No abstract

Direct replays of the experience of a user in a virtual environment are difficult for others to watch due to unnatural camera motions. We present methods for replaying and summarizing these egocentric experiences that effectively communicate the users observations while reducing unwanted camera movements. Our approach summarizes the viewpoint path as a concise sequence of viewpoints that cover the same parts of the scene. The core of our approach is a novel content dependent metric that can be used to identify similarities between viewpoints. This enables viewpoints to be grouped by similar contextual view information and provides a means to generate novel viewpoints that can encapsulate a series of views. These resulting encapsulated viewpoints are used to synthesize new camera paths that convey the content of the original viewers experience. Projecting the initial movement of the user back on the scene can be used to convey the details of their observations, and the extracted viewpoints can serve as bookmarks for control or analysis. Finally we present performance analysis along with two forms of validation to test whether the extracted viewpoints are representative of the viewers original observations and to test for the overall effectiveness of the presented replay methods.

No abstract

Virtual Reality environments have the ability to present users with rich visual representations of simulated environments. However, means to interact with these types of illusions are generally unnatural in the sense that they do not match the methods humans use to grasp and move objects in the physical world. We demonstrate a system that enables users to interact with virtual objects with natural body movements by combining visual information, kinesthetics and biofeedback from electromyograms (EMG). Our method allows virtual objects to be grasped, moved and dropped through muscle exertion classification based on physical world masses. We show that users can consistently reproduce these calibrated exertions, allowing them to interface with objects in a novel way.

No abstract