Xiaojun Shen

vCOM: Electronic commerce in a collaborative virtual world

Abstract Existing e-commerce applications on the web provide the users a relatively simple, browser-based interface to access available products. Customers are not provided with the same shopping experience as they would in an actual store or mall. This experience, however, can be achieved by the creation of a virtual shopping mall environment, simulating most of the actual shopping user interactions. The virtual mall brings together the services and products of various vendors. Users can navigate through the virtual shopping malls, adding items of interest into a virtual shopping cart, and perform searches assisted by ‘intelligent agents’. A Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) can realize a sophisticated virtual shopping application. In such a CVE, a large number of potential users may interact with each other. In this paper, vCOM, a VRML and Java3D-based prototype is presented, which permits users to navigate around virtual e-commerce worlds and perform collaborative shopping and intelligent searches with the assistance of software agents, in order to find the products and services of interest to them. They can then negotiate with sales agents to bargain for the best possible price and then make a secure buying transaction. The virtual mall prototype also allows the user to communicate with an ‘intelligent shopping assistant’ using simple voice commands. This assistant interacts with the shopper using voice synthesis and helps him/her use the interface to efficiently navigate in the mall. Real-time interactions between the entities in this shared environment are implemented over the High Level Architecture (HLA), an IEEE standard for distributed simulations and modeling. The paper focuses on user interface design, collaborative e-commerce through HLA and multi-agent architecture.

Architecture and Evaluation of Tele-Haptic Environments

A collaborative, haptic, audio and visual environment (C-HAVE) consists of a network of nodes. Each node in the C-HAVE world contributes to the shared environment with some virtual objects. These can be static, e.g., a sculpture or the ground, or dynamic, e.g., an object that can be virtually manipulated. We aim at developing a heterogeneous scalable architecture for large collaborative haptics environments where a number of potential users participate with different kinds of haptic devices. The main objective of the presented research is the development of three prototypes to demonstrate quantitatively the effects of adding haptics to a task. The experimental results reveal the effects of the different implementations on the performance and time delay of a particular task through objective measurement results.

A Fuzzy Logic Based Intelligent Negotiation Agent (FINA) in Ecommerce

With the evolution of electronic commerce (eCommerce) on the Web and the rise of interest in intelligence of software agents, automated negotiation is becoming an increasingly popular method for an eCommerce system to be efficient; however, negotiation, which takes place in transactions, is complicated, time-consuming and costly for participants to reach an agreement. This paper presents a model of an intelligent negotiation agent based on fuzzy logic methodology in order to alleviate the complexity of negotiation. The proposed negotiation agent model is particularly suitable to open environments, such as the Internet. The conventional methods, such as game theory, are incapable of handling an open environment where the information is sparse and full of uncertainty, while the fuzzy approaches are suitable to elegantly deal with this problem. The fuzzy logic based intelligent negotiation agent, presented in this paper, is able to interact autonomously and consequently save human labor in negotiations. The aim of modeling a negotiation agent is to reach mutual agreement efficiently and intelligently. The negotiation agent is able to negotiate with other such agents, over various sets of issues, on behalf of the real-world parties they represent, i.e. it can handle multi-issue negotiation. The reasoning model of the negotiation agent has been implemented partially by using c# based on Microsoft .NET. The reliability and the flexibility of the reasoning model are finally evaluated. The results show that performance of the proposed agent model is acceptable for negotiation parties to achieve mutual benefits

A heterogeneous scalable architecture for collaborative haptics environments

The purpose of this research effort is to design a generic architecture for collaborative haptic, audio, visual environments (C-HAVE). We aim to develop a heterogeneous scalable architecture for large collaborative haptics environments where a number of potential users participate with different kinds of haptic devices. This paper begins with a brief overview of C-HAVE and then proceeds to describe a generic architecture that is implemented over HLA/RTI (High Level Architecture/Run Time Infrastructure), an IEEE standard for distributed simulations and modeling. A potential electronic commerce application over C-HAVE is discussed.

Prediction-based Haptic Data Reduction and Compression in Tele-Mentoring Systems

In this paper, a novel haptic data reduction and compression technique to reduce haptic data traffic in networked haptic tele-mentoring systems is presented. The suggested method follows a two-step procedure: (1) haptic data packets are not transmitted when they can be predicted within a predefined tolerable error; otherwise, (2) data packets are compressed prior to transmission. The prediction technique relies on the least-squares method. Knowledge from human haptic perception is incorporated into the architecture to assess the perceptual quality of the prediction results. Packet-payload compression is performed using uniform quantization and adaptive Golomb-Rice codes. The preliminary experimental results demonstrate the algorithms effectiveness as great haptic data reduction and compression is achieved, while preserving the overall quality of the tele-mentoring environment.

Haptic tele-surgery simulation

In the last decades, with the rapid development of electronic and computer technologies, advanced medical equipment has been introduced to facilitate medical diagnosis and treatment. Yet, medical education and training approaches have not benefited much from these developments. As the kinds of surgical operations increase, specialized procedures become more and more sophisticated. Thus, the medical specialists have to be well-trained before they perform surgery on real human beings. The purpose of this research is to develop a collaborative haptic simulation architecture for tracheotomy surgery and its training program. In this simulation, there will be two scenarios. In the first, two doctors operate collaboratively from different locations. In the second scenario, the trainer coaches the trainee on how to perform the surgery successfully in a tele-mentoring manner.

Haptic-Enabled Telementoring Surgery Simulation

Medical surgery involves a high degree of skill and experience, making the learning curve for medical trainees quite long. For instance, in eye cataract surgery, despite it only taking around seven minutes for a well-trained surgeon to perform and having a success rate of 99 percent, medical residents need months to become proficient in this procedure to avoid its typical complications. Medical trainees traditionally have acquired surgical skills through apprenticeships in which trainees observe senior surgeons, then perform under guidance until they achieve mastery. Training often makes use of cadavers or laboratory animals, but this type of training is becoming increasingly difficult to do in many countries due to ethical reasons. An effective alternative is medical simulation, which can enhance understanding, improve performance, and assess competence; in preoperative settings, it assists surgeons in remaining at a high technical skill level. Surgical simulation can provide high-fidelity training that increases the diffusion of innovative and less- invasive procedures while decreasing the surgeons learning curve.

Design and Implementation of Haptic Tele-mentoring over the Internet

Haptic tele-mentoring refers to an educational technique in which the mentor can teach the mentee, in a hand-by-hand manner over communication networks, through the coupling of two haptic devices. Essentially, the realization of tele-mentoring relies on the efficient transmission of haptic information, such that either end of the network can sense and/or impart forces. A few of obstacles in developing the tele-mentoring applications over the internet are network delay, jitter, and packet loss. These impairments potentially affect the stability of the tele-mentoring system and degrade the feeling of guiding. This paper analyzes the design and implementation constraints of the system, as well as the simulation and experimental results. To compensate for the network latency, a novel approach based on the behaviors of the human arm trajectory is proposed to lower the overshoot so as to improve the overall system stability. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the anti-overshoot algorithm.

Motion and Force Prediction in Haptic Media

This paper introduces a novel generic method aimed at predicting motion and force information in haptic media. An autoregressive (AR) model is presented for the prediction of both, haptic movement and force. The conditional maximum likelihood technique is utilized in order to accurately estimate the adaptive coefficients of the AR model. Furthermore, the incorporation of concepts from haptic perceptibility, i.e. the just noticeable difference (JND), has been demonstrated to optimize the suggested algorithm, while preserving the immersiveness of the haptic-enabled environment. The proposed technique has also proved to provide accurate prediction results for non-linear haptic movement and force information while simultaneously remaining computationally efficient.

A cataract tele-surgery training application in a hapto-visual collaborative environment running over the CANARIE photonic network

We discuss our efforts in developing a hapto-visual application that medical students can use to gain valuable experience in performing eye cataract surgery on a human. Our application supports three scenarios: an instructor and a trainee in geographically distant locations interacting in real-time having the instructor tele-mentor the trainee using haptic devices at both ends; a trainee learning the surgical procedure by means of perceptual cues (e.g. projective lighting); and finally, a trainee performing the surgery without any guidance. Collaboration and remote interaction is done over the CANARIE CA*net4 photonic network. Organizationally, project development responsibilities are split into four functional components: the GUI, the graphic rendering, the haptic rendering (which includes collision detection and collision response by means of a physics engine), and networking. In this paper, we discuss our work on the four components, comment on the challenges we are facing and expect to face, and also discuss remaining work.