Rycharde Jeffery Hawkes

Distributed virtual environments and VRML: an event-based architecture

We present an approach to the problem of implementing and supporting Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) on the Internet using an event-based notification system. The three most important characteristics of this approach are generality, scalability, and openness. We describe the notification system, how we use it to provide general DVE support, its use in implementing the Living Worlds Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) DVE architecture, and an application in an office environment.

Quantifying fidelity for virtual environment simulations employing memory schema assumptions

In a virtual environment (VE), efficient techniques are often needed to economize on rendering computation without compromising the information transmitted. The reported experiments devise a functional fidelity metric by exploiting research on memory schemata. According to the proposed measure, similar information would be transmitted across synthetic and real-world scenes depicting a specific schema. This would ultimately indicate which areas in a VE could be rendered in lower quality without affecting information uptake. We examine whether computationally more expensive scenes of greater visual fidelity affect memory performance after exposure to immersive VEs, or whether they are merely more aesthetically pleasing than their diminished visual quality counterparts. Results indicate that memory schemata function in VEs similar to real-world environments. “High-level” visual cognition related to late visual processing is unaffected by ubiquitous graphics manipulations such as polygon count and depth of shadow rendering; “normal” cognition operates as long as the scenes look acceptably realistic. However, when the overall realism of the scene is greatly reduced, such as in wireframe, then visual cognition becomes abnormal. Effects that distinguish schema-consistent from schema-inconsistent objects change because the whole scene now looks incongruent. We have shown that this effect is not due to a failure of basic recognition.

The painter

This four-minute film was created by 422, a UK-based, awardwinning production company, in collaboration with researchers from HP Labs, Bristol, UK. The animation was rendered using a prototype rendering service developed by HP Labs, running on an HP Utility Data Center (UDC). By tapping into large amounts of compute power on-demand, 422 was able to meet the aggressive deadline without sacrificing production values.

Cells: A Self-Hosting Virtual Infrastructure Service

We describe the design and implementation of Cells, a novel multi-tenanted virtual infrastructure service. Cells has the unique property of being self-hosting: it operates its own management system within one of the tenant virtual infrastructures that it manages and therefore benefits from the same security, flexibility and scalability as other tenant services. Cells is also differentiated by its declarative interface for infrastructure configuration, and its fine-grained control of network and storage connections within and between tenant infrastructures.

Loom: Complex large-scale visual insight for large hybrid IT infrastructure management

Abstract Interactive visual exploration techniques (IVET) such as those advocated by Shneiderman and extreme scale visual analytics have successfully increased our understanding of a variety of domains that produce huge amounts of complex data. In spite of their complexity, IT infrastructures have not benefited from the application of IVET techniques. Loom is inspired in IVET techniques and builds on them to tame increasing complexity in IT infrastructure management systems guaranteeing interactive response times and integrating key elements for IT management: Relationships between managed entities coming from different IT management subsystems, alerts and actions (or reconfigurations) of the IT setup. The Loom system builds on two main pillars: (1) a multiplex graph spanning data from different ITIMs; and (2) a novel visualisation arrangement: the Loom “Thread” visualisation model. We have tested this in a number of real-world applications, showing that Loom can handle million of entities without losing information, with minimum context switching, and offering better performance than other relational/graph-based systems. This ensures interactive response times (few seconds as 90th percentile). The value of the “Thread” visualisation model is shown in a qualitative analysis of users’ experiences with Loom.

An Extensible Toolkit for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

In this paper, we describe an extensible toolkit for creating, testing and executing context-aware mobile applications. Our aim is to facilitate research in wearable & ubiquitous computing by providing an experimental framework into which novel sensors, networking mechanisms, web services and algorithms can easily be added and explored. The paper describes the toolkit, an SDK used to create plug-ins, and three example extensions that encapsulate a low-cost 3-axis compass, a heart rate monitor and a system for detecting services available on the network.

Action-based slant perception in real and virtual environments

An innovative action-based motoric measure of slant is proposed, based on gait. This measure is ecologically-valid derived from the angle that the foot makes in relation to the horizontal ground plane immediately before impact (Figure 1). This work explores whether the proposed measure is affected by factors such as material of the walking surface and inclination of the walking ramps. Moreover, experimental studies were conducted in a real environment set-up and in its virtual counterpart. Comparisons between real-world spatial judgments and simulation equivalents provide performance benchmarks as well as tools to assess whether a technological set-up would be of similar functional fidelity to a real-world task situation.

Friction and slant perception in real and virtual environments

Comparisons between real-world spatial judgments and simulation equivalents provide performance benchmarks as well as tools to assess whether a technological set-up would be of similar functional fidelity to a real-world task situation. It is widely recognised that perceptual fidelity is not necessarily equivalent to physical simulation. Identifying ways to ‘induce’ reality by possibly distorting physics based on fundamental perceptual processes triggered in real and synthetic worlds rather than simulating the physics of reality is a novel research route worth pursuing. We describe a set of comparative studies between a real-world task situation and varied synthetic simulations which attempt to introduce novel functional fidelity metrics based on slant and friction perception, as well as novel perceptual estimates of slant offering a truly interdisciplinary approach.