Nancy Rodriguez

Teaching Virtual Reality with Affordable Technologies

In 2004, G.C. Burdea published his article Teaching Virtual Reality: Why and How? He pointed out that the reduced offer of Virtual Reality courses could be explained by the requirement of specialized and expensive equipment. Even if a VR course could only focus on theoretical principles, hands-on learning allows to increase and clarify knowledge and to directly experience ---and then better understand- several concepts as immersion, natural interfaces or motion sickness. At the present time, digital entertainment industry renewal has fostered the development of low cost devices for virtual reality. These affordable technologies as a BYOD approach are used in the i¾?i¾?open VR Labi¾?i¾? of the Computer Science department at University of Montpellier. In this paper, the VR Lab as well as our course Vision and Augmented/Virtual Reality are described in detail.

Energy Consumption Improvement through a Visualization Software

In this chapter, we present a project called RIDER, for Research for IT Driver EneRgy efficiencies. We are developing a green box composed by a set of IT components; able to generate efficient predictive model and building optimization. The main part of the green box is a pivot model managed by a rule engine and a standard BMS with a specific input/output protocol. Modules can extend the standard green box offering system/user advices, proposing improvements on data model and predicting building behavior. This chapter introduces the RIDER green box and details the visualization module, which is used to improve model by using user knowledge.

CoViz: Cooperative Visualization to Facilitate Sense Making by Groups of Users

Coviz is a tool that uses visualization to support spontaneous construction, organization and exploration of collections. We use the term collection to identify a set of documents gathered for a given purpose by one or several individuals. Coviz facilitates creation, organization and update of collections by providing multi-scale visualization and interaction techniques. Coviz has been tested in several informative case studies involving small groups of users. In these situations, Coviz has fulfilled several important aspects of both groups and personal organization needs. Our initial experiments indicate that Coviz can even encourage unusual and interesting forms of cooperation among people.

Tabu search for human pose recognition

The use of computer vision techniques to build hands-free input devices has long been a topic of interest to researchers in the field of natural interaction. In recent years Microsoft’s Kinect has brought these technologies to the layman, but the most commonly used libraries for Kinect human pose recognition are closed-source. There is not yet an accepted, effective open-source alternative upon which highly specific applications can be based. We propose a novel technique for extracting the appendage configurations of users from the Kinect camera’s depth feed, based on stochastic local search techniques rather than per-pixel classification.

Stakeholder detection for online debates

This paper presents a work in progress about stakeholder detection for online debates. We propose an approach based on classical community detection methods applied to semantic social networks representation. We defend that new web2.0 tools should assist users to define semantic relations between users, groups and roles based on social interaction analysis. The main goal is to provide new mecanisms for moderation decreasing misunderstandings and highlighting unexpected behaviors.