Context: In recent years, everyone is completely relying on using computers and smartphones in our daily activities. Augmented Reality will superimpose virtual and computer-generated information on top of the real world. Volvo Construction Equipment (VCE) team is planning to use Augmented Reality applications on a real construction site to track the details of the vehicles without going to the laboratory. An Augmented reality application is developed for Microsoft HoloLensand Mobile device and the user experience is evaluated. This research has been conducted at PDRL-BTH, in collaboration with VCE. Objectives: In this research, the key attributes are collected, which should be displayed in both the devices and compare the user experience using the user satisfaction score. Furthermore, this research involves exploring and evaluating the difference in the user experience between both the devices. Methods: In this study first an interview is carried out with the design engineers of the VCE team. Some open-ended questions were asked to the VCE team. The information required from the VCE team is collected and documented and further an experiment on the user experience has been conducted to calculate the User Satisfaction Score between the Microsoft HoloLens and Mobile device. After the experiment, the significant difference has been measured using statistical techniques among the two devices. To measure the size of the difference Cohen’s D effect size is used. Results: The significant difference between the User Satisfaction Score of the two devices has been done using T-test. The results state that the significant value is less than 0.05 and hence the null hypothesis is rejected. The measurable difference states that Microsoft HoloLens has a better user interface than the Mobile device with respect to the user satisfaction Score. Conclusions: After obtaining the results and analyzing the data, we conclude that there is a significant difference in the user experience of Microsoft HoloLens when compared to Mobile device. We also conclude that Microsoft HoloLens has better user experience when compared to the Mobile device.

The visualization of data helps to provide faster and deeper insight into the data. In this work, a system for visualizing and analyzing big data in an interactive mixed reality environment is proposed. Such a system can be used for representing different types of data such as temporal, geospatial, network graph, and high dimensional. Also, an implementation of this system for four different data types are created. The data types include network data, volumetric data, high dimensional, and spectral data for different mixed reality devices such as Microsoft HoloLens, Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, and Android ARCore were created. It was shown that such a system could store and use billions of samples and represent millions of them at once.

Off-highway vehicle, such as excavators and forklifts, are heavy machines that are capable of causing harm to humans or damage property. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to develop interfaces for these kind of vehicles that can aid the operator to maintain a high level of situational awareness. How the interface affects the operators’ situational awareness is consequently an important metric to measure when evaluating the interface. Mixed reality simulators can be used to both develop and evaluate such interfaces in an immersive and safe environment. In this thesis we investigated how to measure situational awareness in a mixed-reality off-highway vehicle simulation scenario, without having to pause the scenario, by cross-referencing logs from the virtual environment and logs from the users' gaze position. Our method for investigating this research question was to perform a literature study and a user test. Each participant in the user test filled out a SART post-simulation questionnaire which we then compared with our measurement system.

<p>This thesis describes a six-month project based on stroke rehabilitation and involves designing with medical doctors, a physiotherapist and an occupational therapist, prototyping and evaluating with both stroke patients and other users. Our project involves the construction of a rehabilitation exercise system, based on virtual environments (VE) and haptics, designed for stroke patients. Our system uses a commercially available haptic device called the PHANTOM Omni, which has the possibility of being used as a rehabilitation tool to interact with virtual environments. The PHANTOM Omni is used in combination with our own developed software based on the platform H3D API. Our goal is to construct an application which will motivate the stroke patient to start using their arm again.</p><p>We give a review of the different aspects of stroke, rehabilitation, VE and haptics and how these have previously been combined. We describe our findings from our literature studies and from informal interviews with medical personnel. From these conclusions we attempt to take the research area further by suggesting and evaluating designs of different games/genres that can be used with the PHANTOM Omni as possible haptic exercises for post-stroke arm rehabilitation. We then present two different implementations to show how haptic games can be constructed. We mainly focus on an application we built, a game, using an iterative design process based on studies conducted during the project, called "The Labyrinth". The game is used to show many of the different aspects that have to be taken into account when designing haptic games for stroke patients. From a study with three stroke patients we have seen that "The Labyrinth" has the potential of being a stimulating, encouraging and fun exercise complement to the traditional rehabilitation. Through the design process and knowledge we acquired during this thesis we have created a set of general design guidelines that we believe can help in the future software development of haptic games for post-stroke arm rehabilitation.</p>

Ambient intelligence refers to the vision of computationally augmented everyday environments that are sensitive, adaptive and responsive to humans and intelligently support their daily lives. Ambient ecologies are the infrastructures of ambient intelligence. To enable system developers to frame and manage the dynamic and complex interaction of humans with ambient ecologies consisting of a mixture of physical (real) and virtual (digital) objects, novel interaction paradigms are needed. Traditional interaction paradigms like the WIMP (windows, icon, menus, and pointing devices) paradigm for desktop computing operate in a closed world, unaware of the physical, social and cultural context. They restrict human perception and action to screen, mouse and keyboard with the assumption that human attention will be fully devoted to interaction with the computer. Emerging interaction paradigms for ambient intelligence are typically centered on specific devices, specific computing environments or specific human capabilities. Also, many of them are driven by technological advancements rather than viewing the human agent as their starting point. A principled, theoretical approach centered in the individual human agent, their situation and activities that are comprehensive and integrated while at the same time instrumental in the design of ambient ecologies has been lacking. This thesis introduces egocentric interaction as an approach towards the modeling of ambient ecologies with the distinguishing feature of taking the human agent’s body, situation and activities as center of reference, as opposed to the more common device-centric approaches in facilitating human-environment interaction. Egocentric interaction is encapsulated in a number of assumptions and principles such as situatedness, the proximity principle, the physical-virtual equity principle, perception and action instead of “input” and “output,” and activity-centeredness. A situative space model is proposed based on some of these principles. It is intended to capture what a specific human agent can perceive and not perceive, reach and not reach at any given moment in time. The situative space model is for the egocentric interaction paradigm what the virtual desktop is for the WIMP interaction paradigm: more or less everything of interest to a specific human agent is assumed and supposed to happen here. In addition, the conception and implementation of the easy ADL ecology based on egocentric interaction, comprising of smart objects, a personal activity-centric middleware, ambient intelligence applications aimed at everyday activity support, and a human agent literally in the middle of it all is described. The middleware was developed to address important challenges in ambient intelligence: (1) tracking and managing smart objects; (2) tracking a human agent’s situative spaces; (3) recognizing human activities and actions; (4) managing and facilitating human-environment interaction; and (5) to ease up the development of ambient intelligence applications. The easy ADL ecology was first simulated in immersive virtual reality, and then set up physically as a living laboratory to evaluate: (1) the technological and technical performance of individual middleware components, (2) to perform a user experience evaluation assessing various aspects of user satisfaction in relation to the support offered by the easy ADL ecology, and (3) to use it as a research test bed for addressing challenges in ambient intelligence. While it is problematic to directly compare the “proof-of-concept” easy ADL ecology with related research efforts, it is clear from the user experience evaluation that the subjects were positive with the services it offered. / easy ADL project

Motion capture is the process to record the movement of a human. To accomplish this, a hybrid tracking system is used. It combines an optic tracking system with a magnetic one to compensate shortcomings and effectively use their advantages. Another part of this work copes with the conversion of the tracking data into skeletal information and related topics like skeleton definition, skeleton fitting or parameterization of joint rotations. / Mittels Motion Capture werden die Bewegungen eines Menschen in computerlesbare Form überführt. Dazu wird ein hybrides Trackingsystem verwendet, das durch Kombination eines optischen mit einem magnetischen System entsteht und die Schwächen der Einzelsysteme kompensiert. Neben der Realisierung dieses Hybridsystems steht die Übertragung der gewonnenen Bewegungsdaten auf ein Skelettmodell und damit verbundene Fragen, wie Skelettdefinition, Skelettanpassung oder Beschränkung der Gelenkrotationen im Vordergrund.

Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2006--Darmstadt.

Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2003--Darmstadt. / Dateien in unterschiedlichen Formaten.-Enth.: Textteil. CD-Daten.

Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2003--Darmstadt.

Este trabalho aborda o uso de experimentação remota como forma de aprimorar a educação em sistemas de controle e automação. Para isto, uma arquitetura é proposta, onde experimentos reais podem ser combinados com partes simuladas (virtuais) criando um experimento de realidade mista. Um ambiente de ensino à distância, acessível na Internet, engloba o experimento remoto para proporcionar maiores recursos pedagógicos, guias e materiais educacionais teóricos aos estudantes. As diversas tecnologias, presentes no estado da arte, utilizadas para a elaboração da arquitetura são descritas e comparadas para facilitar o entendimento das escolhas realizadas. Trabalhos correlatos são apresentados para descrever o estado da arte dos laboratórios de experiências remotas de diversos tipos. Com base neste estudo, deficiências e vantagens são apontadas para a criação da arquitetura proposta. Para validar a arquitetura são propostos diversos estudos de caso com implementações utilizadas nos cursos de automação e controle da instituição na qual este trabalho está relacionado, ou ainda em cursos de educação à distância para atingir um público mais amplo. Esta dissertação está relacionada como resultado importante do consórcio internacional RExNet, financiado pelo projeto europeu Alfa, do qual a UFRGS faz parte. / This work aims to the use of remotely web-based experiments to improve the learning process of automation and control systems theory courses. An architecture combining virtual learning environments, remote experiments, students guide and experiments analysis is proposed based on a wide state of art study. The validation of the architecture uses state of art technologies and new simple developed programs to implement the case studies presented. All implementations presented in this work uses an Internet accessible virtual learning environment providing educational resources, guides and learning material to create a distance learning course associated with the remote mixed reality experiment. The experiment is integrated in the learning environment and support the mixture of real equipments combined with simulated ones (virtual). This mixture of equipments (components) is automatic controlled by the user and is a new developed technology called interchangeable components. The state of art section of this work presents, compare and describes several technologies used to implement the proposed architecture. Related work of remote experimentation and virtual learning environments is also presented. The architecture was elaborated based on appointed advantages and drawbacks of the related studies. This work is part of the RExNet consortium, supported by the European Alfa project.