The paper presents different issues dealing with both the preservation of cultural heritage using Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies in a cultural context. While the VR/AR technologies are mentioned, the attention is paid to the 3D visualization and 3D interaction modalities illustrated through three different demonstrators: the VR demonstrators (Immersive and semi immersive) and the AR demonstrator including tangible user interfaces. To show the benefits of the VR and AR technologies for studying and preserving cultural heritage, we investigated the visualisation and interaction with reconstructed underwater archaeological sites. The base idea behind using VR and AR techniques is to offer archaeologists and general public new insights on the reconstructed archaeological sites allowing archaeologists to study directly from within the virtual site and allowing the general public to immersively explore a realistic reconstruction of the sites. Both activities are based on the same VR engine but drastically differ in the way they present information and exploit interaction modalities. The visualisation and interaction techniques developed through these demonstrators are the results of the ongoing dialogue between the archaeological requirements and the technological solutions developed.

International audienceHumanoid robots are not easy to program, it's a challenging task, even if they come with an advanced high level programming interfaces, such as drag-and-drop applications, which are indeed less complex and save a lot of time, it still needs an experienced user to produce a high quality motion, especially for the natural human-like motions which are very hard to reproduce. This paper introduces a new technique to fully imitate the human body motion on a humanoid robot NAO in real time using the Kinect Depth Camera, OpenNI Framework and the Robot Operating System (ROS)

No abstract

No abstract

Augmented reality (AR) deals with the problem of dynamically and accurately align virtual objects with the real world. Among the used methods, vision-based techniques have advantages for AR applications, their registration can be very accurate, and there is no delay between the motion of real and virtual scenes. However, the downfall of these approaches is their high computational cost and lack of robustness. To address these shortcomings we propose a robust camera pose estimation method based on tracking calibrated fiducials in a known 3D environment, the camera location is dynamically computed by the Orthogonal Iteration Algorithm. Experimental results show the robustness and the effectiveness of our approach in the context of real-time AR tracking.

No abstract

in many current teleoperation architectures, remote tasks are indirectly performed by a Human Operator (HO) by means of a virtual environment consisting in a virtual or symbolic representation of the remote site. In order to achieve virtual tasks, the interaction of the HO and the virtual representation is monitored. Monitoring results are subsequently translated into a sequence of instructions sent to the remote robot for actual execution. This paper focuses on different strategies designed to allow a user-friendly operator interaction with the virtual representation in order to achieve complex remote tasks via Internet. The use of active virtual guides to assist the HO in performing simple or complex tasks -with enhanced performances(speed, precision and safety)-is also discussed. Techniques such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) combined with Internet-based programming facilities are investigated as part of the proposed teleoperation system named ARITI (acronym for Augmented Reality Interface for Telerobotic applications via Internet).

No abstract