A facility for the integration of live and virtual environments in realtime

This paper describes a research facility which has been established to explore the integration of live and virtual environments in real-time. The facility combines digital ontput from both live and electronic sources such as video, animatinos and 3D virtual environments and enables the monitoring and control of the interaction between live actors and the digital enviromnents. This provides a research environment in which the interaction between participants in the design and construction process and 3D virtual buildings can be investigated. This will lead to the enhancement of decision making and planning in the design and construction process.

Electronic markets and service delivery: requisite competencies for virtual environments

Electronic markets have a short but dynamic history. How an electronic market can be successfully developed remains in dispute. There is a clear need to better understand the nature of electronic markets themselves and, in particular, to review important developments in their conceptualisation. To enable a deeper understanding of these issues, we decided to restrict our investigation to electronic markets in the agricultural export sector. Agribusiness is a natural early adopter of digital marketplaces because of the industry’s traditional reliance on markets and current take-up of global supply chain management (Wilkins, Swatman and Castleman, 2002). We review two portals from this sector that aimed to simplify access to regulatory documentation. The earlier implementation had its funding withdrawn after one year, whilst the more recently established portal is rapidly becoming a showcase project for the stakeholders. We use a composite theory based on Bijker (1995) and Nowotny et al (2001) to establish a framework for analysing our data. We also refer to a body of literature characterising intangible services and their design and its implications for emarket implementations. Our findings indicate that governance style is in fact closely related to the success or failure of specific sites. We also found support for earlier research indicating that expectations and understanding of electronic markets are still evolving.

Soft tissue modelling for haptic rendering in virtual environments

This paper focuses on the development of a haptic recording and modelling system. Currently being evaluated for multiple uses in surgery and manufacturing, this recording system evaluates haptic data captured via a robotic ann coupled with real time high-resolution load cell. This data is then analysed and validated against previous samples and a generated model before being logged for playback during simulation and training of a human operator. 3D models of point force interactions are created allowing unique visuals to be presented to a user. Primarily designed for the medical field, recorded results of soft tissue cutting have been presented.

Project quality management in virtual environments : a primer

The rise of geographically dispersed project teams enabled by technology has made project quality management a significant challenge for organizations. This paper uses findings from a project on geographically dispersed, cooperating SMEs in the building trade, to explore whether concepts and artefacts from the Rational Unified Process® (RUP®) software development approach could be adapted and used to better manage quality in virtual projects. Our future research aims to explore the use of RUP artefacts in a virtual environment and their impact on
project management and quality.

Crime risks of three-dimensional virtual environments

Three-dimensional virtual environments (3dves) are the new generation of digital multi-user social networking platforms. Their immersive character allows users to create a digital humanised representation or avatar, enabling a degree of virtual interaction not possible through conventional text-based internet technologies. As recent international experience demonstrates, in addition to the conventional range of cybercrimes (including economic fraud, the dissemination of child pornography and copyright violations), the 'virtual-reality' promoted by 3dves is the source of great speculation and concern over a range of specific and emerging forms of crime and harm to users. This paper provides some examples of the types of harm currently emerging in 3dves and suggests internal regulation by user groups, terms of service, or end-user licensing agreements, possibly linked to real-world criminological principles. This paper also provides some directions for future research aimed at understanding the role of Australian criminal law and the justice system more broadly in this emerging field.

Enabling multi-point haptic grasping in virtual environments

Haptic interaction has received increasing research interest in recent years. Currently, most commercially available haptic devices provide the user with a single point of interaction. Multi-point haptic devices present a logical progression in device design and enable the operator to experience a far wider range of haptic interactions, particularly the ability to grasp via multiple fingers. This is highly desirable for various haptically enabled applications including virtual training, telesurgery and telemanipulation. This paper presents a gripper attachment which utilises two low-cost commercially available haptic devices to facilitate multi-point haptic grasping. It provides the ability to render forces to the user's fingers independently and using Phantom Omni haptic devices offers several benefits over more complex approaches such as low-cost, reliability, and ease of programming. The workspace of the gripper attachment is considered and in order to haptically render the desired forces to the user's fingers, kinematic analysis is discussed and necessary formulations presented. The integrated multi-point haptic platform is presented and exploration of a virtual environment using CHAI 3D is demonstrated.

Male body image in real and virtual environments

My research investigated the relevance of men’s online avatars to their body image concerns in real life. The results revealed that the size and muscle of avatars are of clinical significance for certain men, particularly those who value and identify with the aesthetic properties of their avatars.

Managing large scale virtual environments using portals

This article describes a technique for Large Scale Virtual Environments (LSVEs) partitioning in hexagon cells and using portal in the cell interfaces to reduce the number of messages on the network and the complexity of the virtual world. These environments usually demand a high volume of data that must be sent only to those users who needs the information [Greenhalgh, Benford 1997].

Scalable distributed virtual environments using multicast application level

Most of architectures proposed for developing Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) allow limited number of users. To support the development of applications using the internet infrastructure, with hundred or, perhaps, thousands users logged simultaneously on DVE, several techniques for managing resources, such as bandwidth and capability of processing, must be implemented. The strategy presented in this paper combines methods to attain the scalability required, In special the multicast protocol at application level.

XSAMPL3D: An Action Description Language for the Animation of Virtual Characters

In this paper we present XSAMPL3D, a novel language for the high-level representation of actions performed on objects by (virtual) humans. XSAMPL3D was designed to serve as action representation language in an imitation-based approach to character animation: First, a human demonstrates a sequence of object manipulations in an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment. From this demonstration, an XSAMPL3D description is automatically derived that represents the actions in terms of high-level action types and involved objects. The XSAMPL3D action description can then be used for the synthesis of animations where virtual humans of different body sizes and proportions reproduce the demonstrated action. Actions are encoded in a compact and human-readable XML-format. Thus, XSAMPL3D describtions are also amenable to manual authoring, e.g. for rapid prototyping of animations when no immersive VR environment is at the animator's disposal. However, when XSAMPL3D descriptions are derived from VR interactions, they can accomodate many details of the demonstrated action, such as motion trajectiories,hand shapes and other hand-object relations during grasping. Such detail would be hard to specify with manual motion authoring techniques only. Through the inclusion of language features that allow the representation of all relevant aspects of demonstrated object manipulations, XSAMPL3D is a suitable action representation language for the imitation-based approach to character animation.

Adaptive fuzzy knowledge-based systems for control metabots' mobility on virtual environments

The confluence of three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds with social networks imposes on software agents, in addition to conversational functions, the same behaviours as those common to human-driven avatars. In this paper, we explore the possibilities of the use of metabots (metaverse robots) with motion capabilities in complex virtual 3D worlds and we put forward a learning model based on the techniques used in evolutionary computation for optimizing the fuzzy controllers which will subsequently be used by metabots for moving around a virtual environment.