It's the Human that Matters: Accurate User Orientation Estimation for Mobile Computing Applications

Ubiquity of Internet-connected and sensor-equipped portable devices sparked a new set of mobile computing applications that leverage the proliferating sensing capabilities of smart-phones. For many of these applications, accurate estimation of the user heading, as compared to the phone heading, is of paramount importance. This is of special importance for many crowd-sensing applications, where the phone can be carried in arbitrary positions and orientations relative to the user body. Current state-of-the-art focus mainly on estimating the phone orientation, require the phone to be placed in a particular position, require user intervention, and/or do not work accurately indoors; which limits their ubiquitous usability in different applications. In this paper we present Humaine, a novel system to reliably and accurately estimate the user orientation relative to the Earth coordinate system. Humaine requires no prior-configuration nor user intervention and works accurately indoors and outdoors for arbitrary cell phone positions and orientations relative to the user body. The system applies statistical analysis techniques to the inertial sensors widely available on today's cell phones to estimate both the phone and user orientation. Implementation of the system on different Android devices with 170 experiments performed at different indoor and outdoor testbeds shows that Humaine significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in diverse scenarios, achieving a median accuracy of $15^\circ$ averaged over a wide variety of phone positions. This is $558\%$ better than the-state-of-the-art. The accuracy is bounded by the error in the inertial sensors readings and can be enhanced with more accurate sensors and sensor fusion.Comment: Accepted for publication in the 11th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (Mobiquitous 2014

Resource sharing and networking of engineering college libraries

This lecture on resource sharing and networking of engineering college libraries in Karnataka delivered at the second annual seminar of ASSIST (Asian Society for Social Service, Information Science and Technology) explains the need for resource sharing, enumerates the buzz words relating to "cooperation" and "e-revolution", points out the inherent limitations as well as certain facts and hurdles in the process of resource sharing. It examines cost considerations of resources versus their use considerations as well as strength of resources versus strength of user need considerations. The lecture enumerates various possibilities and areas for resource sharing. In conclusion, some suggestions and tips are offered to overcome the hurdles for effective resource sharing. Two case studies, namely subscription to e-journals and user-orientation at ISAC (ISRO Satellite Centre) library are also presented

Enhanced indoor location tracking through body shadowing compensation

This paper presents a radio frequency (RF)-based location tracking system that improves its performance by eliminating the shadowing caused by the human body of the user being tracked. The presence of such a user will influence the RF signal paths between a body-worn node and the receiving nodes. This influence will vary with the user's location and orientation and, as a result, will deteriorate the performance regarding location tracking. By using multiple mobile nodes, placed on different parts of a human body, we exploit the fact that the combination of multiple measured signal strengths will show less variation caused by the user's body. Another method is to compensate explicitly for the influence of the body by using the user's orientation toward the fixed infrastructure nodes. Both approaches can be independently combined and reduce the influence caused by body shadowing, hereby improving the tracking accuracy. The overall system performance is extensively verified on a building-wide testbed for sensor experiments. The results show a significant improvement in tracking accuracy. The total improvement in mean accuracy is 38.1% when using three mobile nodes instead of one and simultaneously compensating for the user's orientation

Spatial mechanism design in virtual reality with networking

Development and increased use of virtual reality tools are allowing users to replace physical models with digital models. Changes that are expensive and take a long time to make are easily done on digital models. VRNETS software was developed as a tool for designing and evaluating spatial 4C mechanism with networking to allow users at different locations to share positions and mechanism data. Spatial mechanisms allow motion in three-dimensional space. Spatial 4C mechanisms consist of four rigid links connected by four cylindrical (CCCC) joints. Solutions are obtained by synthesis, after specifying the location and orientation of four positions in space. The solutions are represented as a type map or as a set of congruencies. A type map is a 2D color-coded map representing the solutions. All of the possible mechanisms that can be formed that pass through all four positions are obtained in the solution set but not all of the mechanisms necessarily move in a continuous motion between the positions.;Filters are applied to the type map to indicate the mechanisms that suffer from branch and circuit defects. From these representations, the user can choose and evaluate different mechanisms. Animating each mechanism will show if the mechanism goes through the positions in the orientation and order specified. This design process is shared between two or more users through a network process based on client/server networking. Networking is implemented using World2Wolrd software, which is written on top of User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The application itself is written in C++ using WorldToolKit software libraries. This application provides designers with a tool to design spatial 4C mechanism. The virtual environment enables designers to interact with the design using natural, intuitive, three-dimensional motions

Creation of virtual worlds from 3D models retrieved from content aware networks based on sketch and image queries

The recent emergence of user generated content requires new content creation tools that will be both easy to learn and easy to use. These new tools should enable the user to construct new high-quality content with minimum effort; it is essential to allow existing multimedia content to be reused as building blocks when creating new content. In this work we present a new tool for automatically constructing virtual worlds with minimum user intervention. Users can create these worlds by drawing a simple sketch, or by using interactively segmented 2D objects from larger images. The system receives as a query the sketch or the segmented image, and uses it to find similar 3D models that are stored in a Content Centric Network. The user selects a suitable model from the retrieved models, and the system uses it to automatically construct a virtual 3D world

Enabling collaboration in virtual reality navigators

In this paper we characterize a feature superset for Collaborative Virtual Reality Environments (CVRE), and derive a component framework to transform stand-alone VR navigators into full-fledged multithreaded collaborative environments. The contributions of our approach rely on a cost-effective and extensible technique for loading software components into separate POSIX threads for rendering, user interaction and network communications, and adding a top layer for managing session collaboration. The framework recasts a VR navigator under a distributed peer-to-peer topology for scene and object sharing, using callback hooks for broadcasting remote events and multicamera perspective sharing with avatar interaction. We validate the framework by applying it to our own ALICE VR Navigator. Experimental results show that our approach has good performance in the collaborative inspection of complex models.Postprint (published version