Designing a Virtual Manikin Animation Framework Aimed at Virtual Prototyping

International audienceIn the industry, numerous commercial packages provide tools to introduce, and analyse human behaviour in the product's environment (for maintenance, ergonomics...), thanks to Virtual Humans. We will focus on control. Thanks to algorithms newly introduced in recent research papers, we think we can provide an implementation, which even widens, and simplifies the animation capacities of virtual manikins. In order to do so, we are going to express the industrial expectations as for Virtual Humans, without considering feasibility (not to bias the issue). The second part will show that no commercial application provides the tools that perfectly meet the needs. Thus we propose a new animation framework that better answers the problem. Our contribution is the integration - driven by need ~ of available new scientific techniques to animate Virtual Humans, in a new control scheme that better answers industrial expectations

Passive Control Architecture for Virtual Humans

International audienceIn the present paper, we introduce a new control architecture aimed at driving virtual humans in interaction with virtual environments, by motion capture. It brings decoupling of functionalities, and also of stability thanks to passivity. We show projections can break passivity, and thus must be used carefully. Our control scheme enables task space and internal control, contact, and joint limits management. Thanks to passivity, it can be easily extended. Besides, we introduce a new tool as for manikin's control, which makes it able to build passive projections, so as to guide the virtual manikin when sharp movements are needed

Integration of a Balanced Virtual Manikin in a Virtual Reality Platform aimed at Virtual Prototyping

International audienceThe work presented here is aimed at introducing a virtual human controller in a virtual prototyping framework. After a brief introduction describing the problem solved in the paper, we describe the interest as for digital humans in the context of concurrent engineering. This leads us to draw a control architecture enabling to drive virtual humans in a real-time immersed way, and to interact with the product, through motion capture. Unfortunately, we show this control scheme can lead to unfeasible movements because of the lack of balance control. Introducing such a controller is a problem that was never addressed in the context of real-time. We propose an implementation of a balance controller, that we insert into the previously described control scheme. Next section is dedicated to show the results we obtained. Finally, we propose a virtual reality platform into which the digital character controller is integrated

Patterns for Collaborative Virtual Reality

The paper considers two design patterns enabling to extend automatically a virtual prototyping application into a collaborative application. The proposed patterns deal with distributed designation and automatic aggregation. They provide adequate properties in term of cooperation and mobility while guarantying good usability over the standard Internet. Thus, distant participants can share and cooperate to define common agreed design of a virtual prototype while alternating between disconnected and meeting works. These two patterns take part of a more complete framework including several other patterns that address distributed protection, meeting schedule, real time membership, real time awareness, progression, parallel work, refreshment, security, address allocation and multicast connectivity. First pattern provides a distributed designation of a virtual scene tree that supports mobility. Unique names are maintained in a fully distributed way among disconnected workspaces and meeting replicas. Second pattern addresses the aggregation of different disconnected workspaces into a global scene tree. That aggregation mechanism relies on a peer-to-peer communication model. It enables to aggregate the scene while working on it. Different patterns of our framework rely on existing patterns that we compound. They capture an efficient style of distribution through reuse of existing architectural patterns. The whole framework runs on Unix and Windows, can be deployed easily on the standard Internet, is fully distributed and supports efficiently mobility and conciliation meetings. It is used in a virtual prototyping application at EADS

COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE DISTRIBUTED BUILDING SITE METAPHOR

The 7-th International Conference in Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Interactive Digital Media'99, conference proceedings, pp. SP/111-117.Virtual reality is used to support the collaboration in design of manufacturing products. Most of the time, solutions focus on sophisticated communication architectures in order to satisfy general requirements of collaboration. Within the building site, workers share and split dynamically the work, join their local works automatically into a global work and achieve conciliation. The corresponding services are provided through low cost communication services available on standard Internet workstations. A generic solution allows distributing dynamically the scene graph beyond the different users. The users form a meeting to interact on the global scene while keeping the work consistent. They can resolve the choices of design through a conciliation procedure. The solution allows a low cost deployment and highly usable collaboration services. In contrast with other solutions, the collaboration services fit the design activity of manufacturing products and only use best effort communication services