Exploring aerospace design in virtual reality with dimension reduction

One of the today’s most propitious immersive technologies is virtual reality (VR). This term is colloquially associated with head-sets that transport users to a bespoke, built-forpurpose immersive 3D virtual environment. It has given rise to the field of immersive visual analytics—a new field of research that aims to use immersive technologies for enhancing and empowering data analytics. In this paper we present a VR aerospace design environment with the objective of aiding the component aerodynamic design process by interactively visualizing performance and geometry. This virtual environment uses ideas from parameter-space dimension reduction to enhance the exploration and exploitation of the design space. We decompose the design of such an environment into function structures, present an implementation of the system, and verify the interface in terms of usability and expressiveness

Towards defining a CAVE like system performance evaluation

One of the main goals of Virtual Reality is to provide immersive environments that take participants away from the real life into a virtual one, this is how Cave Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE) came about many years ago. Nowadays there are many of this kind of room-sized systems providing a superior Virtual Reality experience and are used for research into a wide range of disciplines including archaeology, architecture, art, biology, engineering, geometry, geology, medicine and healthcare, meteorology and physics. Nevertheless, for a good Virtual Reality user experience, it is necessary to have a processing system optimized for visual computing (based on CAVE-related features, Interaction, Application, etc.). In this work we propose an evaluation methodology for our Cave-like multi-VRmedia System. The proposal is based on three generic criteria: Performance, Usability and Relevance. The strategy tries to prove how assertive a system is when it comes to solving a problem.Workshop: WCGIV – Computación Gráfica, Imágenes y VisualizaciónRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informátic

Generation and Rendering of Interactive Ground Vegetation for Real-Time Testing and Validation of Computer Vision Algorithms

During the development process of new algorithms for computer vision applications, testing and evaluation in real outdoor environments is time-consuming and often difficult to realize. Thus, the use of artificial testing environments is a flexible and cost-efficient alternative. As a result, the development of new techniques for simulating natural, dynamic environments is essential for real-time virtual reality applications, which are commonly known as Virtual Testbeds. Since the first basic usage of Virtual Testbeds several years ago, the image quality of virtual environments has almost reached a level close to photorealism even in real-time due to new rendering approaches and increasing processing power of current graphics hardware. Because of that, Virtual Testbeds can recently be applied in application areas like computer vision, that strongly rely on realistic scene representations. The realistic rendering of natural outdoor scenes has become increasingly important in many application areas, but computer simulated scenes often differ considerably from real-world environments, especially regarding interactive ground vegetation. In this article, we introduce a novel ground vegetation rendering approach, that is capable of generating large scenes with realistic appearance and excellent performance. Our approach features wind animation, as well as object-to-grass interaction and delivers realistically appearing grass and shrubs at all distances and from all viewing angles. This greatly improves immersion, as well as acceptance, especially in virtual training applications. Nevertheless, the rendered results also fulfill important requirements for the computer vision aspect, like plausible geometry representation of the vegetation, as well as its consistence during the entire simulation. Feature detection and matching algorithms are applied to our approach in localization scenarios of mobile robots in natural outdoor environments. We will show how the quality of computer vision algorithms is influenced by highly detailed, dynamic environments, like observed in unstructured, real-world outdoor scenes with wind and object-to-vegetation interaction

From Isovists via Mental Representations to Behaviour: First Steps Toward Closing the Causal Chain

This study addresses the interrelations between human wayfinding performance, the mental representation of routes, and the geometrical layout of path intersections. The virtual reality based empirical experiment consisted of a route learning and reproduction task and two choice reaction tasks measuring the acquired knowledge of route decision points. In order to relate the recorded behavioural data to the geometry of the environment, a specific adaptation of isovist-based spatial analysis was developed that accounts for directional bias in human spatial perception and representation. Taken together, the applied analyses provided conclusive evidence for correspondences between geometrical properties of environments as captured by isovists and their mental representation

An evaluation of physics engines and their application in haptic virtual assembly environments

Virtual Reality (VR) applications are employed in engineering situation to simulate real and artificial situations where the user can interact with 3D models in real time. Within these applications the virtual environment must emulate real world physics such that the system behaviour and interaction are as natural as possible and to support realistic manufacturing applications. As a consequence of this focus, several simulation engines have been developed for various digital applications, including VR, to compute the physical response and body dynamics of objects. However, the performance of these physics engines within haptic-enabled VR applications varies considerably. In this study two third party physics engines - Bullet and PhysXtm- are evaluated to establish their appropriateness for haptic virtual assembly applications. With this objective in mind five assembly tasks were created with increasing assembly and geometry complexity. Each of these was carried out using the two different physics engines which had been implemented in a haptic-enabled virtual assembly platform specifically developed for this purpose. Several physics-performance parameters were also defined to aid the comparison. This approach and the subsequent results successfully demonstrated the key strengths, limitations, and weaknesses of the physics engines in haptic virtual assembly environments