as a full-body avatar that is controlled by natural movements of the person in the real world (see Figure 1d), can greatly enhance believability and a user's sense immersion in VR.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures. Video: http://living.media.mit.edu/projects/metaspace-ii

A Utility Framework for Selecting Immersive Interactive Capability and Technology for Virtual Laboratories

There has been an increase in the use of virtual reality (VR) technology in the education community since VR is emerging as a potent educational tool that offers students with a rich source of educational material and makes learning exciting and interactive. With a rise of popularity and market expansion in VR technology in the past few years, a variety of consumer VR electronics have boosted educators and researchers’ interest in using these devices for practicing engineering and science laboratory experiments. However, little is known about how such devices may be well-suited for active learning in a laboratory environment. This research aims to address this gap by formulating a utility framework to help educators and decision-makers efficiently select a type of VR device that matches with their design and capability requirements for their virtual laboratory blueprint. Furthermore, a framework use case is demonstrated by not only surveying five types of VR devices ranging from low-immersive to full-immersive along with their capabilities (i.e., hardware specifications, cost, and availability) but also considering the interaction techniques in each VR device based on the desired laboratory task. To validate the framework, a research study is carried out to compare these five VR devices and investigate which device can provide an overall best-fit for a 3D virtual laboratory content that we implemented based on the interaction level, usability and performance effectiveness

Stereoscopic bimanual interaction for 3D visualization

Virtual Environments (VE) are being widely used in various research fields for several decades such as 3D visualization, education, training and games. VEs have the potential to enhance the visualization and act as a general medium for human-computer interaction (HCI). However, limited research has evaluated virtual reality (VR) display technologies, monocular and binocular depth cues, for human depth perception of volumetric (non-polygonal) datasets. In addition, a lack of standardization of three-dimensional (3D) user interfaces (UI) makes it challenging to interact with many VE systems. To address these issues, this dissertation focuses on evaluation of effects of stereoscopic and head-coupled displays on depth judgment of volumetric dataset. It also focuses on evaluation of a two-handed view manipulation techniques which support simultaneous 7 degree-of-freedom (DOF) navigation (x,y,z + yaw,pitch,roll + scale) in a multi-scale virtual environment (MSVE). Furthermore, this dissertation evaluates auto-adjustment of stereo view parameters techniques for stereoscopic fusion problems in a MSVE. Next, this dissertation presents a bimanual, hybrid user interface which combines traditional tracking devices with computer-vision based "natural" 3D inputs for multi-dimensional visualization in a semi-immersive desktop VR system. In conclusion, this dissertation provides a guideline for research design for evaluating UI and interaction techniques

Natural user interfaces for interdisciplinary design review using the Microsoft Kinect

As markets demand engineered products faster, waiting on the cyclical design processes of the past is not an option. Instead, industry is turning to concurrent design and interdisciplinary teams. When these teams collaborate, engineering CAD tools play a vital role in conceptualizing and validating designs. These tools require significant user investment to master, due to challenging interfaces and an overabundance of features. These challenges often prohibit team members from using these tools for exploring designs. This work presents a method allowing users to interact with a design using intuitive gestures and head tracking, all while keeping the model in a CAD format. Specifically, Siemens\u27 Teamcenter® Lifecycle Visualization Mockup (Mockup) was used to display design geometry while modifications were made through a set of gestures captured by a Microsoft KinectTM in real time. This proof of concept program allowed a user to rotate the scene, activate Mockup\u27s immersive menu, move the immersive wand, and manipulate the view based on head position. This work also evaluates gesture usability and task completion time for this proof of concept system. A cognitive model evaluation method was used to evaluate the premise that gesture-based user interfaces are easier to use and learn with regards to time than a traditional mouse and keyboard interface. Using a cognitive model analysis tool allowed the rapid testing of interaction concepts without the significant overhead of user studies and full development cycles. The analysis demonstrated that using the KinectTM is a feasible interaction mode for CAD/CAE programs. In addition, the analysis pointed out limitations in the gesture interfaces ability to compete time wise with easily accessible customizable menu options

Modeling On and Above a Stereoscopic Multitouch Display

International audienceWe present a semi-immersive environment for conceptual design where virtual mockups are obtained from gestures we aim to get closer to the way people conceive, create and manipulate three-dimensional shapes. We developed on-and-above-the-surface interaction techniques based on asymmetric bimanual interaction for creating and editing 3D models in a stereoscopic environment. Our approach combines hand and nger tracking in the space on and above a multitouch surface. This combination brings forth an alternative design environment where users can seamlessly switch between interacting on the surface or in the space above it to leverage the bene t of both interaction spaces