Diego Roberto Colombo Dias

Design and evaluation of an advanced virtual reality system for visualization of dentistry structures

This paper presents the development of an application created to assist the teaching of dental structures, generate rich content information and different manners of interaction. An ontology was created to provide semantics informations for virtual models. We also used two devices gesture-based interaction: Kinect and Wii Remote. It was developed a system which use intuitive interaction, and it is able to generate three dimensional images, making the experience of teaching/learning motivating. The projection environment used by the system was called Mini CAVE.

Multimedia presentation integrating interactive media produced in real time with high performance processing

Sophisticated interactive animation may be an interesting element to compose a multimedia document. However, potential demand for high performance computing can make this option impractical in digital interactive TV and mobile device environments, due to computing power restrictions of these platforms. In previous work we proposed a solution to overcome such restrictions based on video streaming. Moving forward the solution, it is described in this paper how to take advantage of media-agnostic characteristic, when present in the multimedia presentation machine, to manage this new type of media in multimedia documents. As a proof of concept we extended and tested an NCL presentation engine to add suport to this new type of media.

Immersive and interactive virtual reality applications based on 3D web browsers

This study explores the possibility of effectively using web-standard technologies (i.e., HTML5, JavaScript, WebGL, and WebRTC) to deploy full immersive and interactive virtual reality applications. These applications are based on computer clusters and run in multi-projection environments, such as CAVEs, Panoramas and Power Walls. Until recently, these applications were build using tailored solutions, such low-level libraries to distribute data. We discuss the modern-day web technology which allows these applications meet a multi-platform requirement. This paper also evaluates the communication and synchronization requirements of these applications that are traditionally the main bottleneck. As a proof-of-concept to show the feasibility of our study, we devised and implemented an immersive and interactive virtual reality application employing only web technologies. Our proof-of-concept runs on a miniCAVE environment with three displays and a 6-node cluster.

Teaching-Learning Environment Tool to Promote Individualized Student Assistance

To develop an effective teaching-learning process for a group of students respecting their individual learning pace is a challenging task for teachers. To assist students individually, it is necessary to identify each student’s difficulty and take appropriate teaching action. This paper presents an assisted learning tool based on the web that monitors and reports the student’s learning behavior for the teacher. This tool, called eTutor, also performs preconfigured actions (i.e., displays a video or text) according to the current state of student learning. We tested this tool in two different topics for two groups of students. The evaluation showed that this tool promotes student assistance, helping the teachers to be closer to their students.

Embedding Augmented Reality Applications into Learning Management Systems

A tool is proposed to reduce the disparity between the state of the art of technologies and the time of maturity required for effective implementation, facilitating the insertion of augmented reality content into learning management systems. This tool uses didactic material based on augmented reality in the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) that is a learning object standard. We tested this tool, generating a learning object based on augmented reality and sharing it to the Moodle platform. We also tested and shared this object to the repository SCORM Cloud.

3D content generation to moodle platform to support anatomy teaching and learning

Anatomy learning is very important for many courses, and it requires understanding three-dimensional (3D) shapes, most forms of anatomy teaching are offered to students through two-dimensional (2D) resources, such as images and videos. Many software solutions were developed with the purpose of assisting anatomy teaching and learning, arranging varied techniques and assets, as interaction and visualization of 3D virtual models. Despite great features, these solutions lack standards utilization and pedagogical methodology. This paper aims to present a 3D content generation technique to Moodle, one of the most popular platforms for teaching and learning management, built upon a specific pedagogical methodology, and validated by educational experts. The standard used in this technique allow sharing and reuse of content not only among Moodle systems, which are used by a large number of educational institutions and professors but also in other Virtual Learning Environments.

Unity Cluster Package - Dragging and Dropping Components for Multi-projection Virtual Reality Applications Based on PC Clusters

Virtual Reality applications created using game engines allow developers to quickly come up with a prototype that runs on a wide variety of systems, achieve high quality graphics, and support multiple devices easily. This paper aims to present a component set (Unity Cluster Package) for the Unity game engine that facilitates the development of immersive and interactive Virtual Reality applications. This drag-and-drop component set allows Unity applications to run on a commodity PC cluster with passive support for stereoscopy, perspective correction according to the user’s viewpoint and access to special servers to provide device-independent features. We present two examples of Unity multi-projection applications running in a mini CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment)-like (three-screens) system ported using this component set.

A dynamic-adaptive architecture for 3d collaborative virtual environments based on graphic clusters

3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (3DCVE) enable geographically distant users to conduct collaborative activities in a shared virtual environment. However, this collaboration involves dealing with some problems related to communication among different locations, such as jitter, latency and packet loss, mainly in Internet-based networks. This paper summarizes a few problems related to data network in the 3DCVE development. It also proposes and implements a Dynamic Adaptive Connection model for distributed cluster graphics communication. The proposed model performs checks on communications among graphics clusters and makes adjustments in communication dynamically using Fuzzy Logic. Some experiments are presented for validation purposes. Finally, we present a discussion about the future potential of the architecture.

Data Network in Development of 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments: A Systematic Review

Background: 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (3DCVE) have been used to allow multiple geographically distant users to share virtual reality environment. This remote user collaboration requires to deal with network problems. Objective: The objective of this systematic review is twofold: (1) to identify possible solutions to network issues, especially those related to the Internet, such as jitter, latency and packet loss; and (2) to identify the protocols and network topologies commonly used in 3DCVE. Results: We selected 132 papers from the most commonly used search portals, i.e., IEEE, ACM, Scopus, Springer, Science Direct and Web of Science. We also describe the studies conducted over the past 10 years, highlighting the network protocols and topologies, which are commonly used. Finally, we suggest a framework architecture for 3DCVE based on graphic cluster.

A virtual reality environment to support chat rooms for hearing impaired and to teach Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS)

Improving the way that totally or partially deaf people communicate with the world is a challenging task for our society. One way to improve their communication is to learn sign language, which is a visual language based on hand shapes, orientations, and movements of the hands, arms, or body, and facial expressions. This paper aims to present a 3D virtual reality environment to allow deaf users to communicate with each other in a real-time, synchronous, instantaneous fashion via an online chat room and to assist the teaching-learning process of Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS). A three-dimensional avatar was developed which can translate words or sentences from Portuguese to LIBRAS. It was performed two experiments to evaluate the communication via the chat room: (1) with chat history enabled (visible) and (2) with chat history disabled (invisible). These evaluations involved 30 end-users, which confirmed that the virtual environment as developed here is effective to distance classes.