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The objective of this research project is to develop a user-friendly and cost-effective interactive input device that allows intuitive and efficient manipulation of 3D objects (6 DoF) in virtual reality (VR) visualization environments with flat projections walls. During this project, it was planned to develop an extended version of a laser pointer with multiple laser beams arranged in specific patterns. Using stationary cameras observing projections of these patterns from behind the screens, it is planned to develop an algorithm for reconstruction of the emitter’s absolute position and orientation in space. Laser pointer concept is an intuitive way of interaction that would provide user with a familiar, mobile and efficient navigation though a 3D environment. In order to navigate in a 3D world, it is required to know the absolute position (x, y and z position) and orientation (roll, pitch and yaw angles) of the device, a total of 6 degrees of freedom (DoF). Ordinary laser-based pointers when captured on a flat surface with a video camera system and then processed, will only provide x and y coordinates effectively reducing available input to 2 DoF only. In order to overcome this problem, an additional set of multiple (invisible) laser pointers should be used in the pointing device. These laser pointers should be arranged in a way that the projection of their rays will form one fixed dot pattern when intersected with the flat surface of projection screens. Images of such a pattern will be captured via a real-time camera-based system and then processed using mathematical re-projection algorithms. This would allow the reconstruction of the full absolute 3D pose (6 DoF) of the input device. Additionally, multi-user or collaborative work should be supported by the system, would allow several users to interact with a virtual environment at the same time. Possibilities to port processing algorithms into embedded processors or FPGAs will be investigated during this project as well.
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.
Low power dissipation is a current topic in digital design, and therefore, it should be covered in a state-of-the-art electrical engineering curriculum. This paper describes how low-power design can be addressed within a digital design course. Doing so would be beneficial for both topics because low-power design is not detached from the systems perspective, and the digital design course would be enriched by references to current challenges and applications. Thus, the presented course should serve as an example of how a course can be developed to also teach students about sustainable engineering.
The steadily decreasing prices of display technologies and computer graphics hardware contribute to the increasing popularity of multiple-display environments, like large, high-resolution displays. It is therefore necessary that educational organizations give the new generation of computer scientists an opportunity to become familiar with this kind of technology. However, there is a lack of tools that allow for getting started easily. Existing frameworks and libraries that provide support for multi-display rendering are often complex in understanding, configuration and extension. This is critical especially in educational context where the time that students have for their projects is limited and quite short. These tools are also rather known and used in research communities only, thus providing less benefit for future non-scientists. In this work we present an extension for the Unity game engine. The extension allows – with a small overhead – for implementation of applications that are apt to run on both single-display and multi-display systems. It takes care of the most common issues in the context of distributed and multi-display rendering like frame, camera and animation synchronization, thus reducing and simplifying the first steps into the topic. In conjunction with Unity, which significantly simplifies the creation of different kinds of virtual environments, the extension affords students to build mock-up virtual reality applications for large, high-resolution displays, and to implement and evaluate new interaction techniques and metaphors and visualization concepts. Unity itself, in our experience, is very popular among computer graphics students and therefore familiar to most of them. It is also often employed in projects of both research institutions and commercial organizations; so learning it will provide students with qualification in high demand.
Der Einsatz von Agentensystemen ist vielfältig, dennoch sind aktuelle Realisierungen lediglich in der Lage primär regelkonformes oder aber „geskriptetes“ Verhalten auch unter Einsatz von randomisierten Verfahren abzubilden. Für eine realistische Repräsentation sind jedoch auch Abweichungen von den Regeln notwendig, die nicht zufällig sondern kontextbedingt auftreten. Im Rahmen dieses Forschungsprojektes wurde ein realitätsnaher Straßenverkehrssimulator realisiert, der mittels eines detailliert definierten Systems für kognitive Agenten auch diese irregulären Verhaltensweisen generiert und somit ein realistisches Verkehrsverhalten für die Verwendung in VR-Anwendungen simuliert. Durch das Erweitern der Agenten mit psychologischen Persönlichkeitsprofilen, basierend auf dem „Fünf-Faktoren-Modell“, zeigen die Agenten individualisierte und gleichzeitig konsistente Verhaltensmuster. Ein dynamisches Emotionsmodell sorgt zusätzlich für eine situationsbedingte Adaption des Verhaltens, z.B. bei langen Wartezeiten. Da die detaillierte Simulation kognitiver Prozesse, der Persönlichkeitseinflüsse und der emotionalen Zustände erhebliche Rechenleistungen verlangt, wurde ein mehrschichtiger Simulationsansatz entwickelt, der es erlaubt den Detailgrad der Berechnung und Darstellung jedes Agenten während der Simulation stufenweise zu verändern, so dass alle im System befindlichen Agenten konsistent simuliert werden können. Im Rahmen diverser Evaluierungsiterationen in einer bestehenden VR-Anwendung – dem FIVIS-Fahrradfahrsimulator des Antragstellers - konnte eindrucksvoll nachgewiesen werden, dass die realisierten Konzepte die ursprünglich formulierten Forschungsfragestellung überzeugend und effizient lösen.
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.
Annual Report 2011 - 2012
(2013)
Annual Report 2013 - 2014
(2015)
Are There Extended Cognitive Improvements from Different Kinds of Acute Bouts of Physical Activity?
(2020)
Acute bouts of physical activity of at least moderate intensity have shown to enhance cognition in young as well as older adults. This effect has been observed for different kinds of activities such as aerobic or strength and coordination training. However, only few studies have directly compared these activities regarding their effectiveness. Further, most previous studies have mainly focused on inhibition and have not examined other important core executive functions (i.e., updating, switching) which are essential for our behavior in daily life (e.g., staying focused, resisting temptations, thinking before acting), as well. Therefore, this study aimed to directly compare two kinds of activities, aerobic and coordinative, and examine how they might affect executive functions (i.e., inhibition, updating, and switching) in a test-retest protocol. It is interesting for practical implications, as coordinative exercises, for example, require little space and would be preferable in settings such as an office or a classroom. Furthermore, we designed our experiment in such a way that learning effects were controlled. Then, we tested the influence of acute bouts of physical activity on the executive functioning in both young and older adults (young 16–22 years, old 65–80 years). Overall, we found no differences between aerobic and coordinative activities and, in fact, benefits from physical activities occurred only in the updating tasks in young adults. Additionally, we also showed some learning effects that might influence the results. Thus, it is important to control cognitive tests for learning effects in test-retest studies as well as to analyze effects from physical activity on a construct level of executive functions.
We describe a systematic approach for rendering time-varying simulation data produced by exa-scale simulations, using GPU workstations. The data sets we focus on use adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to overcome memory bandwidth limitations by representing interesting regions in space with high detail. Particularly, our focus is on data sets where the AMR hierarchy is fixed and does not change over time. Our study is motivated by the NASA Exajet, a large computational fluid dynamics simulation of a civilian cargo aircraft that consists of 423 simulation time steps, each storing 2.5 GB of data per scalar field, amounting to a total of 4 TB. We present strategies for rendering this time series data set with smooth animation and at interactive rates using current generation GPUs. We start with an unoptimized baseline and step by step extend that to support fast streaming updates. Our approach demonstrates how to push current visualization workstations and modern visualization APIs to their limits to achieve interactive visualization of exa-scale time series data sets.
Seit 2012 wird an der Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg die Studieneingangsphase im Qualitätspakt Lehre gefördert. Ein wesentliches Anliegen im Projekt „Pro-MINT-us“ ist die Einbeziehung der gesamten Hochschule, um keine isolierten Maßnahmen anzubieten, sondern die im Projekt entwickelten Lehrideen nachhaltig zu verankern.
Realism and plausibility of computer controlled entities in entertainment software have been enhanced by adding both static personalities and dynamic emotions. Here a generic model is introduced which allows the transfer of findings from real-life personality studies to a computational model. This information is used for decision making. The introduction of dynamic event-based emotions enables adaptive behavior patterns. The advantages of this new model have been validated with a four-way crossroad in a traffic simulation. Driving agents using the introduced model enhanced by dynamics were compared to agents based on static personality profiles and simple rule-based behavior. It has been shown that adding an adaptive dynamic factor to agents improves perceivable plausibility and realism. It also supports coping with extreme situations in a fair and understandable way.
An Universitäten und Fachhochschulen ist die Mathematik-Ausbildung eines der Nadelöhre für angehende Ingenieurinnen und Ingenieure. Viele Studierende der Ingenieurwissenschaften scheitern in den ersten Studiensemestern an den Anforderungen der Mathematik. Lehrende, Fach- und Hochschuldidaktiker/innen und zunehmend auch Fachvertretungen und Verbände stellen sich die Frage, was an den Fakultäten und Fachbereichen getan werden kann, damit Studierende ihre mathematischen Fähigkeiten vergrößern und den anspruchsvollen Studienweg zur Ingenieurin oder zum Ingenieur meistern können.
Virtual reality environments are increasingly being used to encourage individuals to exercise more regularly, including as part of treatment in those with mental health or neurological disorders. The success of virtual environments likely depends on whether a sense of presence can be established, where participants become fully immersed in the virtual environment. Exposure to virtual environments is associated with physiological responses, including cortical activation changes. Whether the addition of a real exercise within a virtual environment alters sense of presence perception, or the accompanying physiological changes, is not known. In a randomized and controlled study design, trials of moderate-intensity exercise (i.e. self-paced cycling) and no-exercise (i.e. automatic propulsion) were performed within three levels of virtual environment exposure. Each trial was 5-min in duration and was followed by post-trial assessments of heart rate, perceived sense of presence, EEG, and mental state. Changes in psychological strain and physical state were generally mirrored by neural activation patterns. Furthermore these change indicated that exercise augments the demands of virtual environment exposures and this likely contributed to an enhanced sense of presence.
Ziel des hier beschriebenen Forschungsprojekts war die Entwicklung eines prototypischen Fahrradfahrsimulators für den Einsatz in der Verkehrserziehung und im Verkehrssicherheitstraining. Der entwickelte Prototyp soll möglichst universell für verschiedene Altersklassen und Applikationen einsetzbar sowie mobil sein.
We present our approach to extend a Virtual Reality software framework towards the use for Augmented Reality applications. Although VR and AR applications have very similar requirements in terms of abstract components (like 6DOF input, stereoscopic output, simulation engines), the requirements in terms of hardware and software vary considerably. In this article we would like to share the experience gained from adapting our VR software framework for AR applications. We will address design issues for this task. The result is a VR/AR basic software that allows us to implement interactive applications without fixing their type (VR or AR) beforehand. Switching from VR to AR is a matter of changing the configuration file of the application. We also give an example of the use of the extended framework: Augmenting the magnetic field of bar magnets in physics classes. We describe the setup of the system and the real-time calculation of the magnetic field, using a GPU.
The visual and auditory quality of computer-mediated stimuli for virtual and extended reality (VR/XR) is rapidly improving. Still, it remains challenging to provide a fully embodied sensation and awareness of objects surrounding, approaching, or touching us in a 3D environment, though it can greatly aid task performance in a 3D user interface. For example, feedback can provide warning signals for potential collisions (e.g., bumping into an obstacle while navigating) or pinpointing areas where one’s attention should be directed to (e.g., points of interest or danger). These events inform our motor behaviour and are often associated with perception mechanisms associated with our so-called peripersonal and extrapersonal space models that relate our body to object distance, direction, and contact point/impact. We will discuss these references spaces to explain the role of different cues in our motor action responses that underlie 3D interaction tasks. However, providing proximity and collision cues can be challenging. Various full-body vibration systems have been developed that stimulate body parts other than the hands, but can have limitations in their applicability and feasibility due to their cost and effort to operate, as well as hygienic considerations associated with e.g., Covid-19. Informed by results of a prior study using low-frequencies for collision feedback, in this paper we look at an unobtrusive way to provide spatial, proximal and collision cues. Specifically, we assess the potential of foot sole stimulation to provide cues about object direction and relative distance, as well as collision direction and force of impact. Results indicate that in particular vibration-based stimuli could be useful within the frame of peripersonal and extrapersonal space perception that support 3DUI tasks. Current results favor the feedback combination of continuous vibrotactor cues for proximity, and bass-shaker cues for body collision. Results show that users could rather easily judge the different cues at a reasonably high granularity. This granularity may be sufficient to support common navigation tasks in a 3DUI.
Females are influenced more than males by visual cues during many spatial orientation tasks; but females rely more heavily on gravitational cues during visual-vestibular conflict. Are there gender biases in the relative contributions of vision, gravity and the internal representation of the body to the perception of upright? And might any such biases be affected by low gravity? 16 participants (8 female) viewed a highly polarized visual scene tilted ±112° while lying supine on the European Space Agency's short-arm human centrifuge. The centrifuge was rotated to simulate 24 logarithmically spaced g-levels along the long axis of the body (0.04-0.5g at ear-level). The perception of upright was measured using the Oriented Character Recognition Test (OCHART). OCHART uses the ambiguous symbol "p" shown in different orientations. Participants decided whether it was a "p" or a "d" from which the perceptual upright (PU) can be calculated for each visual/gravity combination. The relative contribution of vision, gravity and the internal representation of the body were then calculated. Experiments were repeated while upright. The relative contribution of vision on the PU was less in females compared to males (t=-18.48, p≤0.01). Females placed more emphasis on the gravity cue instead (f:28.4%, m:24.9%) while body weightings were constant (f:63.0%, m:63.2%). When upright (1g) in this and other studies (e.g., Barnett-Cowan et al. 2010, EJN, 31,1899) females placed more emphasis on vision in this task than males. The reduction in weight allocated by females to vision when in simulated low-gravity conditions compared to when upright under normal gravity may be related to similar female behaviour in response to other instances of visual-vestibular conflict. Why this is the case and at which point the perceptual change happens requires further research.
Generating and visualizing large areas of vegetation that look natural makes terrain surfaces much more realistic. However, this is a challenging field in computer graphics, because ecological systems are complex and visually appealing plant models are geometrically detailed. This work presents Silva (System for the Instantiation of Large Vegetated Areas), a system to generate and visualize large vegetated areas based on the ecological surrounding. Silva generates vegetation on Wang-tiles with associated reusable distributions enabling multi-level instantiation. This paper presents a method to generate Poisson Disc Distributions (PDDs) with variable radii on Wang-tile sets (without a global optimization) that is able to generate seamless tilings. Because Silva has a freely configurable generation pipeline and can consider plant neighborhoods it is able to incorporate arbitrary abiotic and biotic components during generation. Based on multi-levelinstancing and nested kd-trees, the distributions on the Wang-tiles allow their acceleration structures to be reused during visualization. This enables Silva to visualize large vegetated areas of several hundred square kilometers with low render times and a small memory footprint.
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.
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.
Telepresence robots allow users to be spatially and socially present in remote environments. Yet, it can be challenging to remotely operate telepresence robots, especially in dense environments such as academic conferences or workplaces. In this paper, we primarily focus on the effect that a speed control method, which automatically slows the telepresence robot down when getting closer to obstacles, has on user behaviors. In our first user study, participants drove the robot through a static obstacle course with narrow sections. Results indicate that the automatic speed control method significantly decreases the number of collisions. For the second study we designed a more naturalistic, conference-like experimental environment with tasks that require social interaction, and collected subjective responses from the participants when they were asked to navigate through the environment. While about half of the participants preferred automatic speed control because it allowed for smoother and safer navigation, others did not want to be influenced by an automatic mechanism. Overall, the results suggest that automatic speed control simplifies the user interface for telepresence robots in static dense environments, but should be considered as optionally available, especially in situations involving social interactions.
Might the gravity levels found on other planets and on the moon be sufficient to provide an adequate perception of upright for astronauts? Can the amount of gravity required be predicted from the physiological threshold for linear acceleration? The perception of upright is determined not only by gravity but also visual information when available and assumptions about the orientation of the body. Here, we used a human centrifuge to simulate gravity levels from zero to earth gravity along the long-axis of the body and measured observers' perception of upright using the Oriented Character Recognition Test (OCHART) with and without visual cues arranged to indicate a direction of gravity that differed from the body's long axis. This procedure allowed us to assess the relative contribution of the added gravity in determining the perceptual upright. Control experiments off the centrifuge allowed us to measure the relative contributions of normal gravity, vision, and body orientation for each participant. We found that the influence of 1 g in determining the perceptual upright did not depend on whether the acceleration was created by lying on the centrifuge or by normal gravity. The 50% threshold for centrifuge-simulated gravity's ability to influence the perceptual upright was at around 0.15 g, close to the level of moon gravity but much higher than the threshold for detecting linear acceleration along the long axis of the body. This observation may partially explain the instability of moonwalkers but is good news for future missions to Mars.
Das Interesse an Virtual Reality (VR) für die Hochschullehre steigt aktuell vermehrt durch die Möglichkeit, logistisch schwierige Aufgaben abzubilden sowie aufgrund positiver Ergebnisse aus Wirksamkeitsstudien. Gleichzeitig fehlt es jedoch an Studien, die immersive VR-Umgebungen, nicht-immersive Desktop-Umgebungen und konventionelle Lernmaterialien gegenüberstellen und lehr-lernmethodische Aspekte evaluieren. Aus diesem Grund beschäftigt sich dieser Beitrag mit der Konzeption und Realisierung einer Lernumgebung für die Hochschullehre, die sowohl mit einem Head Mounted Display (HMD) als auch mittels Desktops genutzt werden kann, sowie deren Evaluation anhand eines experimentellen Gruppendesigns. Die Lernumgebung wurde auf Basis einer eigens entwickelten Softwareplattform erstellt und die Wirksamkeit mithilfe von zwei Experimentalgruppen – VR vs. Desktop-Umgebung – und einer Kontrollgruppe evaluiert und verglichen. In einer Pilotstudie konnten sowohl qualitativ als auch quantitativ positive Einschätzungen der Usability der Lernumgebung in beiden Experimentalgruppen herausgestellt werden. Darüber hinaus zeigten sich positive Effekte auf die kognitive und affektive Wirkung der Lernumgebung im Vergleich zu konventionellen Lernmaterialien. Unterschiede zwischen der Nutzung als VR- oder Desktop-Umgebung zeigen sich auf kognitiver und affektiver Ebene jedoch kaum. Die Analyse von Log-Daten deutet allerdings auf Unterschiede im Lern- und Explorationsverhalten hin.