Recent advances in the field of web technologies, including the increasing support of virtual reality hardware, have allowed for shared virtual environments, reachable by just entering a URL in a browser. One contemporary solution that provides such a shared virtual reality is LIRKIS Global Collaborative Virtual Environments (LIRKIS G-CVE). It is a web-based software system, built on top of the A-Frame and Networked-Aframe frameworks. This paper describes LIRKIS G-CVE and introduces its two original components. The first one is the Smart-Client Interface, which turns smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, into input devices. The advantage of this component over the standard way of user input is demonstrated by a series of experiments. The second component is the Enhanced Client Access layer, which provides access to positions and orientations of clients that share a virtual environment. The layer also stores a history of connected clients and provides limited control over the clients. The paper also outlines an ongoing experiment aimed at an evaluation of LIRKIS G-CVE in the area of virtual prototype testing.
LIRKIS CAVE is a unique immersive virtual reality installation with a compact cylinder-based construction and a high-quality stereoscopic video output rendered on twenty 55” Full HD LCD panels. While the video output of the CAVE provides a high level of immersion to a virtual world, its original implementation of peripherals support had a negative impact because of a limited number of supported devices and certain performance issues. In this paper we describe a new, distributed, peripheral devices support implementation for the LIRKIS CAVE, which solves the performance issues and allows for ease of integration of new input devices into the CAVE. We also present a successful integration of a special input device, the Myo armband,which allows a natural and unobtrusive gesture-based control of virtual environments. The integration includes a newly developed control and monitoring application for the Myo, called MLCCS, which utilization is not limited to CAVE systems or virtual reality applications.
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