Computational Simulation and 3D Virtual Reality Engineering Tools for Dynamical Modeling and Imaging of Composite Nanomaterials

An adventure at engineering design and modeling is possible with a Virtual Reality Environment (VRE) that uses multiple computer-generated media to let a user experience situations that are temporally and spatially prohibiting. In this paper, an approach to developing some advanced architecture and modeling tools is presented to allow multiple frameworks work together while being shielded from the application program. This architecture is being developed in a framework of workbench interactive tools for next generation nanoparticle-reinforced damping/dynamic systems. Through the use of system, an engineer/programmer can respectively concentrate on tailoring an engineering design concept of novel system and the application software design while using existing databases/software outputs.Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions (http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions

An affordable surround-screen virtual reality display

Building a projection-based virtual reality display is a time, cost, and resource intensive enterprise andmany details contribute to the final display quality. This is especially true for surround-screen displays wheremost of them are one-of-a-kind systems or custom-made installations with specialized projectors, framing, andprojection screens. In general, the costs of acquiring these types of systems have been in the hundreds and evenmillions of dollars, specifically for those supporting synchronized stereoscopic projection across multiple screens.Furthermore, the maintenance of such systems adds an additional recurrent cost, which makes them hard to affordfor a general introduction in a wider range of industry, academic, and research communities.We present a low-cost, easy to maintain surround-screen design based on off-the-shelf affordable componentsfor the projection screens, framing, and display system. The resulting system quality is comparable to significantlymore expensive commercially available solutions. Additionally, users with average knowledge can implement ourdesign and it has the added advantage that single components can be individually upgraded based on necessity aswell as available funds

New approaches for mixed reality in urban environments: the CINeSPACE project

The CINeSPACE (www.cinespace.eu) project allows tourists to access the rich cultural heritage of urban environments by literally morphing the user into the past through the use of multimedia archives. Tourists use the device which includes both a PDA type of device with a GIS interface displayed on a touch screen to help the user navigate and select multimedia content, and video binoculars to create the augmented reality effects. In addition to this mode of interaction, a survey of Mixed Reality user interaction paradigms will be presented. A key feature of Mixed Reality user interfaces is the object identification and annotation methods available to the user, of which a survey, including a review of the GeoConcepts ontology annotation methodology used in the CINeSPACE device, will be presented.Peer Reviewe

New approaches for mixed reality in urban environments: the CINeSPACE project

The CINeSPACE (www.cinespace.eu) project allows tourists to access the rich cultural heritage of urban environments by literally morphing the user into the past through the use of multimedia archives. Tourists use the device which includes both a PDA type of device with a GIS interface displayed on a touch screen to help the user navigate and select multimedia content, and video binoculars to create the augmented reality effects. In addition to this mode of interaction, a survey of Mixed Reality user interaction paradigms will be presented. A key feature of Mixed Reality user interfaces is the object identification and annotation methods available to the user, of which a survey, including a review of the GeoConcepts ontology annotation methodology used in the CINeSPACE device, will be presented.Peer Reviewe

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

real time assistance to manual assembly through depth camera and visual feedback

Abstract The current fourth industrial revolution significantly impacts on production processes. The personalized production paradigm enables customers to order unique products. The operators assemble an enormous component variety adapting their process from product to product with limited learning opportunities. Digital technologies are increasingly adopted in production processes to improve performance and quality. Considering this framework, this research proposes a hardware/software architecture to assist in real-time operators involved in manual assembly processes. A depth camera captures human motions in relation with the workstation environment whereas a visual feedback guides the operator through consecutive assembly tasks. An industrial case study validates the architecture

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol: Letting applications talk to each other

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol, is a hub-based communication standard for the exchange of data and control between participating client applications. It has been developed within the context of the Virtual Observatory with the aim of enabling specialised data analysis tools to cooperate as a loosely integrated suite, and is now in use by many and varied desktop and web-based applications dealing with astronomical data. This paper reviews the requirements and design principles that led to SAMP's specification, provides a high-level description of the protocol, and discusses some of its common and possible future usage patterns, with particular attention to those factors that have aided its success in practice.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for Virtual Observatory special issue of Astronomy and Computin

Serious game augmented reality 3D for physical rehabilitation

This research consists in the development of a PhysioAR framework (Augmented Reality Physiotherapy) that consider a set of two wearable sensors (Left Controller and Right Controller and Meta/Oculus Quest headset controller for use in natural interactions with a set of AR therapeutic serious games developed on the Unity 3D. The system allows to perform training sessions for hands and fingers, knees and legs motor rehabilitation bearing in mind that the games are for people who have suffered from stroke. The training is part of special care that must be taken for this through the serious games that are properly adapted to be a source of motivation and easy to be played. This FisioAR project includes, two different apps designed, one for calendar and for physiotherapists has a background data with all information needed to do and other to make login in main app and have the possibility to interact with our three types of games specifically designed, developed and implemented for Oculus Quest. Two different mobile apps were constructed on Outsystems platform, where one is destinated to physiotherapists and other is destinated to AVC patient’s. Three Different types of serious games were developed on Unity Platform Engine and all the games have specific contents to be played according with motor and cognitive rehabilitation objectives. The first game called Boxes Game, has six cubes displayed with different colors and six spheres also with six different colors. The main goal of this game is to put the maximum number of spheres in a box with the same color. This game will involve the use of legs, knees and arms and can be easily adapted to each patients’ conditions, making it more or less demanding. The Second Game is called Garden Care Game. Its scenario was made with prefabs (assets) and materials from Unity asset store to simulate a realistic garden, with a watering can, fences and a set of flowers. The main goal of this game is to care the flowers with water. This simple goal is related with the measurement of the wrist rotation made by the patient through wearable sensors while watering each flower. This game as a score for each flower watered. In the Third Game called Puzzle Game, there’s a white screen with the same number of divisions as the existing image blocks in project.Esta pesquisa consiste no desenvolvimento de uma solução do projeto FisioAR baseada em dispositivos vestíveis, combinando um conjunto de sensores vestíveis e controlador de headset para uso em interações naturais com um conjunto de serious games terapêuticos VR desenvolvidos na plataforma de games 3D Unity. O sistema permite realizar treinos de reabilitação motora de mãos e dedos, joelhos e pernas tendo em vista que os jogos são para pessoas que sofreram AVC e devem ser tomados cuidados especiais com isso e que os jogos estão devidamente adaptados para serem mais simples. ser jogado. Este projeto FisioAR tem em todas as implementações, dois aplicativos diferentes projetados, três tipos diferentes de jogos projetados no Oculus Quest. Dois aplicativos diferentes foram construídos na plataforma Outsystems sendo um destinado a fisioterapeutas e outro a pacientes AVC. Três tipos diferentes de jogos foram especialmente projetados no Unity Platform Engine e todos os jogos possuem conteúdos específicos para serem jogados. O primeiro jogo denominado Boxes Game, tem seis cubos apresentados com cores diferentes e seis esferas também com seis cores diferentes. O principal objetivo deste jogo é colocar o número máximo de esferas em uma caixa com a mesma cor e com distância mínima percorrida. Este jogo envolverá o uso de pernas, joelhos e braços e pode ser facilmente adaptado às condições de cada paciente, tornando-o mais ou menos exigente. O segundo jogo é chamado de jogo de cuidado de jardim. Seu cenário foi feito com pré-fabricados e materiais da loja de ativos da unidade para simular um jardim realista, com regador, cercas e um conjunto de flores. O objetivo principal deste jogo é regar as flores. Esse objetivo simples está relacionado à medição da rotação do punho feita pelo paciente por meio de sensores vestíveis ao regar cada flor. Este jogo é uma pontuação para cada flor regada. No terceiro jogo, chamado Puzzle Game, há uma tela branca com o mesmo número de divisões que os blocos de imagem existentes no projeto