Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Along with the advancement of three dimensional computer graphics technology and interaction technology, new types of education system as well as entertainment system are expected to emerge. In this paper as one example of such a system, we propose “Interactive Folktale System,” This system makes it possible for people, especially children, to enjoy folktales in various ways. They can appreciate the regeneration of original tales and its variations. Also they can interact with the story, by communicating with the characters in the story or by playing a role of one of the characters. Moreover, they can easily create a new folktale by changing the original story or by describing a script for the new story. Also the architecture of an authoring system that supports that realization of the interactive folktale system is described.

The talk will provide an overview of the symbiosis of Computer Graphics, Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment technology as basis for Storytelling based Edutainment Applications and Serious Games for business and market oriented applications.

Since human age, stories have been told and used as media to document history and transmit personal experiences. In the digital age, Computer Graphics is used to build interactive virtual worlds for training and simulation, game and storytelling technologies are used to motivate learners and provide playful, story-driven information and communication environments. This is now starting to be used more and more for professional application, that means "using games on and for the job"!

Within the talk, underlying methods, concepts and technologies will be illustrated by current and recent projects of the INI-GraphicsNet in that domain: The "Virtuelles Autohaus" and "Virtual IGD Rostock" as examples for playful interactive virtual environments for training and simulation, "Virtual Human" and the "Servingo Story Generator" as examples for Storytelling based edutainment applications and "INSCAPE", "U-CREATE" addressing the authoring process for the creation of these edutainment scenarios and serious games for a given application domain.

Ocean stimulation is important for computer animation, games, and other virtual reality applications. In this paper, a real-time method for simulating integrated ocean environment, including sky sphere, atmospheric system and ocean wave model, is proposed. By this method, the effect of cloud floating in sky sphere is obtained through texture perturbation, while the atmospheric system realizes the air scattering and absorbing effect. The ocean wave model constructs ocean surface mesh by Sine wave and realizes the bumping effect of ocean surface through normal disturbance of bump map method. For the lightening computation of ocean wave, the incident ray can be obtained by sampling the sky sphere and the reflecting light ray can then be calculated through the principle of mirror reflection. The proposed algorithm can be easily accelerated by GPU hardware. Experiments show that the method is easy to implement, and is effective to render ocean at high frame rate

Abstract. The synthesis for dynamic flowing water is of relatively high practical value in design of virtual reality, computer games, digital movies and scientific computing etc. On one hand, the physical model cannot help people to produce the photorealistic and easy edited flowing scene; on the other hand, digital products can be used to show the flowing scene in the world easily. This paper presents a novel algorithm for synthesizing dynamic water scene based on a sample video. To obtain video textons, we analyze the sample video automatically using dynamic textures model. Then we utilize linear dynamic system (LDS) to represent the characteristic of each texton. By further hard constrains we synthesize a new video for dynamic water flow which is prolonged and non-fuzzy in vision. We provide test examples to demonstrate the effective and efficiency of our proposed method.

In this paper, an efficient system generating a customized 3D virtual human reflecting user’s features by using the frontal and lateral pictures captured through a PC camera is suggested. To render the complete 3D virtual human figure, a customized virtual face is defined based on predefined facial feature points, followed by the generation of virtual body and accessories by mapping through Body Mass Index (BMI), which is a measure of body fat defined as the weight divided by the square of height. The basic emotion elements also can be expressed using special muscle modules. The proposed system can generate several 3D formats such as AKF, ASE, and WRL as outputs for various types of displays. The better performances in terms of easiness of usage, speed of generation, and the usability are validated by comparing with those of similarly implemented systems. The test results are shown.

Badminton is a fast and complicated sport under diverse occasions. It requires players to be swift, which make its simulation challenging. This paper proposes a sophisticated method to implement a Virtual Badminton System (VBS) using motion capture technique. We establish a database by collecting a variety of actions after analyzing and concluding basic badminton motions. Editing and controlling methods are adopted on motion sequences to simulate more occasions. Our system combines motions together by a high-level Finite State Machine (FSM) to describe the badminton logic of the virtual athlete, and create movements like the virtual athlete reacting automatically with a series of characteristic swings when interacting with user. Physical collision model is also added to enhance the immersion of our system.

High compression of plant geometry is an important aspect in fast realistic visualization of plants. Hierarchical structuring plant morphology is a key factor for real time plant rendering, especially when pedestrian views, including both close-ups and far views, are requested. We present here a new geometric simplification method, called View-dependent Hierarchical Foliage Simplification (VHFS). It aims to construct efficient multi-resolution models, faithful to botanical knowledge for sparse organs of trees, such as leaves, flowers and fruits. Both preprocessing and view-dependent rendering processes are considered hereby. In the preprocessing phase, sparse organs are simplified hierarchically with respect to the topological structure of the plant, i.e. to the plant branching order hierarchy and the phyllotaxy (or anthotaxy) groups. In the rendering phase, the simplification degrees for organs in different locations in the crown are defined from the current viewpoint. The selection of the different simplification levels is based on the distance to the viewer and a visibility coefficient of the considered organs. This visibility coefficient is an approximate occlusion based on the relationship between the viewing direction and direction of each first order branch. Compared with other foliage simplification methods, the main advantages of VHFS lay in the respect of consistent botanical structure at any stage of compression, ensuring realistic foliage appearance, higher efficiency in preprocessing stage and higher data compression.

In an augmented reality system, Mutual occlusion and intensity matching of real and virtual environment enhance the user’s feeling that virtual objects truly exist in the real world. Aiming at the attribute of conventional optical see-through HMD which cannot present mutual occlusion and intensity matching correctly, we propose a novel display design with mutual occlusion and intensity matching capabilities. An 8-bit gray level XGA LCD, by which mutual occlusion and intensity matching be accomplished is used as the addressable filter in our design. Furthermore, with our optical system, a viewer can simultaneously observe both outside scene and a pattern on the LCD panel in focus. Experimental results show that our novel design can integrate more seamlessly a virtual object in a real scene.

This paper introduces an immersive game interface called a well-tep. A well-tep is made based on a stepper which is sporting goods for home envi-ronment and used for moving a game character back and forward in the game. To operate the well-tep, a game player only needs to walk on the well-tep and use two hand-held switches to change direction. Spatial sound is applied to items which a game character will face in the game. An item emits sound diffe-rently according to where a character stares. The paper explains how they work in the game and potential uses for a well-tep.

Learning to build and test virtual reality (VR) systems is difficult due to the many required knowledge (e.g. computer graphics, sound processing, simulation, interaction, etc.) and subsystems to worry about (e.g. various sensors, displays, computers, graphics board, etc.). Furthermore, virtual reality contents have to be optimized according to different goals such as its basic function, usability, and presence. Thus, learning and applying a structured approach to designing VR systems is very critical to a successful completion of a meaningful class project. In this paper, we report our experiences in using a development methodology and an authoring support tool called the CLEVR/P-VoT to teach virtual reality to engineering students of advanced levels. CLEVR’s central concept is to refine and validate forms, functions and behaviors of the virtual objects and scenes incrementally and hierarchically. P-VoT helps students interactively try out and explore different virtual object/scene configurations and immediately see their impact with respect to system performance, interaction usability, realism, and presence. P-VoT, used in the first stage of the class, is designed at an abstraction level appropriate for even non-computer science major students to quickly learn and understand the need of a structured development approach. Having learned the merits of the structured approach firsthand, the students effectively put it to use in the second stage of the course for implementing a more sophisticated class project.