Ce document explore l'utilisation de méthodes de planification automatique dans des simulations interactives. Lors de simulations de montage et de démontage de composants industriels en environnement virtuel, l'utilisateur peut nécessiter une assistance. Cette assistance est réalisée par l'utilisation d'une solution de planification de trajectoire en temps réel. Cette solution permet la construction interactive d'une chemin par la combinaison de l'avis de l'utilisateur avec la performance de planificateurs automatiques. / This PhD thesis explores the use of motion planning methods in interactive simulations. In the context of assembling and disassembling simulations of industrial components using haptic devices, the user may require assistance to find collision free paths. This assistance can be provided using real time interactive path planning methods. Our solution allows an interactive construction of free paths by combining the opinion of the user with the performance of fast modified automatic path planners.

Denna uppsats undersöker hur VR-verktyg kan användas för att skapa bättre förutsättningar för personer med funktionsnedsättningar. Bakgrunden till undersökningen är att i Sverige finns det närmare 1,5 miljoner människor som lever med funktionsnedsättningar. Det kommer med jämna mellanrum nya direktiv från bland annat den svenska regeringen och EU för att de funktionshinder som finns ska överbyggas. Samtidigt så håller VR-tekniken på att utvecklas i en rasande fart  Huvudfokus för VR-verktyget har varit HTC Vive och den funktionsnedsättning som varit i fokus har varit nedsatt rörelseförmåga i form av att vara rullstolsburen. Syftet har varit att ta reda på i vilken mån de som arbetar med projektering idag är medvetna om de behov som funktionsnedsatta har och hur de arbetar för att säkerställa att dessa behov tillmötesgås. Syftet har även varit att undersöka hur VR-verktyg likt HTC Vive kan användas för att skapa bättre förutsättningar för personer med funktionsnedsättningar. Undersökningen har skett genom att via studier inhämta teori som sedan jämförts med resultat från en kvalitativ studie. Den kvalitativa studien har bestått av intervjuer med sex personer som på något sätt jobbar med projektering av byggnader och annan bebyggelse. Under dessa intervjuer har de som deltagit vid intervjun även fått testa på att röra sig i en VR-miljö med en rullstolsburens förutsättningar. Denna VR-miljö samt funktionen att röra sig med en rullstolsburens förutsättningar har utvecklats i samband med detta examensarbete. Resultatet analyserades och slutsatserna blev att det finns en medvetenhet gällande funktionsnedsatta och tillgänglighet hos de som arbetar med projektering idag. Denna medvetenhet grundar sig huvudsakligen i de lagar och regler som finns gällande byggande och tillgänglighet. Det virtuella verktyg, som HTC Vive, kan bidra med är att verifiera att det som byggts verkligen fungerar ur tillgänglighetssynpunkt. VR-verktyg kan även bidra till en förståelse för hur det är att leva med en funktionsnedsättning. Detta kan i sin tur leda till utveckling i byggprocessen med hänsyn till tillgänglighet, vilket skapar en mer universell design. För att det ska kunna slå igenom och börja användas i praktiken behöver verktyg tillverkade av professionella utvecklare utvecklas, till exempel av Autodesk.

Virtual Reality är ett media med gamla rötter, men samtidigt en ny teknologi för allmänheten. Ett av problemen med VR är att det kan frammana visst obehag då det brukas, så kallad simulatorsjuka (Kennedy m.fl., 1993), vilket forskare studerar i syftet att förstå hur det undviks. I denna undersökning har en artefakt tagits fram i form av en spelprototyp, av slaget 2,5D-side-scrollingspel till VR, och använts för att studera uppkomsten av simulatorsjuka. Artefakten använder en head-mounted display för att uppnå VR. Tre testpersoner deltog i undersökningen, och för att mäta symptomen användes ett beprövat frågeformulär samt kvalitativa intervjuer. Data visar på att en tidigare hypotes om intryckskonflikt (Kolasinski, 1995, s.7) är inkorrekt, samt att konventionella orienteringsmekaniker har vissa fördelar. För framtida studier bör simulatorsjuka undersökas från fler vinklar och/eller med ett större urval av testpersoner.

Panoramic image Virtual Reality (VR) is a 360 degree image which has been interpreted as a kind of VR that allows users to navigate, view, hear and have remote access to a virtual environment. Panoramic Video VR builds on this, where filming is done in the real world to create a highly dynamic and immersive environment. This is proving to be a very attractive technology and has introduced many possible applications but still present a number of challenges, considered in this research. An initial literature survey identified limitations in panoramic video to date: these were the technology (e.g. filming and stitching) and the design of effective navigation methods. In particular, there is a tendency for users to become disoriented during way-finding. In addition, an effective interface design to embed contextual information is required. The research identified the need to have a controllable test environment in order to evaluate the production of the video and the optimal way of presenting and navigating within the scene. Computer Graphics (CG) simulation scenes were developed to establish a method of capturing, editing and stitching the video under controlled conditions. In addition, a novel navigation method, named the “image channel” was proposed and integrated within this environment. This replaced hotspots: the traditional navigational jumps between locations. Initial user testing indicated that the production was appropriate and did significantly improve user perception of position and orientation over jump-based navigation. The interface design combined with the environment view alone was sufficient for users to understand their location without the need to augment the view with an on screen map. After obtaining optimal methods in building and improving the technology, the research looked for a natural, complex, and dynamic real environment for testing. The web-based virtual zoo (World Association of Zoos and Aquariums) was selected as an ideal production: It had the purpose to allow people to get close to animals in their natural habitat and created particular interest to develop a system for knowledge delivery, raising protection concerns, and entertaining visitors: all key roles of a zoo. The design method established from CG was then used to develop a film rig and production unit for filming a real animal habitat: the Formosan rock monkey in Taiwan. A web-based panoramic video of this was built and tested though user experience testing and expert interviews. The results of this were essentially identical to the testing done in the prototype environment, and validated the production. Also was successfully attracting users to the site repeatedly. The research has contributed to new knowledge in improvement to the production process, improvement to presentation and navigating within panoramic videos through the proposed Image Channel method, and has demonstrated that web-based virtual zoo can be improved to help address considerable pressure on animal extinction and animal habitat degradation that affect humans by using this technology. Further studies were addressed. The research was sponsored by Taiwan’s Government and Twycross Zoo UK was a collaborator.

The latest advances of Virtual Reality technologies and three-dimensional graphics, as well as the developments in Gaming Technologies in the recent years, have stemmed the proliferation of Serious Games in a broader spectrum of research applications. Among the most popular areas of application are public services such as Defence and Health, where digital technologies realise new challenges and opportunities for research and development of Serious Games and for a variety of contexts. As with all games, the user engagement is elevated and apart from the entertaining aspect, Serious Games serve as a novel and promising alternative experience to knowledge transfer. Furthermore, Serious Games bring to the end user and the overall society a series of attractive benefits. These benefits include safety, cost-effectiveness, increased motivation and personalisation. Hence, this Thesis aims to investigate novel approaches of developing Serious Games that utilise the recent advances of Virtual Reality and Gaming Technology and facilitate the aforementioned benefits. The process of design and development of the novel tools and applications follow an iterative manner and are driven by the review of the available literature as well as end-user feedback.

This thesis project presents possible uses of Virtual Reality for art education. To understand VR, this thesis reviews the history of using technology in educational environments and explores the concepts, definitions, and characteristics of VR in general. Then, it shows diverse purposes of VR for education and art educational environments. For an art class, the units present the use of Teen Second Life, which is a free on-line virtual world. The units demonstrate how art educators may use Teen Second life for high school art classes to build students’ understandings of their identities by creating their avatars, clothing, objects and artwork and by displaying the artwork in a virtual community. The purpose of this thesis project is to suggest possible uses of VR for art educational environments.

It is well established that exposure to virtual motion environments (VME) can elicit postural instability (PI) in addition to motion sickness (MS). While research has found sex differences in motion sickness, the results of experimental studies are equivocal regarding these differences, and previous studies utilizing VME have failed to address the factor of sex differences in terms of hormonal fluctuations, which may also be instrumental in behavioral responses to VME, such as PI. The intent of this investigation was to determine whether exposure to VME, during various phases of the menstrual cycle (premenstrual, permenstrual, ovulation) would reveal sex differences in MS and PI during some phases, but not others. The first experiment involved men and women completing Daily Living Logs for a period of 40 days to provide a baseline for any sex differences (and for women, menstrual phase differences) in motion related activity and symptomatology. The second experiment involved 24 participants (6 men) viewing a rotating Archimedes spiral for a period of twenty minutes. Exposures were timed to place each woman in three phases of her menstrual cycle; men were exposed by yoking their exposure time to a female counterpart. Multiple measures of PI and MS were recorded before, after and during exposure. Results of the first experiment found no significant effects of sex or phase upon symptomatology, revealing no support for the theory of a reporting bias as influencing sex differences in MS or PI elicited in the laboratory. The second experiment found no significant effect of sex of phase upon any of the PI measures, but found significant interaction effects of sequence and phase, as well as sequence and sex, upon reported magnitude ratings of illusory self-motion perception. There were also significant effects of sex found upon measures of MS, with women reporting more discomfort to exposure to motion stimulation, as compared to men. There were no significant effects of phase upon any of the MS measures. While these findings show no support for a reporting bias influencing the sex differences found experimentally induced MS, it yields no evidence to support a hormonal influence on these differences.

Coherence describes the validity of the internal rules that drive the behaviors of a virtual environment (VE) in presenting a credible scenario. A VR system with a high level of coherence could lead to strong plausibility illusion, which is a key component of the sense of presence. There are few existing studies centered around coherence, and they tend to put the user in a passive role when experiencing the VE without emphasizing on their active participation in the interaction. This dissertation makes up this gap by connecting the concept of coherence with fundamental 3D user interface design that focuses on the algorithms that map the user's actions to the VE's behaviors. Specifically, we inspect the design of coherent interactions for two complicated tasks, namely travel and object manipulation. For travel, we propose a family of redirected walking techniques called "narrative driven cell-based redirection", which lets the user traverse a VE that's much larger than the physical space without breaking the coherence of the scenario. For object manipulation, we propose the novel concept of physics coherence to capture whether an interface conforms to the rules of physics and design several novel techniques that try to balance between physics coherence and usability. Together, we provide some useful tools for designing coherent interactions and discuss how coherence affects user experience in VR interaction. / Doctor of Philosophy / To create a virtual reality (VR) experience that feels plausible, it’s important to consider the validity of the internal rules that drive the behaviors of the virtual environment (VE), which we call “coherence” of a VR system. We discuss how to support coherence in two types of fundamental VR interaction. The first one is travel, which concerns moving the viewpoint around following the user’s intention. For this task, we propose a family of novel interaction techniques called “narrative driven cell-based redirection”, which lets the user traverse a VE that’s much larger than the physical space without breaking the coherence of the scenario. The second one is object manipulation, which is about controlling a virtual object using hand input. For this task, we propose the novel concept of physics coherence to capture whether the interaction conforms to the rules of physics and design several novel techniques that try to balance between physics coherence and controllability. Together, we provide some useful tools for designing coherent interactions and discuss how coherence affects user experience in VR interaction.

Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology has brought many new opportunities for training researchers and students. In the traditional training environment, trainees usually follow verbal instructions (lecture) or visual instructions (video tutorial, job manual) as certain training methods. For this research study, we not only tested how much procedural knowledge the trainees could learn from the VR training compared with traditional media training (video plus instruction manual), we also specifically focused on how well the knowledge could retain in a certain amount of time. The finding of this study shows that VR training can help trainees learn procedural knowledge, and also shows that VR training can help enhance procedural knowledge retention in terms of recall error. However, we did not find any significant difference in recall time between VR training group and traditional media training group.

Este trabalho utiliza conceitos de Realidade Virtual e Sistemas Distribuídos para desenvolver um Ambiente Virtual Distribuído para visualização e análise de moléculas de proteínas, denominado VRMol. O sistema foi implementado com a linguagem Java, incluindo as APls Java 3D e Java RMI, visando permitir que pesquisadores geograficamente dispersos troquem informações de uma maneira rápida e eficiente, acelerando a pesquisa e discussão remotas. Assim, foram desenvolvidos uma interface gráfica com Java 3D e um conjunto de métodos para troca de mensagens de acordo com o modelo de comunicação cliente/servidor, com Java RMI. Além disso, o sistema também permite a utilização de alguns dispositivos de entrada não convencionais como joystick e luvas. / This work use the Virtual Reality and the Distributed Systems concepts to develop a Distributed Virtual Environment to visualize and analyze molecules of proteins, called VRMol. The system was implemented with the Java programming language, including the Java 3D and Java RMI APIs, aiming to allow geographically disperse researches exchange information in a quick and efficient way, speeding up the remote research and discussion. Thus, was developed a graphical interface with Java 3D and a set of methods to exchange messages according to a client/server communication model with Java RMI. Furthermore, the system also allows the use of some non-conventional input devices as joysticks and gloves.