Prof. Dr. André Hinkenjann
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Modern Monte-Carlo-based rendering systems still suffer from the computational complexity involved in the generation of noise-free images, making it challenging to synthesize interactive previews. We present a framework suited for rendering such previews of static scenes using a caching technique that builds upon a linkless octree. Our approach allows for memory-efficient storage and constant-time lookup to cache diffuse illumination at multiple hitpoints along the traced paths. Non-diffuse surfaces are dealt with in a hybrid way in order to reconstruct view-dependent illumination while maintaining interactive frame rates. By evaluating the visual fidelity against ground truth sequences and by benchmarking, we show that our approach compares well to low-noise path traced results, but with a greatly reduced computational complexity allowing for interactive frame rates. This way, our caching technique provides a useful tool for global illumination previews and multi-view rendering.
Designs for decorative surfaces, such as flooring, must cover several square meters to avoid visible repeats. While the use of desktop systems is feasible to support the designer, it is challenging for a non-domain expert to get the right impression of the appearances of surfaces due to limited display sizes and a potentially unnatural interaction with digital designs. At the same time, large-format editing of structure and gloss is becoming increasingly important. Advances in the printing industry allow for more faithful reproduction of such surface details. Unfortunately, existing systems for visualizing surface designs cannot adequately account for gloss, especially for non-domain experts. Here, the complex interaction of light sources and the camera position must be controlled using software controls. As a result, only small parts of the data set can be properly inspected at a time. Also, real-world lighting is not considered here. This work presents a system for the processing and realistic visualization of large decorative surface designs. To this end, we present a tabletop solution that is coupled to a live 360° video feed and a spatial tracking system. This allows for reproducing natural view-dependent effects like real-world reflections, live image-based lighting, and the interaction with the design using virtual light sources employing natural interaction techniques that allow for a more accurate inspection even for non-domain experts.
Evaluation of a Multi-Layer 2.5D display in comparison to conventional 3D stereoscopic glasses
(2020)
In this paper we propose and evaluate a custom-build projection-based multilayer 2.5D display, consisting of three layers of images, and compare performance to a stereoscopic 3D display. Stereoscopic vision can increase the involvement and enhance game experience, however may induce possible side effects, e.g. motion sickness and simulator sickness. To overcome the disadvantage of multiple discrete depths, in our system perspective rendering and head-tracking is used. A study was performed to evaluate this display with 20 participants playing custom-designed games. The results indicated that the multi-layer display caused fewer side effects than the stereoscopic display and provided good usability. The participants also stated a better or equal spatial perception, while the cognitive load stayed the same.
This paper presents groupware to study group behavior while conducting a creative task on large, high-resolution displays. Moreover, we present the results of a between-subjects study. In the study, 12 groups with two participants each prototyped a 2D level on a 7m x 2.5m large, high-resolution display using tablet-PCs for interaction. Six groups underwent a condition where group members had equal roles and interaction possibilities. Another six groups worked in a condition where group members had different roles: level designer and 2D artist. The results revealed that in the different roles condition, the participants worked significantly more tightly and created more assets. We could also detect some shortcomings for that configuration. We discuss the gained insights regarding system configuration, groupware interfaces, and groups behavior.
Modern Monte-Carlo-based rendering systems still suffer from the computational complexity involved in the generation of noise-free images, making it challenging to synthesize interactive previews. We present a framework suited for rendering such previews of static scenes using a caching technique that builds upon a linkless octree. Our approach allows for memory-efficient storage and constant-time lookup to cache diffuse illumination at multiple hitpoints along the traced paths. Non-diffuse surfaces are dealt with in a hybrid way in order to reconstruct view-dependent illumination while maintaining interactive frame rates. By evaluating the visual fidelity against ground truth sequences and by benchmarking, we show that our approach compares well to low-noise path-traced results, but with a greatly reduced computational complexity, allowing for interactive frame rates. This way, our caching technique provides a useful tool for global illumination previews and multi-view rendering.
Foreword to the Special Section on the Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality 2019 (SVR 2019)
(2020)
Modern Monte-Carlo-based rendering systems still suffer from the computational complexity involved in the generation of noise-free images, making it challenging to synthesize interactive previews. We present a framework suited for rendering such previews ofstatic scenes using a caching technique that builds upon a linkless octree. Our approach allows for memory-efficient storage and constant-time lookup to cache diffuse illumination at multiple hitpoints along the traced paths. Non-diffuse surfaces are dealt with in a hybrid way in order to reconstruct view-dependent illumination while maintaining interactive frame rates. By evaluating the visual fidelity against ground truth sequences and by benchmarking, we show that our approach compares well to low-noise path traced results, but with a greatly reduced computational complexity allowing for interactive frame rates. This way, our caching technique provides a useful tool for global illumination previews and multi-view rendering.
Large display environments are highly suitable for immersive analytics. They provide enough space for effective co-located collaboration and allow users to immerse themselves in the data. To provide the best setting - in terms of visualization and interaction - for the collaborative analysis of a real-world task, we have to understand the group dynamics during the work on large displays. Among other things, we have to study, what effects different task conditions will have on user behavior.
In this paper, we investigated the effects of task conditions on group behavior regarding collaborative coupling and territoriality during co-located collaboration on a wall-sized display. For that, we designed two tasks: a task that resembles the information foraging loop and a task that resembles the connecting facts activity. Both tasks represent essential sub-processes of the sensemaking process in visual analytics and cause distinct space/display usage conditions. The information foraging activity requires the user to work with individual data elements to look into details. Here, the users predominantly occupy only a small portion of the display. In contrast, the connecting facts activity requires the user to work with the entire information space. Therefore, the user has to overview the entire display.
We observed 12 groups for an average of two hours each and gathered qualitative data and quantitative data. During data analysis, we focused specifically on participants' collaborative coupling and territorial behavior.
We could detect that participants tended to subdivide the task to approach it, in their opinion, in a more effective way, in parallel. We describe the subdivision strategies for both task conditions. We also detected and described multiple user roles, as well as a new coupling style that does not fit in either category: loosely or tightly. Moreover, we could observe a territory type that has not been mentioned previously in research. In our opinion, this territory type can affect the collaboration process of groups with more than two collaborators negatively. Finally, we investigated critical display regions in terms of ergonomics. We could detect that users perceived some regions as less comfortable for long-time work.
Lower back pain is one of the most prevalent diseases in Western societies. A large percentage of European and American populations suffer from back pain at some point in their lives. One successful approach to address lower back pain is postural training, which can be supported by wearable devices, providing real-time feedback about the user’s posture. In this work, we analyze the changes in posture induced by postural training. To this end, we compare snapshots before and after training, as measured by the Gokhale SpineTracker™. Considering pairs of before and after snapshots in different positions (standing, sitting, and bending), we introduce a feature space, that allows for unsupervised clustering. We show that resulting clusters represent certain groups of postural changes, which are meaningful to professional posture trainers.
In presence of conflicting or ambiguous visual cues in complex scenes, performing 3D selection and manipulation tasks can be challenging. To improve motor planning and coordination, we explore audio-tactile cues to inform the user about the presence of objects in hand proximity, e.g., to avoid unwanted object penetrations. We do so through a novel glove-based tactile interface, enhanced by audio cues. Through two user studies, we illustrate that proximity guidance cues improve spatial awareness, hand motions, and collision avoidance behaviors, and show how proximity cues in combination with collision and friction cues can significantly improve performance.
We present a novel forearm-and-glove tactile interface that can enhance 3D interaction by guiding hand motor planning and coordination. In particular, we aim to improve hand motion and pose actions related to selection and manipulation tasks. Through our user studies, we illustrate how tactile patterns can guide the user, by triggering hand pose and motion changes, for example to grasp (select) and manipulate (move) an object. We discuss the potential and limitations of the interface, and outline future work.
In recent years, a variety of methods have been introduced to exploit the decrease in visual acuity of peripheral vision, known as foveated rendering. As more and more computationally involved shading is requested and display resolutions increase, maintaining low latencies is challenging when rendering in a virtual reality context. Here, foveated rendering is a promising approach for reducing the number of shaded samples. However, besides the reduction of the visual acuity, the eye is an optical system, filtering radiance through lenses. The lenses create depth-of-field (DoF) effects when accommodated to objects at varying distances. The central idea of this article is to exploit these effects as a filtering method to conceal rendering artifacts. To showcase the potential of such filters, we present a foveated rendering system, tightly integrated with a gaze-contingent DoF filter. Besides presenting benchmarks of the DoF and rendering pipeline, we carried out a perceptual study, showing that rendering quality is rated almost on par with full rendering when using DoF in our foveated mode, while shaded samples are reduced by more than 69%.
Large, high-resolution displays are highly suitable for creation of digital environments for co-located collaborative task solving. Yet, placing multiple users in a shared environment may increase the risk of interferences, thus causing mental discomfort and decreasing efficiency of the team. To mitigate interferences coordination strategies and techniques were introduced. However, in a mixed-focus collaboration scenarios users switch now and again between loosely and tightly collaboration, therefore different coordination techniques might be required depending on the current collaboration state of team members. For that, systems have to be able to recognize collaboration states as well as transitions between them to ensure a proper adjustment of the coordination strategy. Previous studies on group behavior during collaboration in front of large displays investigated solely collaborative coupling states, not transitions between them though. To address this gap, we conducted a study with 12 participant dyads in front of a tiled display and let them solve two tasks in two different conditions (focus and overview). We looked into group dynamics and categorized transitions by means of changes in proximity, verbal communication, visual attention, visual interface, and gestures. The findings can be valuable for user interface design and development of group behavior models.
Large, high-resolution displays demonstrated their effectiveness in lab settings for cognitively demanding tasks in single user and collaborative scenarios. The effectiveness is mostly reached through inherent displays' properties - large display real estate and high resolution - that allow for visualization of complex datasets, and support of group work and embodied interaction. To raise users' efficiency, however, more sophisticated user support in the form of advanced user interfaces might be needed. For that we need profound understanding of how large, tiled displays impact users work and behavior. We need to extract behavioral patterns for different tasks and data types. This paper reports on study results of how users, while working collaboratively, process spatially fixed items on large, tiled displays. The results revealed a recurrent pattern showing that users prefer to process documents column wise rather than row wise or erratic.
Motion capture, often abbreviated mocap, generally aims at recording any kind of motion -- be it from a person or an object -- and to transform it to a computer-readable format. Especially the data recorded from (professional and non-professional) human actors are typically used for analysis in e.g. medicine, sport sciences, or biomechanics for evaluation of human motion across various factors. Motion capture is also widely used in the entertainment industry: In video games and films realistic motion sequences and animations are generated through data-driven motion synthesis based on recorded motion (capture) data.
Although the amount of publicly available full-body-motion capture data is growing, the research community still lacks a comparable corpus of specialty motion data such as, e.g. prehensile movements for everyday actions. On the one hand, such data can be used to enrich (hand-over animation) full-body motion capture data - usually captured without hand motion data due to the drastic dimensional difference in articulation detail. On the other hand, it provides means to classify and analyse prehensile movements with or without respect to the concrete object manipulated and to transfer the acquired knowledge to other fields of research (e.g. from 'pure' motion analysis to robotics or biomechanics).
Therefore, the objective of this motion capture database is to provide well-documented, free motion capture data for research purposes.
The presented database GraspDB14 in sum contains over 2000 prehensile movements of ten different non-professional actors interacting with 15 different objects. Each grasp was realised five times by each actor. The motions are systematically named containing an (anonymous) identifier for each actor as well as one for the object grasped or interacted with.
The data were recorded as joint angles (and raw 8-bit sensor data) which can be transformed into positional 3D data (3D trajectories of each joint).
In this document, we provide a detailed description on the GraspDB14-database as well as on its creation (for reproducibility).
Chapter 2 gives a brief overview of motion capture techniques, freely available motion capture databases for both, full body motions and hand motions, and a short section on how such data is made useful and re-used. Chapter 3 describes the database recording process and details the recording setup and the recorded scenarios. It includes a list of objects and performed types of interaction. Chapter 4 covers used file formats, contents, and naming patterns. We provide various tools for parsing, conversion, and visualisation of the recorded motion sequences and document their usage in chapter 5.
This work presents the analysis of data recorded by an eye tracking device in the course of evaluating a foveated rendering approach for head-mounted displays (HMDs). Foveated rendering methods adapt the image synthesis process to the user’s gaze and exploiting the human visual system’s limitations to increase rendering performance. Especially, foveated rendering has great potential when certain requirements have to be fulfilled, like low-latency rendering to cope with high display refresh rates. This is crucial for virtual reality (VR), as a high level of immersion, which can only be achieved with high rendering performance and also helps to reduce nausea, is an important factor in this field. We put things in context by first providing basic information about our rendering system, followed by a description of the user study and the collected data. This data stems from fixation tasks that subjects had to perform while being shown fly-through sequences of virtual scenes on an HMD. These fixation tasks consisted of a combination of various scenes and fixation modes. Besides static fixation targets, moving tar- gets on randomized paths as well as a free focus mode were tested. Using this data, we estimate the precision of the utilized eye tracker and analyze the participants’ accuracy in focusing the displayed fixation targets. Here, we also take a look at eccentricity-dependent quality ratings. Comparing this information with the users’ quality ratings given for the displayed sequences then reveals an interesting connection between fixation modes, fixation accuracy and quality ratings.