VIARGO: A Generic VR-based Interaction Library

2020

Virtual Reality is an immersive and powerful technology which is already changing computing, entertainment, education, and social networking. Modern VR headsets are capable of comfortably delivering high-resolution, high-framerate content and providing fully mobile motion tracking. Consumer VR systems typically consist of a tracked headset and two tracked hand controllers. However, the system format and technology implementation of commercial VR headsets introduce limitations in the user experience. In this project, we identify three specific interaction limitations present in modern VR and devise a hardware solution for each. The three issues we aim to improve are finger presence, two-handed rigid virtual object interactions, and locomotion. The first interaction limitation, finger presence, is the sense of movement control of the virtual hand’s fingers when in VR. Another issue arises when interacting with rigid two-handed virtual objects, as the user is typically using two separa...

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.

Proceedings of the seventh …, 2002

We present the Interaction Technique Markup Language (InTml), a profile on top of the core X3D that describes 3D interaction techniques (InTs) and hardware platforms. InTml makes 3D InTs easier to understand, compare, and integrate in complete virtual reality (VR) applications. InTml can be used as a front end for any VR toolkit, so InTml documents that plug together 3D InTs, VR objects, and devices can be fully described and executed.

2011

Implementing appropriate interaction for Virtual Reality (VR) applications is one of the most challenging tasks that a developer has to face. This challenge is due to both technical and theoretical factors. First, from a technical point of view, the developer does not only have to deal with nonstandard devices, he has to facilitate their use in a parallel a coordinated way, interweaving the fields of 3D and multimodal interaction. Secondly, from a theoretical point of view, he has to design the interaction almost from scratch, as a standard set of interaction techniques and interactive tasks has not been identified. All these factors are reflected in the absence of appropriate tools to implement VR interaction techniques. In this paper, some existing tools that aim at the development of VR interaction techniques are studied, analysing their strengths and, more specifically, their shortcomings, such as the difficulties to integrate them with any VR platform or their absence of a strong conceptual background. Following that, a framework to implement VR interaction techniques is described that provides the required support for multimodal interaction and, also, uses experience gained from the study of the former tools to avoid previous mistakes. Finally, the usage of the resulting framework is illustrated with the development of the interaction techniques of a sample application.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

In contrast to 2D environments which apply well established user interface elements and generally accepted interaction techniques, VR and AR applications typically provide rather individual and specific realizations. This often leads to inconsistent user interfaces and a long and cumbersome development process. In this paper we show how we extended our approach on modeling VR and AR interface elements and interaction techniques represented by interaction and behavior objects by some simple yet powerful mechanisms: modules, templates, and inheritance. We will also show how specific examples could benefit from that approach.

Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2015

Virtual Reality has become, once again, a popular and interesting topic, both as a research and commercial field. This trend has its origin in the use of mobile devices as computational core and displays for Virtual Reality. Android is one of the most used platform in this context and Unity3d is a suitable game engine for such platform. In order to improve the immersive experience, some electronic devices, Arduino especially, are used to gather information, such as the movement of the user's arms or legs. Although Android, Arduino and Unity3d are often used independently in Virtual Reality investigations, few studies use all of them together. Furthermore, each time these technologies are used in a new project, the developers have to think about a new way of communication between them. In this work we present AnArU, a framework for physical human interaction in Virtual Reality. The goal of AnArU is to allow an easy, efficient and extensible communication between the hardware and software involved in the Virtual Reality System.

2008

Abstract In this paper, we propose a sensor-based interaction for ubiquitous virtual reality (U-VR) systems that users are able to interact implicitly or explicitly with through a sensor. Due to the advances in sensor technology, we can utilize sensory data as a means of user interactions. To show the feasibility of the proposed method, we extend the Composar augmented reality (AR) authoring tool to add support for sensor-based interaction.

2015 IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology; Ubiquitous Computing and Communications; Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing; Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, 2015

The advancement of recent developments over the VR with the expansion of new Head Mount Displays (H.M.D.) such as Oculus Rift and Morpheus have opened new challenges in the already active research filed of the industry of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by exploring new means of communication with the support of the new hardware devices adjustable to body movements and hand position. The paper explores the hardware interactivity and VR H.M.D's through two games designed to use the latest Oculus Rift SDK technology with alternative methods of hardware communication. A usability evaluation study was conducted with 18 participants and the results presented and discussed.

Theory and Practice of Computer Graphics, 2005

In this paper, we present a framework for experimenting with virtual environments. The architecture of the system VRECKO is designed for the rapid prototyping of techniques for human-computer interaction. The architecture is flexible, but simple. Virtual environment entities and other components can be configured at run time. We demonstrate the flexibility of the approach on several examples of experiments and tools which were realized in VRECKO. Keywords: Virtual reality, virtual environment, interaction techniques, ...

VRIC 2010 - Virtual Reality International Conference, 2010

We analyse and compare several prototypes of the HandNavigator, a peripheral device allowing a user to interact with a virtual environment by controlling a virtual hand with fine dexterity. Our prototypes, as easy to manipulate as a computer mouse, integrate a large panel of small sensors enabling the simultaneous control of a large number of degrees of freedom. Based on this architecture, we address the problems of designing a device where physical phenomena, physiological behavior and device structure are all tightly combined and significantly influence the overall interaction. The issues addressed include the generation of degrees of freedom and decoupling of virtual hand and finger movement, the influence of device shape and sensor type on the decoupling necessary for various tasks, dexterity, and performance. Using these different prototypes, we are able to perform complex tasks, such as virtual sculpture and manipulation of deformable objects in a natural way. The choice of the sensors and of their placement on the device show their influence on the dexterity of the virtual hand and on the range of configurations that can be achieved and addressed by a prototype.