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

A Virtual Tornadic Thunderstorm Enabling Students to Construct Knowledge about Storm Dynamics through Data Collection and Analysis

A visually realistic tornadic supercell thunderstorm has been constructed in a fully immersive virtual reality environment to allow students to better understand the complex small-scale dynamics present in such a storm through data probing. Less-immersive versions have been created that run on PCs, facilitating broader dissemination. The activity has been tested in introductory meteorology classes over the last four years. An exercise involving the virtual storm was first used by a subset of students from a large introductory meteorology course in spring 2002. Surveys were used at that time to evaluate the impact of this activity as a constructivist learning tool. More recently, data probe capabilities were added to the virtual storm activity enabling students to take measurements of temperature, wind, pressure, relative humidity, and vertical velocity at any point within the 3-D volume of the virtual world, and see the data plotted via a graphical user interface. Similar surveys applied to groups of students in 2003 and 2004 suggest that the addition of data probing improved the understanding of storm-scale features, but the improved understanding may not be statistically significant when evaluated using quizzes reflecting short-term retention. The use of the activity was revised in 2005 to first have students pose scientific questions about these storms and think about a scientific strategy to answer their questions before exploring the storm. Once again, scores on quizzes for students who used the virtual storm activity were slightly better than those of students who were exposed to only a typical lecture, but differences were not statistically significant

Towards Next Generation of Pedestrian and Connected Vehicle In-the-loop Research: A Digital Twin Simulation Framework

Digital Twin is an emerging technology that replicates real-world entities into a digital space. It has attracted increasing attention in the transportation field and many researchers are exploring its future applications in the development of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) technologies. Connected vehicles (CVs) and pedestrians are among the major traffic participants in ITS. However, the usage of Digital Twin in research involving both CV and pedestrian remains largely unexplored. In this study, a Digital Twin framework for CV and pedestrian in-the-loop simulation is proposed. The proposed framework consists of the physical world, the digital world, and data transmission in between. The features for the entities (CV and pedestrian) that need digital twined are divided into external state and internal state, and the attributes in each state are described. We also demonstrate a sample architecture under the proposed Digital Twin framework, which is based on Carla-Sumo Co-simulation and Cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE). The proposed framework is expected to provide guidance to the future Digital Twin research, and the architecture we build can serve as the testbed for further research and development of ITS applications on CV and pedestrian

An empirical evaluation of two natural hand interaction systems in augmented reality

Human-computer interaction based on hand gesture tracking is not uncommon in Augmented Reality. In fact, the most recent optical Augmented Reality devices include this type of natural interaction. However, due to hardware and system limitations, these devices, more often than not, settle for semi-natural interaction techniques, which may not always be appropriate for some of the tasks needed in Augmented Reality applications. For this reason, we compare two different optical Augmented Reality setups equipped with hand tracking. The first one is based on a Microsoft HoloLens (released in 2016) and the other one is based on a Magic Leap One (released more than two years later). Both devices offer similar solutions for the visualization and registration problems but differ in the hand tracking approach, since the former uses a metaphoric hand-gesture tracking and the latter relies on an isomorphic approach. We raise seven research questions regarding these two setups, which we answer after performing two task-based experiments using virtual elements, of different sizes, that are moved using natural hand interaction. The questions deal with the accuracy and performance achieved with these setups and also with user preference, recommendation and perceived usefulness. For this purpose, we collect both subjective and objective data about the completion of these tasks. Our initial hypothesis was that there would be differences, in favor of the isomorphic and newer setup, in the use of hand interaction. However, the results surprisingly show that there are very small objective differences between these setups, and the isomorphic approach is not significantly better in terms of accuracy and mistakes, although it allows a faster completion of one of the tasks. In addition, no remarkable statistically significant differences can be found between the two setups in the subjective datasets gathered through a specific questionnaire. We also analyze the opinions of the participants in terms of usefulness, preference and recommendation. The results show that, although the Magic Leap-based system gets more support, the differences are not statistically significant

Gut Microbiota and Obesity: Prebiotic and Probiotic Effects

Malnutrition through excessive food consumption is a worldwide pandemic. Changes in lifestyle, diet and physical activity have resulted in an exponential increase in the number of obese people around the world. Multiple factors influence the development of this disease, and recently it has been suggested that gut microbiota (GM) plays an important role in nutrient absorption and energy regulation of individuals, thus affecting their nutritional status. It has been proven that gut microbiota is different in individuals with a normal nutritional status compared to those who are obese. Therefore, to study bacterial populations that make up the microbiota and to understand how prebiotics and probiotics affect the increase of these bacteria has become a promising alternative to treat obesity. This chapter looks at defining the established relationship between probiotics, prebiotics and gut microbiota that develop in obese people and people of normal weight, with the aim of providing future dietary recommendations to treat this medical condition

Bibliografía [Cuadernos del Instituto Antonio de Nebrija de estudios sobre la Universidad. 2002, nº 5]

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