Belma Ramic-Brkic

Towards high-fidelity multi-sensory virtual environments

Virtual environments are playing an increasingly important role for training people about real world situations, especially through the use of serious games. A key concern is thus the level of realism that virtual environments require in order to have an accurate match of what the user can expect in the real world with what they perceive in the virtual one. Failure to achieve the right level of realism runs the real risk that the user may adopt a different reaction strategy in the virtual world than would be desired in reality.High-fidelity, physically-based rendering has the potential to deliver the same perceptual quality of an image as if you were “there” in the real world scene being portrayed. However, our perception of an environment is not only what we see, but may be significantly influenced by other sensory inputs, including sound, smell, feel, and even taste. Computation and delivery of all sensory stimuli at interactive rates is a computationally complex problem. To achieve true physical accuracy for each of the senses individually for any complex scene in real-time is simply beyond the ability of current standard desktop computers. This paper discusses how human perception, and in particular any cross-modal effects in multi-sensory perception, can be exploited to selectively deliver high-fidelity virtual environments. Selective delivery enables those parts of a scene which the user is attending to, to be computed in high quality. The remainder of the scene is delivered in lower quality, at a significantly reduced computational cost, without the user being aware of this quality difference.

Virtual smell: authentic smell diffusion in virtual environments

Smell is a key human sense. In the real world, smell plays a leading role in helping us appreciate an environment, for example the smell of fresh coffee, or the dead body. High-fidelity virtual environments are being increasingly used as an accurate representation of the real world for a wide variety of applications, including training, phobia treatment and virtual archeology. This paper compares the diffusion and perception of smell in real and virtual environments. Although airflow can be computed within a virtual environment using, for example a computational fluid dynamic simulator, the results do not necessarily predict how smell may be perceived in the real-world. Virtual smell needs to take into account the type of smell being considered and how humans may perceive this smell.

Augmented real-time virtual environment of the church of the holy trinity in mostar

Digital storytelling significantly improves the immersion of the users into virtual environments. The perception of the information contained in the digital story is better perceived if the story is told by a real avatar, rather than the animated character. The paper describes how we improved the approach of inserting the real avatar recorded against a green screen using a sequence of images with an alpha channel in an X3D real time virtual environment.

Olfactory Adaptation in Virtual Environments

Visual perception is becoming increasingly important in computer graphics. Research on human visual perception has led to the development of perception-driven computer graphics techniques, where knowledge of the human visual system (HVS) and, in particular, its weaknesses are exploited when rendering and displaying 3D graphics. Findings on limitations of the HVS have been used to maintain high perceived quality but reduce the computed quality of some of the image without this quality difference being perceived. This article investigates the amount of time for which (if at all) such limitations could be exploited in the presence of smell. The results show that for our experiment, adaptation to smell does indeed affect participants’ ability to determine quality difference in the animations. Having been exposed to a smell before undertaking the experiment, participants were able to determine the quality in a similar fashion to the “no smell” condition, whereas without adaptation, participants were not able to distinguish the quality difference.

Exploring multiple modalities for selective rendering of virtual environments

The cross-modal interaction between vision and other senses is a key part of how we perceive the real world. Significant stimulation to hearing, sense of smell, taste or touch can reduce the cognitive resources the brain is able to allocate to sight, and thus limit what the Human Visual System (HVS) can actually perceive at that moment. Selective rendering is able to exploit such knowledge of the HVS, to render those parts of a virtual environment a viewer is attending to at a high quality and the rest of the scene at a much lower quality, and thus at a substantially reduced rendering time, without the viewer being aware of this quality difference. This paper investigates how the presence of the modalities of sound, smell and ambient temperature in a virtual environment significantly affects a viewers ability to perceive the quality of the graphics used for that environment. Experiments were run with a total of 356 participants to determine the graphics quality thresholds across the different cross-modal interactions. The results revealed a significant effect of strong perfume, high temperature and audio noise on perceived rendering quality. Under given conditions, this particular combination of modalities can be thus exploited when rendering virtual environments, to substantially reduce rendering time without any loss in the users perception of delivered visual quality.

Kockica: Developing a Serious Game for Alphabet Learning and Practising Vocabulary

Serious games have had a great impact on education of children and especially, children with disabilities. Kockica is a first 3D serious game developed in native (Bosnian) language and as such, is culturally appropriate for B&H children. The game is intended to help children learn alphabet and improve their verbal skills in a fun and joyful way. The idea of the game is to encourage parents to participate in children’s play and learning time, and to offer teachers a new interactive tool that could potentially speed up the learning process and at the same time make it more interesting and fun. The game presented in this paper is developed in collaboration with professionals working at an NGO “EDUS—Education for All”, program devoted to evidence-based work with children with disabilities. In this paper we present a pilot study conducted with neuro-typical children, including correction feedback received from the teachers.

A piece of peace in sWARajevo: Locally and globally interesting stories for virtual museums

Summary form only given. We present a method how to create locally and globally interesting stories for virtual museums in a relatively short time. The local interestingness is understood in a Koestlerian way (AH, AHA, HAHA bisociation effects). Global interestingness is achieved by discovering, within the given unique material, options for relating unrelated contexts, internal poetry and/or change of the narration mode. The craft of storytelling resulted in five short movies, completed during the South-East European Virtual Heritage School: Digital Storytelling for Virtual Museums. These intereStories“ are intentionally aimed at overcoming multiple limitations of backtelling, frequent in virtual museums. The five themes include Bosnian blues Sevdah, fate of Sephardic Jews, existing and nonexisting urban area, and traditional Bosnian coffee. The stories were coauthored by 15 beginners storytellers in groups (24 authors) in 5 days alongside with the 12 lectures on theory and narrative case studies from V-must network good practice. Besides the brainstormings, speed-up focused brainwritting feedback was provided twice: once for preexistent stories, second for betaversions. The final creations were produced in Adobe Premiere Pro and published at YouTube.

Aviončići: Developing a Serious Game for Counting and Color-Matching

Increasing body of research is being focused on developing tools and applications that could improve a variety of skills of children with disabilities. Gaming industry is the fastest growing industry and as such is as of recently being enriched with a number of educational games specifically designed for children with disabilities. Their main disadvantage is the inability to be used in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where exists an increasing number of children that could significantly benefit from them. Therefore, we here present an original educational game Avioncici developed in a native (Bosnian) language with a focus on special interest area: air-planes. The main purpose of the game is to teach children basic counting, color matching and color sorting by taking them through the airport. Preliminary results show the positive feedback on the game design and logic. This represents the first stage of the project, where in the further studies we plan to run a more extensive evaluation on children performance and learning pace.

DIY Smart Mirror

The Internet of Things concept has become increasingly popular when it comes to providing people with technology and tools that would make their lives simpler and ease their day-to-day routines. One such tool is a multipurpose mirror used both as a mirror and a device. There have been several successful attempts of building such a device, and some of them even turned into business opportunities. However, due to its selling prices and shipping policies regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina, it is almost impossible to acquire one. The main purpose of this paper is to show how the process of building a Smart Mirror from scratch showing basic information such as time, date, weather statistics, and recent news headlines. The displayed information is accessible at any point in time. The cost-effective analysis indicates significant cost savings for produced outcome compared to available off-the-shelf solutions.

Farm: Serious Game for Addressing Child Obesity

Obesity among young adults is an increasing world health problem associated with harmful effects on the health and general well-being. Although this phenomenon is mainly connected to low and middle income countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, obesity levels in developed countries such as UK and USA, are significantly increasing as well. In this paper we address the possibility of reducing the problem through the use of serious games. Stimulating children through the fun and interactive play environment has been shown as an effective method in increasing physical activity and energy expenditure during the play. Using this method of playing a carefully designed serious game is one of the ways to stimulate and help children change their behaviour towards eating, physical activity and therefore, consequently, prevent and reduce child obesity. In this paper we present a game which encourages a child to move using Kinect motion sensors. The aim of the game is to move through the virtual farm and cache the healthy food items appearing on the sides. Food items are grouped in four categories across different levels of the game. In the preliminary study presented here, the effect of pleasure and user satisfaction was only tested.