Avatar Kinematics Modeling for Telecollaborative Virtual Environments

Differentiated Services (DiffServ) is a mechanism for supporting network Quality of Service (or QoS) whereby packets that are transmitted by a client program are marked with a priority setting that can be interpreted by the router to effect special treatment of the packet. In particular the marked packets are promoted to a higher priority queue in the router and, as a result, spend a minimum amount of time in the router. Packets that are not marked are attached to a lower priority queue, and in some cases may be dropped when congestion arises. A more detailed description of DiffServ may be found in the paper by Sander et al [Sander et al 2000]. 

A series of experiments were performed over a wide area DiffServ testbed as part of the EMERGE project. EMERGE is a Department of Energy funded project for designing, deploying and testing Differentiated Services on an IP / ATM Regional GigaPoP Network interoperating with ESnet for applications in Combustion, Climate and High-Energy Physics. The main participants of the experiments in this report were EVL and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL).

Differentiated Services Experiments Between the Electronic Visualization Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory

Segmental Postural Stabilizing Responses in an Immersive Virtual Environment

A Model of the Time-Optimal Control of Point-to-Point Human Voluntary Movement

Despite their attractive properties, networked virtual environments (net-VEs) are notoriously difficult to design, implement and test due to the concurrency, real-time and networking features in these systems. The current practice for net-VE design is basically trial and error, empirical, and totally lacks formal methods. This paper proposes to apply a Petri net formal modeling technique to a net-VE - NICE (Narrative Immersive Constructionist / Collaborative Environment), predict the net-VE performance based on simulation, and improve the net-VE performance. The NICE is essentially a network of collaborative virtual reality systems called the CAVE - (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). First, we present extended fuzzy-timing Petri net models of both CAVE and NICE. Then, by using these models and Design / CPN as the simulation tool, we have conducted various simulations to study real-time behavior, network effects and performance (latencies and jitters) of NICE. Our simulation results are consistent with experimental data.

Fuzzy-Timing Petri Net Modeling and Simulation of a Networked Virtual Environment - NICE

This paper describes the design and implementation of CAVERNsoft G2, a toolkit for building collaborative virtual reality applications. G2&rsquo;s special emphasis is on providing the tools to support high-performance computing and data intensive systems that are coupled to collaborative, immersive environments. 

This paper describes G2&rsquo;s broad range of services, and demonstrates how they are currently being used in a collaborative volume visualization application.

Collaborators in a CIBR View Session

CAVERNsoft G2: A Toolkit for High Performance Tele-Immersive Collaboration

Virtual Reality (VR) systems (such as the CAVE&trade;) generate images in real-time on the basis of the viewer&rsquo;s view in the virtual world, so that the viewer sees a three-dimensional view of a given scene. The concurrency and real-time features in virtual environments systems make them difficult to design, implement and test. Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) make this more complicated by adding network considerations into their designs. CVEs demand high Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements on the network to maintain natural and real-time interactions among users. By using formal methods to model CVEs and analyze their real-time behavior, we can evaluate the network effects on CVEs and the performance of CVEs. To model temporal uncertainties in CVEs, we propose an extension of Fuzzy-Timing Petri Nets (EFTN) in this paper. We give our EFTN models for the CAVE, the TCP protocol and the NICE (Narrative Immersive Constructionist / Collaborative Environments) project and we analyze the network effects on the NICE and the dynamic performance of NICE.

Modeling and Performance Analysis Using Extended Fuzzy-Timing Petri Nets for Networked Virtual Environments

This paper explores the concept of multiple perspectives to enhance collaboration by allowing remote participants to tailor their views, user-interfaces and roles to their particular needs and expertise. It describes a preliminary design study conducted on users of a collaborative CAVE-based virtual reality tool for visualizing oceanographic data. Results will focus on the patterns of activity within this environment, in particular the manner in which participants transition between individual and group work during the course of a collaborative session.

User Interacting with CAVE6D Application

Lessons Learned from Employing Multiple Perspectives In a Collaborative Virtual Environment for Visualizing Scientific Data

This paper describes the continuing research on using virtual reality in an educational setting.

Deep Learning in Virtual Reality: How to Teach Children that the Earth is Round

Almost 100 years ago, the Parent-Teacher Organization at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School in Oak Park Illinois bought a stereopticon for use by the teachers, in the belief that a stereoscopic display might give studnets insights not available through conventional imagery. Today, researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago are collaborating with the staff of Lincoln Elementary to explore what learning benefits virtual reality technology may offer children within a school context.

Stills from the Quickworlds Virtual Environments

QuickWorlds: Teacher Driven VR Worlds in an Elementary School Curriculum

N*Vector (Networked Virtual Environment Collaboration Trans-Oceanic Research) is a project to develop innovative networked virtual reality technologies to support transoceanic collaboration. The project is currently being conducted between Japan and the United States, but the results can be generalized to other long-distance collaborative situations. In this paper we present one of the goals of N*VECTOR, to develop tools to bridge time zone differences.

Virtual Mail System

Overcoming Time-Zone Differences and Time Management Problem with Tele-Immersion

The goal of the AccessBot&trade; project is to provide a new form of access for the disabled that integrates teleconferencing with life-sized display screens, robotics and high speed networking, to create a virtual presence for the handicapped participant at meetings. The use of a life-sized display and high-fidelity video and audio conferencing rather than existing conference room meeting systems is to ensure that the handicapped participant commands as equal a presence as the regular participants in the meeting. The use of a zoom / pan / tilt camera empowers the handicapped participant with capabilities beyond what is &ldquo;humanly&rdquo; possible - giving them a &ldquo;bionic&rdquo; eye with which they can see far greater distances. 

This paper will describe the implementation of the AccessBot and the lessons learned from its deployment at the SC98 Conference in Orlando, Florida; and at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications&rsquo; ACCESS Center in Washington D.C.

AccessBot at SC98 Orlando, FL

AccessBot: An Enabling Technology for Telepresence

iGrid 2000, the International Grid, demonstrates how the power of today&rsquo;s research networks enables access to remote computing resources, distribution of digital media, and collaboration with distant colleagues. 

The concept of connecting geographically distant computing resources and people seamlessly, efficiently and routinely over high performance networks is itself a major research topic, as computer scientists and application scientists worldwide prototype the 21st-century advanced computational infrastructure, or &ldquo;grid.&rdquo; 

iGrid highlights both the achievements in grid architecture development, and the advancements it enables in science, engineering, cultural heritage, art and architecture, media communications and distance education. 

iGrid features 24 applications from 14 regions Canada, CERN, Germany, Greece, Japan, Korea, Mexico, The Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom and the United States with emphasis on tele-immersion, large datasets, distributed computing, remote instrumentation, collaboration, human / computer interfaces, streaming media, digital video and high-definition television. 

Applications are presented on impressive display technologies: the CAVE&trade; virtual reality theater developed by the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Super-High Definition digital cinema system from NTT Network Innovation Laboratory, and the Access Grid presentation environment developed by Argonne National Laboratory. Two ImmersaDesks&trade; as well as plasma displays also showcase applications in virtual reality (stereoscopic) or large-screen (monoscopic) mode. 

iGrid is connected to the JGN, the WIDE Project Network (in cooperation with NTT, TTNet and PNJC), APAN and the APAN / TransPAC (100 Mbps) link to STAR TAP&#8480;, the international interconnection point in Chicago, Illinois.

Online Monitoring and Steering of Remote Black Hole Simulations

iGrid2000 Empowering Global Research Community Networking

There exists a number of scientific visualization systems designed to provide a two-dimensional interface to the user. However, little consideration has been given to the development of collaborative virtual environment for visualization purposes. This paper discusses the Tele-Immersive Data Explorer, a generalizable framework to facilitate the construction of domain-specific data exploration applications challennged with the problem of having to visualize massive data-sets immersively and collaboratively. In the paper, we describe the framework&rsquo;s conceptual organization, its distributed multiprocessed object-oriented architecture, and its application to visualize gridded scalar data.

The Tele-Immersive Data Explorer: A Distributed Architecture for Collaborative Interactive Visualization of Large Data-sets

Collaborative VisualEyes is the latest version of VisualEyes - the virtual reality systems used by Genreal Motors since 1993. Internaly developed, VisualEyes has been in production use since early 1995 in design and engineering applications, and is globally deployed. Collaboratoive VisualEyes enables global experimentation in distributed design reviews, and such experiments have been taking place to identify requiremements. The paper describes the simple, but powerful way that VisualEyes was retrofitted for collaboration, using CAVERNsoft. The same architecture is used to connect GM&rsquo;s high-end immersive displays to each other and to live applications. An example of a distributed design review scenario follows the architectural description.

Example Portals to Other Analysis Data

Collaborative VisualEyes

The work in this paper describes a preliminary observational study conducted on users of CAVE6D, a collaborative CAVE-based virtual reality tool for visualizing multivariate oceanographic data sets. CAVE6D presents the concpet of multiple perspectives by allowing participants to customize their views while working collaboratively and supporting the views either privately or globally. The goal of this study is to understand how tele-immmersed participants cooperate when presented with multiple perspectives and to explore ways to leverage these perspectives to allow scientists to more rapidly interpret massive multi-dimensional data sets.

CAVE6D and the Chesapeake Bay Data-set

Exploiting Multiple Perspectives in Tele-Immersion

We present a collection of heuristics and simple tests for evaluating the quality of a projection-based virtual reality display. A typical VR system includes numerous potential sources of error. By understanding the characteristics of a correctly working system, and the types of errors that are likely to occur, users can quickly determine if their display is inaccurate and what components may need correction.

Incorrect Stereo Genlock Example

Quality Evaluation of Projection-Based VR Displays

The PARIS (Personal Augmented Reality Immersive System) is a new VR display device that was first prototyped as a virtual device in a CAVE&reg; to aid in the development process. This initial prototyping in VR allowed the designers to save time and money, and to garner valuable feedback from prospective users, before finally committing the design to hardware.

Artist&rsquo;s Rendering of the Final PARIS Design

Developing the PARIS: Using the CAVE&reg; to Prototype a New VR Display

This paper discusses the practical realities of maintaining a projection-based VR learning environment inside an elementary school, in terms of supporting the VR resource, and integrating it into the school culture. It also presents several of the lessons we have learned in the first year of this deployment.

ImmersaDesk Installation at the Lincoln Elementary School

Deploying VR in an Elementary School - Pipe Dreams and Practical Realities

We describe and end-to-end latency measurement method for virtual environments. The method incorporates a video camera to record both a physical, controller and the corresponding virutal cursor at the same time. The end-to-end latency can be concluded based on the analysis of the playback of the videotape. The only hardware necessary is a standard interlaced NTSC video camera and a video recorder that can display individual video fields. We describe an example of analyzing the effect of differenct hardware and software configurations upon the system latency. The example shows that the method is effective and easy to implement.

Physical Sensor and Virtual Cross

Video-Based Measurement of System Latency

Design rationale and user experience are described for a virtual ambient environment designed to support sixth grade students&rsquo; learning of simple co-occurrence relationships and systematic observational skills. 

User experience was characterized by enthusiasm, but with significant data loss and navigational difficulties. Design implications and further extensions of virtual ambient environments are suggested.

A Scene from the Correlations World

Observation-based Inquiry in a Virtual Ambient Environment

Creating Tele-Immersion Environments (tutorial)

Visualization is the key methodology that gives the researcher insight into data that may be generated from various sources such as computational simulations and scientific experiments. A recent trend has been towards the use of VR technology for data visualization to give the user a realistic insight into the data. 

Teleimmersion is the amalgamation of data mining and significant computation with collaborative VR. It allows multiple networked users to participate in a shared virtual environment. The collaborators can talk to each other and can see each other in the environment. Teleimmersion augments the data visualization and analysis process to produce a new genre of applications. 

With advances in the fields of computational science and engineering we now have faster computers that generate data, which is in the range of a few hundred megabytes to several terabytes. Large data visualization poses a new challenge to the visualization community, as most of the existing systems are not capable of visualizing vast amounts of data. 

Massive data sets and collaborative visualization add a new dimension to ongoing research on visualization in virtual environments. Collaborative extensions have been added to existing non-VR systems. A number of dedicated single user systems allow the user to visualize large datasets in virtual environments. Most of these systems are application specific and cannot be extended. Even though these systems cater to a diverse set of application domains, some trends and patterns in their approach to visualize data are discernable. These design features can be reused in future applications. 

The main contribution of this thesis is in proposing the Teleimmersive Data Explorer (TIDE): a general architecture that blends collaboration with visualization, which can be used by application developers for rapidly building teleimmersive applications for large data visualization. A basis of the TIDE architecture has been implemented.

A Client Collaborating with a Remote Client (seen as avatar)

The Tele-Immersive Data Explorer (TIDE): A Distributed Architecture for Tele-immersive Scientific Visualization

Paul Neumann&rsquo;s PH.D. Dissertation - Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2000. 

This project demonstrates the design and practical scientific use of an anatomically realistic computer model of a human eye in a virtual environment. Users are able to explore and interact with the eye&rsquo;s components to discover their characteristics. The model will eventually be used to educate students on the eye&rsquo;s geometry and will allow them to simulate common pre-surgical procedures.

The 3D Virtual Eye

Virtual Reality Vitrectomy Simulator

This paper describes &ldquo;The Thing Growing&rdquo;, a work of Interacive Fiction implemented in virtual reality, in which the user is the main protagonist and interacts with computer contorlled characters. This work of fiction depends on the user&rsquo;s emotional investment in the story and on her relationship to a central character, the Thing.

The &ldquo;Thing&rdquo;

The Thing Growing: Autonomous Characters in Virtual Reality Interactive Fiction

A Behavioral Layer Architecture for Telecollaborative Virtual Manufacturing Operations

Extended-range Hybrid Tracker and Applications to Motion and Camera Tracking in Manufacturing Systems

Tele-immersive Product Evaluation: A Review and an Implementation Framework

In this paper we discuss issues involved in creating art and cultural heritage projects in Virtual Reality with particular reference to one interactive narrative, &ldquo;The Thing Growing&rdquo;. In the first section we will briefly discuss the potential of VR as a medium for the production of art and the interpretation of culture. In the second section we describe &ldquo;The Thing Growing&rdquo; project. In the third section we discuss building an interactive narrative in VR using XP, an authoring system we designed to simplify the process of producing projects in VR. In the fourth section we will discuss some issues involved in presenting art and cultural heritage projects in VR.

A Tracked User Dancing

Building a VR Narrative

This publication covers the future of Tele-Immersion applications over high speed networks.