Development of Haptic-Enabled Virtual Reality Applications for Engineering, Medicine and Art

Author(s):  
Hugo I. Medellín-Castillo ◽  
Germánico González-Badillo ◽  
Eder Govea ◽  
Raquel Espinosa-Castañeda ◽  
Enrique Gallegos

The technological growth in the last years have conducted to the development of virtual reality (VR) systems able to immerse the user into a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment where the user can interact in real time with virtual objects. This interaction is mainly based on visualizing the virtual environment and objects. However, with the recent beginning of haptic systems, the interaction with the virtual world has been extended to also feel, touch and manipulate virtual objects. Virtual reality has been successfully used in the development of applications in different scientific areas ranging from basic sciences, social science, education and entertainment. On the other hand, the use of haptics has increased in the last decade in domains from sciences and engineering to art and entertainment. Despite many developments, there is still relatively little knowledge about the confluence of software, enabling hardware, visual and haptic representations, to enable the conditions that best provide for an immersive sensory environment to convey information about a particular subject domain. In this paper, the state of the art of the research work regarding virtual reality and haptic technologies carried out by the authors in the last years is presented. The aim is to evidence the potential use of these technologies to develop usable systems for analysis and simulation in different areas of knowledge. The development of three different systems in the areas of engineering, medicine and art is presented. In the area of engineering, a system for the planning, evaluation and training of assembly and manufacturing tasks has been developed. The system, named as HAMS (Haptic Assembly and Manufacturing System), is able to simulate assembly tasks of complex components with force feedback provided by the haptic device. On the other hand, in the area of medicine, a surgical simulator for planning and training orthognathic surgeries has been developed. The system, named as VOSS (Virtual Osteotomy Simulator System), allows the realization of virtual osteotomies with force feedback. Finally, in the area of art, an interactive cinema system for blind people has been developed. The system is able to play a 3D virtual movie for the blind user to listen to and touch by means of the haptic device. The development of these applications and the results obtained from these developments are presented and discussed in this paper.

Author(s):  
Carlo Ferraresi ◽  
Massimiliana Carello ◽  
Francesco Pescarmona ◽  
Roberto Grassi

The paper presents the results of a work carried out by the Department of Mechanics of Politecnico di Torino, concerning the study and development of a six degrees of freedom force reflecting master structure for teleoperation (haptic device) to be controlled by an operator. The latter imposes the six-dimensional linear and angular displacement of a handle, controlling a remote slave robot or interacting with virtual reality. On the other hand, the operator receives a force feedback related to the environment in which the slave robot or virtual device operates. Since the actuators must be force controlled in order to generate a resultant corresponding to the desired wrench, pneumatic actuation has been chosen because it is particularly suitable to the application and quite economical.


Author(s):  
Eder Govea ◽  
Hugo I. Medellín-Castillo

Virtual Reality (VR) is one of the areas of knowledge that have taken advantage of the computer technological development and scientific visualization. It has been used in different applications such as engineering, medicine, education, entertainment, astronomy, archaeology and arts. A main issue of VR and computer assisted applications is the design and development of the virtual environment, which comprises the virtual objects. Thus, the process of designing virtual environment requires the modelling of the virtual scene and virtual objects, including their geometry and surface characteristics such as colours, textures, etc. This research work presents a new methodology to develop low-cost and high quality virtual environments and scenarios for biomechanics, biomedical and engineering applications. The proposed methodology is based on open-source software. Four case studies corresponding to two applications in medicine and two applications in engineering are presented. The results show that the virtual environments developed for these applications are realistic and similar to the real environments. When comparing these virtual reality scenarios with pictures of the actual devices, it can be observed that the appearance of the virtual scenarios is very good. In particular the use of textures greatly helps in assessing specific features such as simulation of bone or metal. Thus, the usability of the proposed methodology for developing virtual reality applications in biomedical and engineering is proved. It is important to mention that the quality of the virtual environment will also depend on the 3D modelling skills of the VR designer.


1996 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Jing-Jing Fang ◽  
Douglas E.R. Clark ◽  
John E. L. Simmons

The authors built a pseudo-immersive three-dimensional computer generated virtual environment (VE) as a shell for research in detailed collision detection. The purpose of the virtual world construction described in this paper is to handle engineering applications such as the mechanical assembly and disassembly of complex systems. A virtual space ball is attached to the VE in order to control the motion of virtual objects in that environment. This software interface simulates a real three-dimensional space ball device. The contribution of the pseudo-immersive system removes the absolute necessity for expensive Virtual Reality equipment and software for research work on virtual reality.


2001 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergei Volkov ◽  
Judy M. Vance

Virtual reality techniques provide a unique new way to interact with three-dimensional digital objects. Virtual prototyping refers to the use of virtual reality to obtain evaluations of designs while they are still in digital form before physical prototypes are built. While the state-of-the-art in virtual reality relies mainly on the use of stereo viewing and auditory feedback, commercial haptic devices have recently become available that can be integrated into the virtual environment to provide force feedback to the user. This paper outlines a study that was performed to determine whether the addition of force feedback to the virtual prototyping task improved the ability of the participants to make design decisions. Seventy-six people participated in the study. The specific task involved comparing the location and movement of two virtual parking brakes located in the virtual cockpit of an automobile. The results indicate that the addition of force feedback to the virtual environment did not increase the accuracy of the participants’ answers, but it did allow them to complete the task in a shorter time. This paper describes the purpose, methods, and results of the study.


2002 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 573-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keikichi Hayashibe

This study examined how well reality was reproduced in several conditions of virtual reality, by mutually comparing the perception of distance in actual 3-dimensional space and 3-dimensional video-recorded space. Apparent distances in both indoor and outdoor situations were estimated by 10 adolescents. Analysis showed that relations between apparent distance and physical distance in the actual spaces both in indoor and outdoor situations arc described by 0.95 and 1.01 power exponents, respectively. On the other hand, the underestimations of the apparent distance are shown in the 3-dimensional video-recorded and the virtual reality spaces both in indoor and outdoor situations whose exponents ranged from .53 to .80.


2013 ◽  
Vol 328 ◽  
pp. 43-47
Author(s):  
Zhi Hui Dong ◽  
Duan Feng Han ◽  
Lei Song

Virtual reality technology, via imitating natural environment, enables to display a vivid visual environment, which has already been applied in a great deal of domains, such as entertainment, education and training. And three-dimensional terrain plays a key role on the contribution of virtual environment, which directly effluents the reality of virtual environment. This paper firstly introduces the key technologies of creating three-dimensional visualization terrain based on ECT (Environment Creation Tool) and EPX, and then creates a terrain database for ship handing simulator to providing the feasibility of this method.


1990 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-41
Author(s):  
René Lemarchand

My apologies to Mr. Chrétien and to your readers for “developing some simplistic formulas on Burundi” in my quest for “media success.” No such simplistic formulas enter his criticism of my Congressional testimony. On the one hand, I am taken to task for not conceding that my interpretation of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict as a recent phenomenon is the product of Chrétien’s “patient research work” over the last quarter of a century; on the other hand, “some very similar analysis” had appeared in my “excellent work of 1970,” which came out long before Mr. Chrétien embarked on his patient research! Try to figure that one out if you can.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-430
Author(s):  
Maja Tabea Jerrentrup

Abstract The art of bodypainting that is fairly unknown to a wider public turns the body into a canvas - it is a frequently used phrase in the field of bodypainting that illustrates the challenge it faces: it uses a three-dimensional surface and has to cope with its irregularities, but also with the model’s abilities and characteristics. This paper looks at individuals who are turned into art by bodypainting. Although body painting can be very challenging for them - they have to expose their bodies and to stand still for a long time while getting transformed - models report that they enjoy both the process and the result, even if they are not confident about their own bodies. Among the reasons there are physical aspects like the sensual enjoyment, but also the feeling of being part of something artistic. This is enhanced and preserved through double staging - becoming a threedimentional work of art and then being staged for photography or film clips. This process gives the model the chance to experience their own body in a detached way. On the one hand, bodypainting closely relates to the body and on the other hand, it can help to over-come the body.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaydip Sen ◽  
Sidra Mehtab ◽  
Gourab Nath

Prediction of future movement of stock prices has been a subject matter of many research work. On one hand, we have proponents of the Efficient Market Hypothesis who claim that stock prices cannot be predicted, on the other hand, there are propositions illustrating that, if appropriately modeled, stock prices can be predicted with a high level of accuracy. There is also a gamut of literature on technical analysis of stock prices where the objective is to identify patterns in stock price movements and profit from it. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach for stock price prediction using five deep learning-based regression models. We select the NIFTY 50 index values of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India, over a period of December 29, 2014 to July 31, 2020. Based on the NIFTY data during December 29, 2014 to December 28, 2018, we build two regression models using <i>convolutional neural networks</i> (CNNs), and three regression models using <i>long-and-short-term memory</i> (LSTM) networks for predicting the <i>open</i> values of the NIFTY 50 index records for the period December 31, 2018 to July 31, 2020. We adopted a multi-step prediction technique with <i>walk-forward validation</i>. The parameters of the five deep learning models are optimized using the grid-search technique so that the validation losses of the models stabilize with an increasing number of epochs in the model training, and the training and validation accuracies converge. Extensive results are presented on various metrics for all the proposed regression models. The results indicate that while both CNN and LSTM-based regression models are very accurate in forecasting the NIFTY 50 <i>open</i> values, the CNN model that previous one week’s data as the input is the fastest in its execution. On the other hand, the encoder-decoder convolutional LSTM model uses the previous two weeks’ data as the input is found to be the most accurate in its forecasting results.


Author(s):  
Tushar H. Dani ◽  
Rajit Gadh

Abstract Despite advances in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and the evolution of the graphical user interfaces, rapid creation, editing and visualization of three-dimensional (3D) shapes remains a tedious task. Though the availability of Virtual Reality (VR)-based systems allows enhanced three-dimensional interaction and visualization, the use of VR for ab initio shape design, as opposed to ‘importing’ models from existing CAD systems, is a relatively new area of research. Of interest are computer-human interaction issues and the design and geometric tools for shape modeling in a Virtual Environment (VE). The focus of this paper is on the latter i.e. in defining the geometric tools required for a VR-CAD system and in describing a framework that meets those requirements. This framework, the Virtual Design Software Framework (VDSF) consists of the interaction and design tools, and an underlying geometric engine that provides the representation and algorithms required by these tools. The geometric engine called the Virtual Modeler uses a graph-based representation (Shape-Graph) for modeling the shapes created by the user. The Shape-Graph facilitates interactive editing by localizing the effect of editing operations and in addition provides constraint-based design and editing mechanisms that are useful in a 3D interactive virtual environment. The paper concludes with a description of the prototype system, called the Virtual Design Studio (VDS), that is currently being implemented.1.


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