DEVAL – A Device Abstraction Layer for VR/AR

2005

The development of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications still is a cumbersome and error prone task. While 2D desktop applications have very clear standards regarding user interfaces and a very limited set of common input devices, no standards for VR/AR applications yet exist. Additionally a wide range of different 3D input devices exists. In this paper we will present our framework for realizing multi-modal VR and AR user interfaces. This framework does not rely on a single mechanism, but provides a set of three individual mechanisms complementing each other. We use an interface markup language for defining cross-platform user interfaces, object behaviors for rapid VR/AR interaction prototyping, and object-oriented scene graphs for realizing complex application scenarios.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

We present a platform that offers designers flexibility on device design, fast prototyping, and integration of new devices to a mixed reality infrastructure. Our solution is based on the integration of a commercial embedded system, the Qwerk, and the Virtual Reality Peripheral Network (VRPN), a network-transparent interface between applications and typical virtual reality (VR) devices. This solution creates a hardware and software layer between new devices and VR applications that facilitate development. We show here three examples. The first application targets a simple device for object movement on an axis. The second one consists on a device that changes the color of a virtual object based on temperature. Finally, we design, build, and test a new wireless navigation device, our "Light Gloves".

2001

This article describes OpenTracker, an open software architecture that provides a framework for the different tasks involved in tracking input devices and processing multi-modal input data in virtual environments and augmented reality application. The OpenTracker framework eases the development and maintenance of hardware setups in a more flexible manner than what is typically offered by virtual reality development packages. This goal is achieved by using an object-oriented design based on XML, taking full advantage of this new technology by allowing to use standard XML tools for development, configuration and documentation. The OpenTracker engine is based on a data flow concept for multi-modal events. A multi-threaded execution model takes care of tunable performance. Transparent network access allows easy development of decoupled simulation models. Finally, the application developer's interface features both a time-based and an event based model, that can be used simultaneously, to serve a large range of applications. OpenTracker is a first attempt towards a "write once, input anywhere" approach to virtual reality application development. To support these claims, integration into an existing augmented reality system is demonstrated. We also show how a prototype tracking equipment for mobile augmented reality can be assembled from consumer input devices with the aid of OpenTracker. Once development is sufficiently mature, it is planned to make Open-Tracker available to the public under an open source software license.

Frontiers in virtual reality, 2022

If Mixed Reality applications are supposed to become truly ubiquitous, they face the challenge of an ever evolving set of hardware and software systems-each with their own standards and APIs-that need to work together and become part of the same shared environment (the application). A unified standard is unlikely so we can not rely on a single software development stack to incorporate all necessary parts. Instead we need frameworks that are modular and flexible enough to be adapted to the needs of the application at hand and are able to incorporate a wide range of setups for devices, services, etc. We identified a set of common questions that can be used to characterize and analyze Mixed Reality applications and use these same questions to identify challenges as well as present solutions in the form of three frameworks tackling the fields of tracking and inference (UbiTrack), interaction (Ubi-Interact) and visualization (UbiVis). Tracking and inference has been addressed for quite some time now while interaction is a current topic with existing solutions. Visualization will be focused more in the future. We present several applications in development together with their future vision and explain how the frameworks help realize these and other potential apps.

NSF Collaborative Virtual Reality and Visualization Workshop, 2003

In this paper we describe how we address the problem of porting VR applications between different VR setups without having to redesign any of the interaction aspects. SLiVR (Semantic Linking in Virtual Reality) a higher level interaction software layer that fits into our VR framework has been developed. This allows the VR application to deal with the interaction aspects in terms of tasks which we call semantic events in an input device independent manner. SLiVR, which contains a library of tools to perform the different ...

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

Software architectures are particularly useful when designing complex systems. Apart from facilitating the design, development and evolution processes, software architectures help developers who are new in the domain to understand the design issues involved, reducing the learning effort. In this work we present a software architecture for virtual reality systems. This architecture applies patterns common in other interactive systems, such as the Model-View-Controller, and also identifies new patterns proper of the VR domain, such as the scene graph. In addition, in the proposed architecture we have identified the variability points needed for adapting and evolving such VR systems. Interfaces DIS NBIS 6 DOF Tracker Mouse Keyboard GEM Rendering Engine Event Queue Event Queue Shared Entity DB Other GEM

2001

There are many toolkits that aid the process of constructing virtual environments. Each of these development systems has a special set of features, they support a set of hardware and they give developers and end users a level of abstraction. This paper presents a new component based system for the development of VR based applications. With a pool of components everybody should be able to create a virtual environment.

Augmented reality (AR) takes natural user input (NUI), such as gestures, voice, and eye gaze, and produces digital visual overlays on top of reality seen by a user. Today, multiple shipping AR applications exist, most notably titles for the Microsoft Kinect and smartphone applications such as Layar, Wikitude, and Junaio. Despite this activity, little attention has been paid to operating system support for AR applications. Instead, each AR application today does its own sensing and rendering, with the help of user-level libraries like OpenCV or the Microsoft Kinect SDK.

2010

2004

Abstract In this paper, we propose context-aware module for virtual reality (VR) to provide more personalized and suitable interaction in current situation. The proposed module, vr-UCAM, is the extended version of ubi-UCAM, a unified context–aware application model for ubiquitous computing (ubiComp) environment. The vrSensor and vrService in vr-UCAM establish dynamic connections with ubiSensor and ubiService in ubi-UCAM.