The current study evaluated the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) platforms, developed within the scope of the SKILLS Integrated Project, for industrial maintenance and assembly (IMA) tasks training. VR and AR systems are now widely regarded as promising training platforms for complex and highly demanding IMA tasks. However, there is a need to empirically evaluate their efficiency and effectiveness compared to traditional training methods. Forty expert technicians were randomly assigned to four training groups in an electronic actuator assembly task: VR (training with the VR platform twice), Control-VR (watching a filmed demonstration twice), AR (training with the AR platform once), and Control-AR (training with the real actuator and the aid of a filmed demonstration once). A post-training test evaluated performance in the real task. Results demonstrate that, in general, the VR and AR training groups required longer training time compared to the Control-VR and Control-AR groups, respectively. There were fewer unsolved errors in the AR group compared to the Control-AR group, and no significant differences in final performance between the VR and Control-VR groups, probably due to a ceiling effect created by the use of two training trials in the selected task for participants who were expert technicians. The results suggest that use of the AR platform for training IMA tasks should be encouraged and use of the VR platform for that purpose should be further evaluated
This paper presents results and experiences coming from 10 years of development and use of XVR, a flexible, general-purpose framework for virtual reality (VR) development. The resulting architecture, that comes under the form of a self-sufficient integrated development environment (IDE) organized around a dedicated scripting language and a virtual machine, is able to accommodate a wide range of applications needs, ranging from simple Web3D applications to motion-based simulators or complex cluster-based immersive visualization systems. Within the framework a common, archetypical structure is used for any application, showing how inhomogeneous needs and technologies can be effectively covered by using a single, rather simple, system organization. We also show how the framework flexibility allows for innovative development techniques such as multiple frameworks coexisting within a single, tightly integrated, VR application. IntroductionVirtual reality (VR) has nowadays garnered full independence as a research topic; many of its methods and approaches are fully mature; technological enablers seem to be easily available; and examples of application fields with great potential have been identified. Everything seems to suggest that VR should now be ready for the transition from experimental research to real applications in the fields of industry, health care, mass entertainment, and more. Nevertheless, the use of VR outside research labs still faces many difficulties, real-life applications emerge at a slower-than-expected pace, and the so-often-predicted impact of VR has yet to take place. One of the difficulties to get a broader acceptance of VR is the lack of sound, stable, and effective standards for the development of applications. The present paper exposes and proposes a general architecture for VR application development, adding some development case studies to exemplify its functions. The exposed framework has now reached a degree of maturity and flexibility superior to similar frameworks, and it is currently being used in the context of several research projects, for very different purposes (see Figure 1). We do not claim this IDE to be the best possible; still, we believe that the architecture presented in this paper could help in the definition of a general architecture for a fully standard VR development platform.
Populated urban environments are very important in many applications such as urban planning and entertainment. However rendering in real time many people in a complex environment is still challenging. In this paper, we propose methods for rendering real time animated crowds in virtual cities. We take advantage of the properties of an urban environment, and the way a viewer and the avatars move within it, to produce fast rendering, based on positional and directional discretization. To allow the display of a large number of different individual people at interactive frame rates, we combined texture compression with multi-pass rendering. The results show that we can visualise in real time a city with thousands of animated people.
Abstract. In this paper we present some preliminary results concerning a realtime visualisation system for densely populated urban environments. In order to be able to render the large number of humans without compromising too much the image quality, we developed a method based on Image-Based Rendering techniques. To allow them to move freely in the city while avoiding collisions against the environment and other humans, we developed a simplified collision test that makes use of the graphics hardware to quickly generate a discretization of the environment. Although our research is at an early stage, the results are already quite promising; we are able to render in real-time a virtual city with thousands of walking humans on a standard PC. Several avenues for further investigation are finally proposed.
In this paper we present XVR, an integrated development environment for the rapid development of Virtual Reality applications. Using a modular architecture and a VR-oriented scripting language, XVR contents can be embedded on a variety of container applications. This makes it suitable to write contents ranging from web-oriented presentations to more complex VR installations involving advanced devices, such as real-time trackers, haptic interfaces, sensorized gloves and stereoscopic devices, including HMDs. Some case studies are also presented to illustrate the development processes related to XVR and its features.
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