Edge-Centric Space Rescaling with Redirected Walking for Dissimilar Physical-Virtual Space Registration

We propose a novel space-rescaling technique for registering dissimilar physical-virtual spaces by utilizing the effects of adjusting physical space with redirected walking. Achieving a seamless immersive Virtual Reality (VR) experience requires overcoming the spatial heterogeneities between the physical and virtual spaces and accurately aligning the VR environment with the user's tracked physical space. However, existing space-matching algorithms that rely on one-to-one scale mapping are inadequate when dealing with highly dissimilar physical and virtual spaces, and redirected walking controllers could not utilize basic geometric information from physical space in the virtual space due to coordinate distortion. To address these issues, we apply relative translation gains to partitioned space grids based on the main interactable object's edge, which enables space-adaptive modification effects of physical space without coordinate distortion. Our evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in aligning the main object's edge, surface, and wall, as well as securing the largest registered area compared to alternative methods under all conditions. These findings can be used to create an immersive play area for VR content where users can receive passive feedback from the plane and edge in their physical environment.Comment: This paper has been accepted as a paper for the 2023 ISMAR conference (2023/10/16-2023/10/20) 10 pages, 5 figure

Virtual Collaborative Design Environment: Information structure and interfaces

The failure to identify design issues in early phases of construction projects has been identified as a significant cause of costly rework, as these issues can impact the building occupants’ abilities to efficiently perform their daily work tasks. Therefore, it is crucial to consider their feedback when design reviewing. To date, efforts have been made to involve building occupants via a variety of user-interfaces that provide different understandings of the project. One such example is Virtual Reality (VR), which increases building occupants’ spatial understanding. Another, is use of design guidelines, intended to support both end-users such as building occupants and also the design team in basing their decision-making on best-practice and ensuring compliance with design requirements. When used together, these different user-interfaces can complement each other by enabling, for instance, visualization of the furniture layout depicted in design guideline documents. However, few studies have identified what is required of a design tool capable of supporting both visualization of design and design-compliance via different user-interfaces. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to advance the understanding of end-users’ involvement in virtual collaborative environments in the building design process. Accordingly, Design Science Research was applied with a two-fold purpose. First, to identify different stakeholders’ challenges that are faced in the design process and specifically how building occupants’ daily work tasks are considered in the design process. Secondly, the research methods such as workshops, semi-structured interviews and documentation analysis helped identify the requirements of a design tool that would enable this knowledge to be transferred and accessible at a cross-project level. The results show that the information structure and user-interface of design guidelines determine to a large degree how effectively compliance with requirements can be validated. An example is the absence of user-interfaces in design guidelines which prevents building occupants from gaining sufficient spatial understanding. This lack of spatial understanding results in them to being reliant on other project members, such as architects and facility planners, for providing input on the design. Moreover, the results show how cross-project knowledge is difficult to facilitate due to how design guidelines have not been created in relation to today’s digital design process. Therefore, this thesis bridges the concepts of integrating design guidelines and VR in the same design tool

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

A Context-aware and Intelligent Framework for the Secure Mission Critical Systems

Recent technological advancements in pervasive systems have shown the poten-tial to address challenges in the military domain. Research developments in mili-tary-based mission-critical systems have refined a lot as in autopilot, sensing true target behavior, battle damage conditions, acquiring and manipulating command control information. However, the application of pervasive systems in the military domain is still evolving. In this paper, an intelligent framework has been pro-posed for mission-critical systems to incorporate advanced heterogeneous com-munication protocols; service-oriented layered structure and context-aware infor-mation manipulation. The proposed framework addresses the limitation of “time-space” constraints in Mission-critical systems that have been improved signifi-cantly. This improvement is courtesy to enhancing situation-aware tactical capa-bilities such as localization, decision significance, strategic span, strategic inten-tions, resource coordination and profiling concerning the situation. A comprehen-sive use case model has been presented for a typical battle-field scenario followed by a comparison of the proposed framework with existing techniques. It is evi-dent from experiments and analyses that the proposed framework provides more effective and seamless interaction with contextual resources to improve tactical capabilities. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: A Context-aware and Intelligent Framework for the Secure Mission Critical Systems, which has been published in final form in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Version

Collaborative geographic visualization

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas AmbientaisThe present document is a revision of essential references to take into account when developing ubiquitous Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with collaborative visualization purposes. Its chapters focus, respectively, on general principles of GIS, its multimedia components and ubiquitous practices; geo-referenced information visualization and its graphical components of virtual and augmented reality; collaborative environments, its technological requirements, architectural specificities, and models for collective information management; and some final considerations about the future and challenges of collaborative visualization of GIS in ubiquitous environment