VRST

A common man's first encounter with Virtual Reality is often through games. This combined with hype generated the popular media and some VR enthusiasts, has lead people think of VR as a technology for entertainment only. This view is obviously narrow, ...

Virtual Reality applications must maintain a constant, frame rate to maximize user performance and comfort. The display component of a VR application consumes a significant portion of the available time, therefore controlling its time usage solves a ...

The rendering and animation of complex scenes containing many objects represented by large numbers of display primitives requires time proportional to the total number of primitives in the scene. To improve the performance of a given graphics engine, ...

The method of level-of-detail (LoD) is effective in conquering complex models of virtual environments. In LoD each object has multiple models with different complexity. Depending on a set of decision criteria (like size and focus) an LoD algorithm ...

This paper describes a case study of building a prototype of an immersive three dimensional (3-D) modeler which supports simple two-handed operations. Designing 3-D objects in a virtual environment has a number of advantages for 3-D geometry creation ...

Virtual environments open up new opportunities and challenges for geometric modeling systems. A general approach to geometric modeling suitable for the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment is described. The approach is based on alpha complexes, and some ...

There are many obstacles to prevent the timely development of competitive new products. Virtual Reality(VR) is a potential technology to improve this situation significantly. A synthetic 3D virtual environment(VE) can be organized to enable both ...

The rapidly growing interest in interactive three-dimensional(3D) computer environments highly recommend the hand gesture as one of their interaction modalities. Among several factors constituting a hand gesture, hand movement pattern is ...

Hand gesture is one of the most natural and expressive ways for the hearing impaired. However, because of the complexity of dynamic gestures, most researches are focused either on static gestures, postures, or a small set of dynamic gestures. As real-...

The manipulation of a virtual object by means of a digital glove is a tedious task for repetitive position and orientation adjustments. In this paper we try to overcome the lack of force feedback of general purpose digital gloves. We propose a solution ...

In Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs), the task space is displayed on a VDT as a set of objects. When using a GUI, the operator uses a mouse to move the cursor and to click on an object. The cursor is analogous to the user's finger and clicking the button ...

Architecture and Virtual Reality (VR) are joined in a very special relationship. The architecture discipline on the one hand is a prime research and application area for virtual reality. VR on the other hand could offer new possibilities to design and ...

Urban planners have developed many theories of how urban design affects people's experience of real-world cities. This paper considers how this body of work might be applied to the design of virtual environments. The paper presents and compares two ...

A discussion of four applications of virtual reality in civil engineering is presented. These applications simulate traffic accidents responses, the prevention of construction falls from a building during construction, form scaffolding fall protection, ...

Optical beacon tracking (OBT) is gaining importance for real-time object position and orientation sensing. We assess the limits of this method and present both practical and theoretical accuracy figures. The basic geometric relationships for 3, 5, and 6 ...

We present a color-video-based augmented reality (AR) system that is designed to be self-tracking that is, it requires no separate tracking subsystem. Rather, tracking is performed strictly from the video images acquired through the lens of the camera ...

This paper describes the work which has been conducted to further the development of an effective motion capture system toed on data fusion and the minimal use of sensing devices. Application of the inverse kinematics method is first described along ...

The problem of collision detection is fundamental to inter-active applications such as computer animation and virtual environments. In these fields, prompt recognition of possible impacts is important for computing real-time response. We present a ...

The paper is concerned with the efficient generation of graphic images by exploiting the frame coherence in visibility to minimize polygon flow. The basic idea is to manage the visible polygon set (VPS) somewhat loosely, thereby reducing the computation ...

Lack of bandwidth has been shown to be a major impediment to achieving realism in large scale virtual worlds with many interacting entities. Recent projects that have addressed this problem have, for the most part, been tied to a single application ...

Virtual environments are created by specifying their content, which comprises geometry, interaction, properties, and behavior of the objects. Interaction and behavior can be cumbersome to specify and create, if they have to be implemented through an ...

In this paper, a boundary element method and a finite element method with the static condensation technique are respectively applied to real-time animation of deformable objects. First, a finite element model in conjunction with the static condensation ...

The Laboratory for Human Interaction in the Virtual Environment at the Naval Postgraduate School is one of the leading groups for the comprehensive study of humans in the virtual environment. The lab builds on work completed by the NPSNET Research Group ...

This paper concentrates on the applicability of virtual reality (VR) technology to science and engineering research. To that end, a look into the effort required to develop effective applications emphasizing software design issues is presented. The ...

This paper describes an experiment to assess the influence of immersion on performance in immersive virtual environments. The task involved Tri-Dimensional Chess, and required subjects to reproduce on a real chess board the state of board learned from a ...

A method is proposed to help a user manipulate an object in a virtual environment. The method does not give special properties to the object in advance, and does not use special hardware. Instead, it uses only visual constraints among object features ...

This paper describes a totally unencumbered, hands-free virtual reality (VR) walkthrough system for the masses. A new navigation technique that requires only the involvement of the user's feet is presented. A user steps on a pressure sensitive mat to ...

This paper proposes a new three-dimensional pointing device considering user friendliness and handiness. The proposed method utilizes five degrees of freedom via the medium of nonverbal voice of human. That is, the spatial direction of the sound source, ...

We integrate an electronic atlas of brain structure with a virtual stereotactic frame in a system for intuitive, reach-in manipulation. Clinical study now under way will test our expectation that plans can be prepared faster, with better and more ...