AeroVR : immersive visualization system for aerospace design and digital twinning in virtual reality

One of today’s most propitious immersive technologies is virtual reality (VR). This term is colloquially associated with headsets that transport users to a bespoke, built-for-purpose immersive 3D virtual environment. It has given rise to the field of immersive analytics—a new field of research that aims to use immersive technologies for enhancing and empowering data analytics. However, in developing such a new set of tools, one has to ask whether the move from standard hardware setup to a fully immersive 3D environment is justified—both in terms of efficiency and development costs. To this end, in this paper, we present AeroVR—an immersive aerospace design environment with the objective of aiding the component aerodynamic design process by interactively visualizing performance and geometry. We decompose the design of such an environment into function structures, identify the primary and secondary tasks, present an implementation of the system, and verify the interface in terms of usability and expressiveness. We deploy AeroVR on a prototypical design study of a compressor blade for an engine

AeroVR: An immersive visualisation system for aerospace design and digital twinning in virtual reality

ABSTRACTOne of today’s most propitious immersive technologies is virtual reality (VR). This term is colloquially associated with headsets that transport users to a bespoke, built-for-purpose immersive 3D virtual environment. It has given rise to the field of immersive analytics—a new field of research that aims to use immersive technologies for enhancing and empowering data analytics. However, in developing such a new set of tools, one has to ask whether the move from standard hardware setup to a fully immersive 3D environment is justified—both in terms of efficiency and development costs. To this end, in this paper, we present AeroVR—an immersive aerospace design environment with the objective of aiding the component aerodynamic design process by interactively visualizing performance and geometry. We decompose the design of such an environment into function structures, identify the primary and secondary tasks, present an implementation of the system, and verify the interface in terms of usability and expressiveness. We deploy AeroVR on a prototypical design study of a compressor blade for an engine.This work was supported by studentships from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC-1788814), and the Cambridge European & Trinity Hall Scholarship in the case of Slawomir Tadeja. The second author, Pranay Seshadri, acknowledges the support of the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund, managed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC); grant number EP/T001569/1

Fast and precise touch-based text entry for head-mounted augmented reality with variable occlusion

We present the VISAR keyboard: An augmented reality (AR) head-mounted display (HMD) system that supports text entry via a virtualised input surface. Users select keys on the virtual keyboard by imitating the process of single-hand typing on a physical touchscreen display. Our system uses a statistical decoder to infer users’ intended text and to provide error-tolerant predictions. There is also a high-precision fall-back mechanism to support users in indicating which keys should be unmodified by the auto-correction process. A unique advantage of leveraging the well-established touch input paradigm is that our system enables text entry with minimal visual clutter on the see-through display, thus preserving the user’s field-of-view. We iteratively designed and evaluated our system and show that the final iteration of the system supports a mean entry rate of 17.75wpm with a mean character error rate less than 1%. This performance represents a 19.6% improvement relative to the state-of-the-art baseline investigated: A gaze-then-gesture text entry technique derived from the system keyboard on the Microsoft HoloLens. Finally, we validate that the system is effective in supporting text entry in a fully mobile usage scenario likely to be encountered in industrial applications of AR HMDs.Per Ola Kristensson was supported in part by a Google Faculty research award and EPSRC grants EP/N010558/1 and EP/N014278/1. Keith Vertanen was supported in part by a Google Faculty research award. John Dudley was supported by the Trimble Fund

Digital Twin Assessments in Virtual Reality: An Explorational Study with Aeroengines

We present an immersive environment where Virtual Reality (VR) is used to visualize the performance of a fleet of aircraft engines. Our virtual environment uses 3D geometric computer-aided design (CAD) models of the engines paired with performance maps that characterize their nominal working condition. These maps plot pressure ratio and efficiency as a function of shaft speed and inlet flow capacity for the numerous engine sub-systems. Superimposed on these maps is the true performance of each engine, obtained through real-time sensors. In this bespoke virtual space, an engineer can rapidly analyze the health of different engine sub-systems across the fleet within seconds. One of the key elements of such a system is the selection of an appropriate interaction technique. In this paper we explore the potential of interaction methods supported by a combination of gaze-tracking and hand-tracking achieved via an additional sensor attached to the front of the VR headset, with no need for the user to hold a controller. We report on an observational study with a small number of domain-experts to identify usability problems, spot potential improvements, and gain insights into our design interaction capabilities. The study allows us to trim the design space and to guide further design efforts in this area. We also analyze qualitative feedback provided by the end-users and discuss the lessons learned during the design, implementation, verification and validation of the system.EPSRC (EPSRC-1788814); Cambridge European and Trinity Hall; Cambridge Philosophical Society Research Studentship; Tsinghua Academic Fund for Undergraduate Overseas Studies; und from Tsien Excellence in Engineering Program; Wave 1 of The UKRI Strategic Priorities Fund under the EPSRC Grant EP/T001569/1, particularly the ``Digital Twinning in Aeronautics'' theme within that grant & The Alan Turing Institut

One year boundary layer aerosol size distribution data from five nordic background stations

International audienceSize distribution measurements performed at five different stations have been investigated during a one-year period between 01 June 2000 and 31 May 2001 with focus on diurnal, seasonal and geographical differences of size distribution properties. The stations involved cover a large geographical area ranging from the Finnish Lapland (67º N) down to southern Sweden (56º N) in the order Värriö, Pallas, Hyytiälä, Aspvreten and Vavihill. The shape of the size distribution is typically bimodal during winter with a larger fraction of accumulation mode particles compared to the other seasons. Highest Aitken mode concentration is found during summer and spring during the year of study. The maximum of nucleation events occur during the spring months at all stations. Nucleation events occur during other months as well, although not as frequently. Large differences were found between different categories of stations. Northerly located stations such as Pallas and Värriö presented well-separated Aitken and accumulation modes, while the two modes often overlap significantly at the two southernmost stations Vavihill and Aspvreten. A method to cluster trajectories was used to analyse the impact of long-range transport on the observed aerosol properties. Clusters of trajectories arriving from the continent were clearly associated with size distributions shifted towards the accumulation mode. This feature was more pronounced the further south the station was located. Marine- or Arctic-type clusters were associated with large variability in the nuclei size ranges. A quasi-lagrangian approach was used to investigate transport related changes in the aerosol properties. Typically, an increase in especially Aitken mode concentrations was observed when advection from the north occurs, i.e. allowing more continental influence on the aerosol when comparing the different measurement sites. When trajectory clusters arrive to the stations from SW, a gradual decrease in number concentration is experienced in all modes as latitude of measurement site increases

Use of specific Green's functions for solving direct problems involving a heterogeneous rigid frame porous medium slab solicited by acoustic waves

A domain integral method employing a specific Green's function (i.e., incorporating some features of the global problem of wave propagation in an inhomogeneous medium) is developed for solving direct and inverse scattering problems relative to slab-like macroscopically inhomogeneous porous obstacles. It is shown how to numerically solve such problems, involving both spatially-varying density and compressibility, by means of an iterative scheme initialized with a Born approximation. A numerical solution is obtained for a canonical problem involving a two-layer slab.Comment: submitted to Math.Meth.Appl.Sc

ReconViguRation: Reconfiguring Physical Keyboards in Virtual Reality.

Physical keyboards are common peripherals for personal computers and are efficient standard text entry devices. Recent research has investigated how physical keyboards can be used in immersive head-mounted display-based Virtual Reality (VR). So far, the physical layout of keyboards has typically been transplanted into VR for replicating typing experiences in a standard desktop environment. In this paper, we explore how to fully leverage the immersiveness of VR to change the input and output characteristics of physical keyboard interaction within a VR environment. This allows individual physical keys to be reconfigured to the same or different actions and visual output to be distributed in various ways across the VR representation of the keyboard. We explore a set of input and output mappings for reconfiguring the virtual presentation of physical keyboards and probe the resulting design space by specifically designing, implementing and evaluating nine VR-relevant applications: emojis, languages and special characters, application shortcuts, virtual text processing macros, a window manager, a photo browser, a whack-a-mole game, secure password entry and a virtual touch bar. We investigate the feasibility of the applications in a user study with 20 participants and find that, among other things, they are usable in VR. We discuss the limitations and possibilities of remapping the input and output characteristics of physical keyboards in VR based on empirical findings and analysis and suggest future research directions in this area