Proceedings of the VRST ’94 Conference held in Singapore in August 1994 are presented here. The papers provide good snapshots of the research issues that were being explored in the virtual reality (VR) field in 1994.
Nineteen papers are divided into six sections. The first section concerns gestures. The basic challenge here is to develop the means by which users can employ gestures to affect the virtual environment. Wexelblat’s paper “Natural Gesture in Virtual Environments” describes work done to develop systems that can analyze and recognize natural hand gestures, rather than being limited to small sets of discrete gestural commands. Next is Quek’s “Towards a Vision-based Hand Gesture Interface.” Here, the idea is to make use of unencumbered hand gestures, which do not require devices such as gloves. Su and Furuta, in “A Logical Hand Device in Virtual Environments,” discuss research on the design of a logical hand device that will ultimately be able to interpret American Sign Language gestures.
The second section is on modeling and animation. “Steps and Ladders in Virtual Reality,” by Slater, Usoh, and Steed, examines the use of whole-body gestures in exploring VR space. The authors suggest that such gestures can enhance the user’s sense of presence. Lee and Wohn’s “Fuzzy Aggregation of Motion Factors for Human Motion Generation” describes research on using fuzzy logic to generate human motions in animations. Halliday and Green, in “A Geometric Modeling and Animation System for Virtual Reality,” describe a system intended to help nonprogrammers design virtual environments.
The third section deals with VR architectures. The first paper, by Steed and Slater, “A User-Defined Virtual Environment Dialogue Architecture,” describes research exploring a manipulable dialogue architecture that allows users to change how gestures affect the VR. Smets, Stappers, Overbeeke, and van der Mast, in “Designing in Virtual Reality: Implementing Perceptual-action Coupling with Affordances,” look at ideas for doing CAD in a VR environment. The motivation is to give designers a truer look at 3D objects as they are being designed. “The Virtual Workbench: Dextrous VR,” by Poston and Serra, describes an alternative to using head-mounted displays to enable users to work in VR space. The approach discussed lets users work with their hands while wearing stereo glasses and looking into a mirror-based display.
The fourth section deals with novel 3D techniques and devices. In “Multisensory Scientific Data Sensualization Through Virtual Reality Technology,” Ogi and Horose describe research into the use of combined sensory feedback in a VR system that replicates not only vision, but also sound and touch. They use the example of a wind sensation system. Foxlin and Durlach’s “An Inertial Head-orientation Tracker with Automatic Drift Compensation for Use with HMDs” discusses research on the application of methods from inertial navigation systems to head-mounted devices (HMDs) used in VR systems. Applewhite’s “A New Ultrasonic Positioning Principle Yielding Pseudo-absolute Location” describes the use of modulated phase coherence in solving positioning problems in VR. The final paper in this section is Hirose, Komori, and Nagumo’s “A Study on the Synthesis of Environmental Sounds.” The authors have been conducting research into the use of realistic sound in VR systems.
The fifth section concerns designing effective virtual worlds. Benford, Bowers, Fahlen, and Greenhalgh, in “Managing Mutual Awareness in Collaborative Virtual Environments,” describe research on facilitating groups of users in interacting via a distributed virtual environment. Bayarri, Fernandez, Perez, and Rosich’s “Real Time Graphics and VR for Driving Simulation in Urban Environments” discusses work aimed at building realism into a VR simulation requiring real-time graphics. Lastly, Cooper and Benjamin present ideas on the use of VR in creating interactive drama, in “Envisionments--Constructing Dramatic Virtual Worlds.”
The final section focuses on collision detection. “Efficient Virtual Collision Detection for Multiple Users in Large Virtual Spaces,” by Fairchild, Poston, and Bricken, deals with the problems of detecting collisions in a large 3D virtual environment that may contain a large number of objects. Aliaga’s “Virtual and Real Object Collisions in a Merged Environment” discusses work involving collision detection, where a see-through head-mounted device is used so that objects from the virtual environment can “collide” with objects in the real world. Finally, Astheimer and Poche, in “Level-of-detail Generation and its Application in Virtual Reality,” examine problems having to do with gaining speed in generating real-time graphics for VR systems.
In addition to the papers, the book presents material relating to some of the talks and panel sessions held at the conference. An abstract of the keynote address by MichaelF. Deering, “Facing the Challenge: Delivering Virtual Reality,” is provided, as well as brief synopses of two panel sessions: “Enabling Technologies for VR” and “Hands Off My VR: The Role of Gestures in VR.” The texts of two invited talks are included: Junji Nomura’s “Virtual Reality Technologies and Its Applications to Industrial Use” describes some real-world applications of VR technology in Japan, and Steve Bryson’s “Virtual Environments in Scientific Visualization” looks at issues surrounding the use of VR in visualization, and focuses on the need for visualization interfaces that can be manipulated by nonprogrammers.
A final section of the proceedings briefly describes demonstrations and videos from the conference.
The papers in this volume are generally well written and informative, and cover a broad range of VR research topics. The book should be of value to those pursuing similar research, and is a useful introduction to the field.
