Beaming into the Rat World: Enabling Real-Time Interaction between Rat and Human Each at Their Own Scale

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) typically generates the illusion in participants that they are in the displayed virtual scene where they can experience and interact in events as if they were really happening. Teleoperator (TO) systems place people at a remote physical destination embodied as a robotic device, and where typically participants have the sensation of being at the destination, with the ability to interact with entities there. In this paper, we show how to combine IVR and TO to allow a new class of application. The participant in the IVR is represented in the destination by a physical robot (TO) and simultaneously the remote place and entities within it are represented to the participant in the IVR. Hence, the IVR participant has a normal virtual reality experience, but where his or her actions and behaviour control the remote robot and can therefore have physical consequences. Here, we show how such a system can be deployed to allow a human and a rat to operate together, but the human interacting with the rat on a human scale, and the rat interacting with the human on the rat scale. The human is represented in a rat arena by a small robot that is slaved to the human’s movements, whereas the tracked rat is represented to the human in the virtual reality by a humanoid avatar. We describe the system and also a study that was designed to test whether humans can successfully play a game with the rat. The results show that the system functioned well and that the humans were able to interact with the rat to fulfil the tasks of the game. This system opens up the possibility of new applications in the life sciences involving participant observation of and interaction with animals but at human scale

Coroutine Synchronization In Avs

The current AVS flow executive provides only limited mechanisms for coroutines synchronization: either they run completely synchronously with the entire network or completely asynchronously. In many real-time applications, responding to user interaction or to real-time sensors (live camera input), finer-grained synchronization control is needed. This paper presents a token-based handshaking scheme which can be instantiated at runtime between any subgroups of modules and coroutines, allowing users to define control flow in the network, as well as data flow. Developer's Track, Third International AVS User Conference (AVS 94), Boston, MA, May 2-4, 1994. 1 INTRODUCTION Interactive data exploration and event monitoring systems need special, continuously running processes to accept asynchronous input from user interaction [4, 5] and remote sensors 1 . AVS provides coroutines for this purpose. They complement the more commonly used modules in AVS data flow networks. AVS coroutines execute..

Interactive data exploration and telecollaboration in biomedicine using AVS

While AVS is a very successful visualization system, it is not currently suited for data exploration and telecollaboration applications because it has not provided the necessary interactive data probing, cursor linking and window migration tools. We have extended AVS in this direction. Interactive, telecollaborative data exploration is a valuable tool for many applications. In this paper, we show how it can be used for the analysis of multi-spectral biomedical data to quantify tissue vascularity in the thyroid of the rat

PerfVisS: A Performance Visualizer for High Performance Fortran Programs on Workstation Farms

Writing efficient code for parallel processors is still a rather complex and little understood task. Tools to gather and analyze performance information during program execution are essential for understanding the reasons for inefficient executions. Current performance visualization systems provide only a limited set of capabilities, hardwired into huge, monolithic programs. Programmers need a very flexible environment in which they can mix and match different performance visualization tools. Research in scientific visualization has developed several environments to visualize, explore and analyze large quantities of data. Reusing these capabilities to visualize MIMD performance data significantly helps in the development of a performance profiler. However, scientific visualization methods have to be altered appropriately to address the non-geometric nature of performance data. This paper presents a profiler, PerfVisS, which builds upon existing Telecollaborative Data Exploration (TDE) ..

Using a Color Reflection Model to Separate Highlights from Object Color

Current methods for image segmentation are confused by artifacts such as highlights, because they are not based on any physical model of these phenomena. In this paper, we present an approach to color image understanding that accounts for color variations due to highlights and shading. Based on the physics of reflection by dielectric materials, such as plastic, we show that the color of every pixel from an object can be described as a linear combination of the object color and the highlight color. According to this model, all color pixels from one object form a planar cluster in the color space whose shape is determined by the object and highlight colors and by the object shape and illumination geometry. We present a method which exploits the color difference between object color and highlight color, as exhibited in the cluster shape, to separate the color of every pixel into a matte component and a highlight component. This generates two intrinsic images, one showing the scene without highlights, and the other one showing only the highlights. The intrinsic images may be a useful tool for a variety of algorithms in computer vision that cannot detect or analyze highlights, such as stereo vision, motion analysis, shape from shading, and shape from highlights. We have applied this method to real images in a laboratory environment, and we show these results and discuss some of the pragmatic issues endemic to precision color imaging