18 research outputs found
Evaluating Grasping Visualizations and Control Modes in a VR Game
A primary goal of the Virtual Reality(VR) community is to build fully immersive and presence-inducing environments with seamless and natural interactions. To reach this goal, researchers are investigating how to best directly use our hands to interact with a virtual environment using hand tracking. Most studies in this field require participants to perform repetitive tasks. In this article, we investigate if results of such studies translate into a real application and game-like experience. We designed a virtual escape room in which participants interact with various objects to gather clues and complete puzzles. In a between-subjects study, we examine the effects of two input modalities (controllers vs. hand tracking) and two grasping visualizations (continuously tracked hands vs. virtual hands that disappear when grasping) on ownership, realism, efficiency, enjoyment, and presence.
Our results show that ownership, realism, enjoyment, and presence increased when using hand tracking compared to controllers. Visualizing the tracked hands during grasps leads to higher ratings in one of our ownership questions and one of our enjoyment questions compared to having the virtual hands disappear during grasps as is common in many applications. We also confirm some of the main results of two studies that have a repetitive design in a more realistic gaming scenario that might be closer to a typical user experience
Emergent Design
Explorations in Systems Phenomenology in Relation to Ontology, Hermeneutics and the Meta-dialectics of Design
SYNOPSIS
A Phenomenological Analysis of Emergent Design is performed based on the foundations of General Schemas Theory. The concept of Sign Engineering is explored in terms of Hermeneutics, Dialectics, and Ontology in order to define Emergent Systems and Metasystems Engineering based on the concept of Meta-dialectics.
ABSTRACT
Phenomenology, Ontology, Hermeneutics, and Dialectics will dominate our inquiry into
the nature of the Emergent Design of the System and its inverse dual, the Meta-system. This is an speculative dissertation that attempts to produce a philosophical, mathematical, and theoretical view of the nature of Systems Engineering Design. Emergent System Design, i.e., the design of yet unheard of and/or hitherto non-existent Systems and Metasystems is the focus. This study is a frontal assault on the hard problem of explaining how Engineering produces new things, rather than a repetition or reordering of concepts that already exist. In this work the philosophies of E. Husserl, A. Gurwitsch, M. Heidegger, J. Derrida, G. Deleuze, A. Badiou, G. Hegel, I. Kant and other Continental Philosophers are brought to bear on different aspects of how new technological systems come into existence through the midwifery of Systems Engineering. Sign Engineering is singled out as the most important aspect of Systems Engineering. We will build on the work of Pieter Wisse and extend his theory of Sign Engineering to define Meta-dialectics in the form of Quadralectics and then Pentalectics. Along the way the various ontological levels of Being are explored in conjunction with the discovery that the Quadralectic is related to the possibility of design primarily at the Third Meta-level of Being, called Hyper Being. Design Process is dependent upon the emergent possibilities that appear in Hyper Being. Hyper Being, termed by Heidegger as Being (Being crossed-out) and termed by Derrida as Differance, also appears as the widest space within the Design Field at the third meta-level of Being and therefore provides the most leverage that is needed to produce emergent effects. Hyper Being is where possibilities appear within our worldview. Possibility is necessary for emergent events to occur. Hyper Being possibilities are extended by Wild Being propensities to allow the embodiment of new things. We discuss how this philosophical background relates to meta-methods such as the Gurevich Abstract State Machine and the Wisse Metapattern methods, as well as real-time architectural design methods as described in the Integral Software Engineering Methodology. One aim of this research is to find the foundation for extending the ISEM methodology to become a general purpose Systems Design Methodology. Our purpose is also to bring these philosophical considerations into the practical realm by examining P. Bourdieu’s ideas on the relationship between theoretical and practical reason and M. de Certeau’s ideas on practice. The relationship between design and implementation is seen in terms of the Set/Mass conceptual opposition. General Schemas Theory is used as a way of critiquing the dependence of Set based mathematics as a basis for Design. The dissertation delineates a new foundation for Systems Engineering as Emergent Engineering based on General Schemas Theory, and provides an advanced theory of Design based on the understanding of the meta-levels of Being, particularly focusing upon the relationship between Hyper Being and Wild Being in the context of Pure and Process Being
Freeform 3D interactions in everyday environments
PhD ThesisPersonal computing is continuously moving away from traditional input using
mouse and keyboard, as new input technologies emerge. Recently, natural user interfaces
(NUI) have led to interactive systems that are inspired by our physical interactions
in the real-world, and focus on enabling dexterous freehand input in 2D or 3D. Another
recent trend is Augmented Reality (AR), which follows a similar goal to further reduce
the gap between the real and the virtual, but predominately focuses on output, by overlaying
virtual information onto a tracked real-world 3D scene.
Whilst AR and NUI technologies have been developed for both immersive 3D output as
well as seamless 3D input, these have mostly been looked at separately. NUI focuses on
sensing the user and enabling new forms of input; AR traditionally focuses on capturing
the environment around us and enabling new forms of output that are registered to the
real world. The output of NUI systems is mainly presented on a 2D display, while
the input technologies for AR experiences, such as data gloves and body-worn motion
trackers are often uncomfortable and restricting when interacting in the real world.
NUI and AR can be seen as very complimentary, and bringing these two fields together
can lead to new user experiences that radically change the way we interact with
our everyday environments. The aim of this thesis is to enable real-time, low latency,
dexterous input and immersive output without heavily instrumenting the user. The
main challenge is to retain and to meaningfully combine the positive qualities that are
attributed to both NUI and AR systems.
I review work in the intersecting research fields of AR and NUI, and explore freehand
3D interactions with varying degrees of expressiveness, directness and mobility
in various physical settings. There a number of technical challenges that arise when
designing a mixed NUI/AR system, which I will address is this work: What can we capture,
and how? How do we represent the real in the virtual? And how do we physically
couple input and output? This is achieved by designing new systems, algorithms, and
user experiences that explore the combination of AR and NUI
Interactive design methods in virtual reality with haptics
This research demonstrated the use of virtual reality and related interaction technology, such as haptics, in an immersive virtual design application. The goal was to present an effective methodology for interactive design where engineers alter products and investigate updated analysis results in real-time using a virtual environment. Research was presented as a series of four papers;Chapter 2 covered a history of the interactive design methodology and it\u27s applications followed by the largest hurdles to effective interaction. Solutions where presented and their effectiveness demonstrated;The third chapter examined some limitations of the custom mesh-free analysis method used on the application. A search was performed for suitable replacement software with an emphasis on Open Source applications. The Tahoe program was selected, tested against the custom implementation, and integrated with the application;In Chapter 4 the calculation of shape design sensitivities for stress approximation were examined. Limitations of the existing finite differences technique were explained and a search of available techniques was made. After considering discrete derivatives, continuum derivatives, and automatic differentiation, and discrete derivatives approach with exact numerical differentiation was selected, implemented, and tested. Results indicate the discrete derivatives approach to be a fine replacement;Chapter 5 considered the use of haptic or force feedback as an additional channel of information for the designer. Several haptic devices and their uses were examined, and a PHANTOM 3.0 was selected for use with the immersive design application. Networked haptic feedback was added to the application and several techniques for mapping model stress state to device forces were investigated. Finally, a simple pilot study was conducted to help determine which feedback styles were considered most useful to a potential designer;The area with the greatest potential for future work would seem to be the use of haptics as a design tool in the application. A proper user study should be conducted to sort out which stress-force mapping techniques are the most effective for a designer. One should also try to determine just how useful the additional haptic feedback generally is when working in the virtual environment;A second area worth investigating further is the use of automatic differentiation routines for the computation of shape design sensitivities. Throughout the course of this research automatic differentiation has made many improvements. With programs as large as 400,000 lines and more now being completely differentiated, it appears to be fast becoming a practical analysis option. This would also make implementing additional types of sensitivity analyses much more straightforward, and would be a powerful addition to the methodologies of interactive design in virtual reality
Proceedings of the NASA Conference on Space Telerobotics, volume 3
The theme of the Conference was man-machine collaboration in space. The Conference provided a forum for researchers and engineers to exchange ideas on the research and development required for application of telerobotics technology to the space systems planned for the 1990s and beyond. The Conference: (1) provided a view of current NASA telerobotic research and development; (2) stimulated technical exchange on man-machine systems, manipulator control, machine sensing, machine intelligence, concurrent computation, and system architectures; and (3) identified important unsolved problems of current interest which can be dealt with by future research
Communicating the Unspeakable: Linguistic Phenomena in the Psychedelic Sphere
Psychedelics can enable a broad and paradoxical spectrum of linguistic
phenomena from the unspeakability of mystical experience to the eloquence of
the songs of the shaman or curandera. Interior dialogues with the Other,
whether framed as the voice of the Logos, an alien download, or communion
with ancestors and spirits, are relatively common. Sentient visual languages are
encountered, their forms unrelated to the representation of speech in natural
language writing systems. This thesis constructs a theoretical model of
linguistic phenomena encountered in the psychedelic sphere for the field of
altered states of consciousness research (ASCR). The model is developed from
a neurophenomenological perspective, especially the work of Francisco Varela,
and Michael Winkelman’s work in shamanistic ASC, which in turn builds on
the biogenetic structuralism of Charles Laughlin, John McManus, and Eugene
d’Aquili. Neurophenomenology relates the physical and functional
organization of the brain to the subjective reports of lived experience in altered
states as mutually informative, without reducing consciousness to one or the
other. Consciousness is seen as a dynamic multistate process of the recursive
interaction of biology and culture, thereby navigating the traditional
dichotomies of objective/subjective, body/mind, and inner/outer realities that
problematically characterize much of the discourse in consciousness studies.
The theoretical work of Renaissance scholar Stephen Farmer on the evolution of
syncretic and correlative systems and their relation to neurobiological
structures provides a further framework for the exegesis of the descriptions of
linguistic phenomena in first-person texts of long-term psychedelic selfexploration.
Since the classification of most psychedelics as Schedule I drugs,
legal research came to a halt; self-experimentation as research did not.
Scientists such as Timothy Leary and John Lilly became outlaw scientists, a
social aspect of the “unspeakability” of these experiences. Academic ASCR has
largely side-stepped examination of the extensive literature of psychedelic selfexploration.
This thesis examines aspects of both form and content from these
works, focusing on those that treat linguistic phenomena, and asking what
these linguistic experiences can tell us about how the psychedelic landscape is
constructed, how it can be navigated, interpreted, and communicated within its
own experiential field, and communicated about to make the data accessible to
inter-subjective comparison and validation. The methodological core of this
practice-based research is a technoetic practice as defined by artist and
theoretician Roy Ascott: the exploration of consciousness through interactive,
artistic, and psychoactive technologies. The iterative process of psychedelic
self-exploration and creation of interactive software defines my own technoetic
practice and is the means by which I examine my states of consciousness employing
the multidimensional visual language Glide
NASA SBIR abstracts of 1992, phase 1 projects
The objectives of 346 projects placed under contract by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are described. These projects were selected competitively from among proposals submitted to NASA in response to the 1992 SBIR Program Solicitation. The basic document consists of edited, non-proprietary abstracts of the winning proposals submitted by small businesses. The abstracts are presented under the 15 technical topics within which Phase 1 proposals were solicited. Each project was assigned a sequential identifying number from 001 to 346, in order of its appearance in the body of the report. Appendixes to provide additional information about the SBIR program and permit cross-reference of the 1992 Phase 1 projects by company name, location by state, principal investigator, NASA Field Center responsible for management of each project, and NASA contract number are included
Attending responding becoming : a living-learning inquiry in a naturally inclusional playspace
Traditional scientific paradigms emphasise writing in the third person, effectively marginalising the subjective perspective of the researcher. Many systems thinking, cybernetics and complexity approaches are better in this regard, as they involve systemic interventions where the relationships between the researcher and other participants really matter. Writing in the first person therefore becomes acceptable.In this Thesis (and a partner document coupled with it), I have explored how to reincorporate subjective empiricism into my systemic intervention practice. This has brought forth many unanticipated contributions. These take the form of new frameworks, concepts and approaches for systems and complexity practice, emerging from my engagements with myself and others, as well as from reflections upon those engagements.However, the content of my reflections and ‘becomings’ are not all that represent my doctoral contribution; there is also the form of my representation(s), as well as the emergent nature of the process through which they have come to be. I have drawn from Gregory Bateson’s use of metalogues: where the nature of a conversation mirrors its content – e.g. getting into a muddle whilst talking about muddles! Intuitively, I grasped the importance of metalogue in what I was attempting, and found myself coining the term metalogic coherence. Without fully appreciating what this might mean in practice, I groped my way into undertaking and documenting my research in ways that I believed would be metalogically coherent with the complexity-attuned principles to which I was committing. In sum, and key to appreciating what unfolds in the narrative, is recognising this Thesis and its partner document as metalogically coherent artefacts of naturally inclusional, complexity-attuned, evolutionary research.To fully acknowledge the different ways of knowing that have flowed into my inquiry, I have written in multiple voices (called statewaves, for reasons to be explained in the thesis). I found myself shifting from one voice to another as I explored and expressed different dimensions of what I was experiencing and discovering.In addition, I have made liberal use of hyperlinks, so both documents are far from linear. They are more akin to a mycorrhizal network, interlinking flows of ideas and sensemaking, all of which can be accessed and experienced differently, depending on each reader’s engagement with and through it.The thesis and its partner document are part of a composite submission that contains both poetry and artwork (visual depictions and animations of the ideas). These elements, along with the more conventional academic text, are augmented by penetrating reflections on my personal motivations, guided by a narrator signposting the streams as they flow into and between each other. All of my being has been implicated and impacted by this endeavour. When insights and new ‘becomings’ emerged flowfully during my practice, my joy was reflected in my narrative; as indeed were my pain, doubts and reinterpretations associated with ideas that were difficult to birth. I present all this in my submission, without retrospective sanitisation or simplification. In so doing, I am keeping faith with the principle that I remain at the heart of my research, and cannot be extracted from it without doing violence to the metalogical coherence that gives it meaning