Greg S. Schmidt

A Survey of Large High-Resolution Display Technologies, Techniques, and Applications

Continued advances in display hardware, computing power, networking, and rendering algorithms have all converged to dramatically improve large high-resolution display capabilities. We present a survey on prior research with large high-resolution displays. In the hardware configurations section we examine systems including multi-monitor workstations, reconfigurable projector arrays, and others. Rendering and the data pipeline are addressed with an overview of current technologies. We discuss many applications for large high-resolution displays such as automotive design, scientific visualization, control centers, and others. Quantifying the effects of large high-resolution displays on human performance and other aspects is important as we look toward future advances in display technology and how it is applied in different situations. Interacting with these displays brings a different set of challenges for HCI professionals, so an overview of some of this work is provided. Finally, we present our view of the top ten greatest challenges in large highresolution displays.

PC Clusters for Virtual Reality

In the late 90’s the emergence of high performance 3D commodity graphics cards opened the way to use PC clusters for high performance Virtual Reality (VR) applications. Today PC clusters are broadly used to drive multi projector immersive environments. In this paper, we survey the different approaches that have been developed to use PC clusters for VR applications. We review the most common software tools that enable to take advantage of the power of clusters. We also discuss some new trends.

Multidimensional visual representations for underwater environmental uncertainty

We investigate how to represent the resulting multivariate information and multidimensional uncertainty by developing and applying candidate visual techniques. Although good techniques exist for visualizing many data types, less progress has been made on how to display uncertainty and multivariate information - this is especially true as the dimensionality rises. At this time, our primary focus is to develop the statistical characterizations for the environmental uncertainty (described only briefly in this article) and to develop a visual method for each characterization. The mariner community needs enhanced characterizations of environmental uncertainty now, but the accuracy of the characterizations is still not sufficient, and therefore formal user evaluations cannot take place at this point in development. We received feedback on the applicability of our techniques from domain experts. We used this in conjunction with previous results to compile a set of development guidelines.

Towards model-based gesture recognition

We propose a new technique for gesture recognition that involves both physical and control models of gesture performance, and describe preliminary experiments done to validate the approach. The technique incorporates underlying dynamics and control models are used to augment a set of Kalman-filter-based recognizer modules so that each filters the input data under the a priori assumption that one of the gestures is being performed. The recognized gesture is the filter output that most closely matches the output of an unaugmented Kalman filter. In our preliminary experiments, we treated gestures made with simple motions of the right arm, done while tracking only hand position. We modeled the path that the hand traverses while performing a gesture as a point-mass moving through air. The control model for each specific gesture was simply an experimentally determined sequence of applied forces plus a proportional control based on spatial position. Our experiments showed that even using such a simple set of models we were able to obtain results reasonably comparable with a carefully hand-constructed feature-based discriminator on a limited set of spatially-distinct planar gestures.

Evaluation of the ShapeTape tracker for wearable, mobile interaction

We describe two engineering experiments designed to evaluate the effectiveness of Measurands ShapeTape for wearable, mobile interaction. Our initial results suggest that the ShapeTape is not appropriate for interactions which require a high degree of accuracy. However, ShapeTape is capable of reproducing the qualitative motion the user is performing and thus could be used to support 3D gesture-based interaction.

Model-Based Motion Filtering for Improving Arm Gesture Recognition Performance

We describe a model-based motion filtering process that, when applied to human arm motion data, leads to improved arm gesture recognition. Arm movements can be viewed as responses to muscle actuations that are guided by responses of the nervous system. Our motion filtering method makes strides towards capturing this structure by integrating a dynamic model with a control system for the arm. We hypothesize that embedding human performance knowledge into the processing of arm movements will lead to better recognition performance. We present details for the design of our filter, our evaluation of the filter from both expert-user and multiple-user pilot studies. Our results show that the filter has a positive impact on recognition performance for arm gestures.

Egocentric medium-field distance perception in projection environments

Egocentric distance perception over distances of 2--20 meters has been extensively studied within real world environments and within virtual environments (VEs) using head-mounted displays (HMDs). Not as much investigation has been performed within projection-based VEs, partly because of measurement restrictions imposed by the limited spatial constraints of the projection-based hardware. A standard measurement technique is blind-folded walking, in which subjects observe the object, close their eyes, and walk to where they perceives the object to be. However, due to the limited space in front of projection-based displays, this technique is difficult to perform. To our best knowledge, there is only one technique, imagined walking [Plumert et al. 2005], applied in projection-based environments. We use and compare triangulated walking [Knapp 1999] to imagined walking and verbal estimation for projection-based environments.

Choreographing realistic animated birds using gesture recognition

We describe progress in developing real-time tools for animation choreography, placing an aerodynamic bird character under interactive gestural control. Since the bird model responds to commands through a multiple-level control system, the effect is that of a director working with an intelligent actor to choreograph motion sequences.