1,532 research outputs found
Immersive and non immersive 3D virtual city: decision support tool for urban sustainability
Sustainable urban planning decisions must not only consider the physical structure of the urban development but the economic, social and environmental factors. Due to the prolonged times scales of major urban development projects the current and future impacts of any decision made must be fully understood. Many key project decisions are made early in the decision making process with decision makers later seeking agreement for proposals once the key decisions have already been made, leaving many stakeholders, especially the general public, feeling marginalised by the process. Many decision support tools have been developed to aid in the decision making process, however many of these are expert orientated, fail to fully address spatial and temporal issues and do not reflect the interconnectivity of the separate domains and their indicators. This paper outlines a platform that combines computer game techniques, modelling of economic, social and environmental indicators to provide an interface that presents a 3D interactive virtual city with sustainability information overlain. Creating a virtual 3D urban area using the latest video game techniques ensures: real-time rendering of the 3D graphics; exploitation of novel techniques of how complex multivariate data is presented to the user; immersion in the 3D urban development, via first person navigation, exploration and manipulation of the environment with consequences updated in real-time. The use of visualisation techniques begins to remove sustainability assessment’s reliance on the existing expert systems which are largely inaccessible to many of the stakeholder groups, especially the general public
Serious Games in Cultural Heritage
Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented
Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review
Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented
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Towards Rapid Generation and Visualisation of Large 3D Urban Landscapes for Mobile Device Navigation
In this paper a procedural 3D modelling solution for mobile devices is presented based on scripting algorithms allowing for both the automatic and also semi-automatic creation of photorealistic quality virtual urban content. The combination of aerial images, GIS data, 2D ground maps and terrestrial photographs as input data coupled with a user-friendly customized interface permits the automatic and interactive generation of large-scale, accurate, georeferenced and fully-textured 3D virtual city content, content that can be specially optimized for use with mobile devices but also with navigational tasks in mind. Furthermore, a user-centred mobile virtual reality (VR) visualisation and interaction tool operating on PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) for pedestrian navigation is also discussed. Via this engine, the import and display of various navigational file formats (2D and 3D) is supported, including a comprehensive front-end user-friendly graphical user interface providing immersive virtual 3D navigation
Comparing and Evaluating Real Time Character Engines for Virtual Environments
As animated characters increasingly become vital parts of virtual environments, then the engines that drive these characters increasingly become vital parts of virtual environment software. This paper gives an overview of the state of the art in character engines, and proposes a taxonomy of the features that are commonly found in them. This taxonomy can be used as a tool for comparison and evaluation of different engines. In order to demonstrate this we use it to compare three engines. The first is Cal3D, the most commonly used open source engine. We also introduce two engines created by the authors, Piavca and HALCA. The paper ends with a brief discussion of some other popular engines
scenery: Flexible Virtual Reality Visualization on the Java VM
Life science today involves computational analysis of a large amount and
variety of data, such as volumetric data acquired by state-of-the-art
microscopes, or mesh data from analysis of such data or simulations.
Visualization is often the first step in making sense of data, and a crucial
part of building and debugging analysis pipelines. It is therefore important
that visualizations can be quickly prototyped, as well as developed or embedded
into full applications. In order to better judge spatiotemporal relationships,
immersive hardware, such as Virtual or Augmented Reality (VR/AR) headsets and
associated controllers are becoming invaluable tools. In this work we introduce
scenery, a flexible VR/AR visualization framework for the Java VM that can
handle mesh and large volumetric data, containing multiple views, timepoints,
and color channels. scenery is free and open-source software, works on all
major platforms, and uses the Vulkan or OpenGL rendering APIs. We introduce
scenery's main features and example applications, such as its use in VR for
microscopy, in the biomedical image analysis software Fiji, or for visualizing
agent-based simulations.Comment: Added IEEE DOI, version published at VIS 201
Simulation Of Virtual Reality Display Characteristics: A Method For The Evaluation Of Motion Perception
Visual perception in virtual reality devices is a widely researched topic. Many newer experiments compare their results to those of older studies that may have used equipment which is now outdated, which can cause perceptual differences. These differences in hardware can be simulated to a degree in software, provided the capabilities of the current hardware meet or exceed those of the older hardware. I present the HMD Simulation Framework, a software package for the Unity3D engine that allows for quick modification of many commonly researched HMD characteristics through the Inspector GUI built into Unity. I also describe a human subjects experiment aimed at identifying perceptual equivalence classes between different sets of headset characteristics. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all human subjects research was suspended for safety reasons, and I was unable to collect any data
A Modular and Open-Source Framework for Virtual Reality Visualisation and Interaction in Bioimaging
Life science today involves computational analysis of a large amount and variety of data, such as volumetric data acquired by state-of-the-art microscopes, or mesh data from analysis of such data or simulations. The advent of new imaging technologies, such as lightsheet microscopy, has resulted in the users being confronted with an ever-growing amount of data, with even terabytes of imaging data created within a day. With the possibility of gentler and more high-performance imaging, the spatiotemporal complexity of the model systems or processes of interest is increasing as well. Visualisation is often the first step in making sense of this data, and a crucial part of building and debugging analysis pipelines. It is therefore important that visualisations can be quickly prototyped, as well as developed or embedded into full applications. In order to better judge spatiotemporal relationships, immersive hardware, such as Virtual or Augmented Reality (VR/AR) headsets and associated controllers are becoming invaluable tools.
In this work we present scenery, a modular and extensible visualisation framework for the Java VM that can handle mesh and large volumetric data, containing multiple views, timepoints, and color channels. scenery is free and open-source software, works on all major platforms, and uses the Vulkan or OpenGL rendering APIs. We introduce scenery's main features, and discuss its use with VR/AR hardware and in distributed rendering.
In addition to the visualisation framework, we present a series of case studies, where scenery can provide tangible benefit in developmental and systems biology: With Bionic Tracking, we demonstrate a new technique for tracking cells in 4D volumetric datasets via tracking eye gaze in a virtual reality headset, with the potential to speed up manual tracking tasks by an order of magnitude. We further introduce ideas to move towards virtual reality-based laser ablation and perform a user study in order to gain insight into performance, acceptance and issues when performing ablation tasks with virtual reality hardware in fast developing specimen. To tame the amount of data originating from state-of-the-art volumetric microscopes, we present ideas how to render the highly-efficient Adaptive Particle Representation, and finally, we present sciview, an ImageJ2/Fiji plugin making the features of scenery available to a wider audience.:Abstract
Foreword and Acknowledgements
Overview and Contributions
Part 1 - Introduction
1 Fluorescence Microscopy
2 Introduction to Visual Processing
3 A Short Introduction to Cross Reality
4 Eye Tracking and Gaze-based Interaction
Part 2 - VR and AR for System Biology
5 scenery — VR/AR for Systems Biology
6 Rendering
7 Input Handling and Integration of External Hardware
8 Distributed Rendering
9 Miscellaneous Subsystems
10 Future Development Directions
Part III - Case Studies
C A S E S T U D I E S
11 Bionic Tracking: Using Eye Tracking for Cell Tracking
12 Towards Interactive Virtual Reality Laser Ablation
13 Rendering the Adaptive Particle Representation
14 sciview — Integrating scenery into ImageJ2 & Fiji
Part IV - Conclusion
15 Conclusions and Outlook
Backmatter & Appendices
A Questionnaire for VR Ablation User Study
B Full Correlations in VR Ablation Questionnaire
C Questionnaire for Bionic Tracking User Study
List of Tables
List of Figures
Bibliography
Selbstständigkeitserklärun
Computer-Assisted Interactive Documentary and Performance Arts in Illimitable Space
This major component of the research described in this thesis is 3D computer
graphics, specifically the realistic physics-based softbody simulation and
haptic responsive environments. Minor components include advanced
human-computer interaction environments, non-linear documentary storytelling,
and theatre performance. The journey of this research has been unusual because
it requires a researcher with solid knowledge and background in multiple
disciplines; who also has to be creative and sensitive in order to combine the
possible areas into a new research direction. [...] It focuses on the advanced
computer graphics and emerges from experimental cinematic works and theatrical
artistic practices. Some development content and installations are completed to
prove and evaluate the described concepts and to be convincing. [...] To
summarize, the resulting work involves not only artistic creativity, but
solving or combining technological hurdles in motion tracking, pattern
recognition, force feedback control, etc., with the available documentary
footage on film, video, or images, and text via a variety of devices [....] and
programming, and installing all the needed interfaces such that it all works in
real-time. Thus, the contribution to the knowledge advancement is in solving
these interfacing problems and the real-time aspects of the interaction that
have uses in film industry, fashion industry, new age interactive theatre,
computer games, and web-based technologies and services for entertainment and
education. It also includes building up on this experience to integrate Kinect-
and haptic-based interaction, artistic scenery rendering, and other forms of
control. This research work connects all the research disciplines, seemingly
disjoint fields of research, such as computer graphics, documentary film,
interactive media, and theatre performance together.Comment: PhD thesis copy; 272 pages, 83 figures, 6 algorithm
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