21,717 research outputs found
Viewing the Future? Virtual Reality In Journalism
Journalism underwent a flurry of virtual reality content creation, production and distribution starting in the final months of 2015. The New York Times distributed more than 1 million cardboard virtual reality viewers and released an app showing a spherical video short about displaced refugees. The Los Angeles Times landed people next to a crater on Mars. USA TODAY took visitors on a ride-along in the "Back to the Future" car on the Universal Studios lot and on a spin through Old Havana in a bright pink '57 Ford. ABC News went to North Korea for a spherical view of a military parade and to Syria to see artifacts threatened by war. The Emblematic Group, a company that creates virtual reality content, followed a woman navigating a gauntlet of anti- abortion demonstrators at a family planning clinic and allowed people to witness a murder-suicide stemming from domestic violence.In short, the period from October 2015 through February 2016 was one of significant experimentation with virtual reality (VR) storytelling. These efforts are part of an initial foray into determining whether VR is a feasible way to present news. The year 2016 is shaping up as a period of further testing and careful monitoring of potential growth in the use of virtual reality among consumers
Enabling Self-aware Smart Buildings by Augmented Reality
Conventional HVAC control systems are usually incognizant of the physical
structures and materials of buildings. These systems merely follow pre-set HVAC
control logic based on abstract building thermal response models, which are
rough approximations to true physical models, ignoring dynamic spatial
variations in built environments. To enable more accurate and responsive HVAC
control, this paper introduces the notion of "self-aware" smart buildings, such
that buildings are able to explicitly construct physical models of themselves
(e.g., incorporating building structures and materials, and thermal flow
dynamics). The question is how to enable self-aware buildings that
automatically acquire dynamic knowledge of themselves. This paper presents a
novel approach using "augmented reality". The extensive user-environment
interactions in augmented reality not only can provide intuitive user
interfaces for building systems, but also can capture the physical structures
and possibly materials of buildings accurately to enable real-time building
simulation and control. This paper presents a building system prototype
incorporating augmented reality, and discusses its applications.Comment: This paper appears in ACM International Conference on Future Energy
Systems (e-Energy), 201
Co-Fusion: Real-time Segmentation, Tracking and Fusion of Multiple Objects
In this paper we introduce Co-Fusion, a dense SLAM system that takes a live
stream of RGB-D images as input and segments the scene into different objects
(using either motion or semantic cues) while simultaneously tracking and
reconstructing their 3D shape in real time. We use a multiple model fitting
approach where each object can move independently from the background and still
be effectively tracked and its shape fused over time using only the information
from pixels associated with that object label. Previous attempts to deal with
dynamic scenes have typically considered moving regions as outliers, and
consequently do not model their shape or track their motion over time. In
contrast, we enable the robot to maintain 3D models for each of the segmented
objects and to improve them over time through fusion. As a result, our system
can enable a robot to maintain a scene description at the object level which
has the potential to allow interactions with its working environment; even in
the case of dynamic scenes.Comment: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2017,
http://visual.cs.ucl.ac.uk/pubs/cofusion,
https://github.com/martinruenz/co-fusio
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
Remote Real-Time Collaboration Platform enabled by the Capture, Digitisation and Transfer of Human-Workpiece Interactions
In this highly globalised manufacturing ecosystem, product design and verification activities, production and inspection processes, and technical support services are spread across global supply chains and customer networks. Therefore, a platform for global teams to collaborate with each other in real-time to perform complex tasks is highly desirable. This work investigates the design and development of a remote real-time collaboration platform by using human motion capture technology powered by infrared light based depth imaging sensors borrowed from the gaming industry. The unique functionality of the proposed platform is the sharing of physical contexts during a collaboration session by not only exchanging human actions but also the effects of those actions on the task environment. This enables teams to remotely work on a common task problem at the same time and also get immediate feedback from each other which is vital for collaborative design, inspection and verifications tasks in the factories of the future
From images via symbols to contexts: using augmented reality for interactive model acquisition
Systems that perform in real environments need to bind the internal state to externally
perceived objects, events, or complete scenes. How to learn this correspondence has been a long
standing problem in computer vision as well as artificial intelligence. Augmented Reality provides
an interesting perspective on this problem because a human user can directly relate displayed
system results to real environments. In the following we present a system that is able to bootstrap
internal models from user-system interactions. Starting from pictorial representations it learns
symbolic object labels that provide the basis for storing observed episodes. In a second step, more
complex relational information is extracted from stored episodes that enables the system to react
on specific scene contexts
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