搜索结果：Virtual

3D Virtual Human technology is growing with several potential applications in health, education, business and telecommunications. Investigating the perception of these virtual humans can help guide to develop better and more effective applications. Recent developments show that the appearance of the virtual humans reached to a very realistic level. However, there is not yet adequate analysis on the perception of appearance and animation realism for emotionally expressive virtual humans. In this paper, we designed a user experiment and analyzed the effect of a realistic virtual human's appearance realism and animation realism in varying emotion conditions. We found that higher appearance realism and higher animation realism leads to higher social presence and higher attractiveness ratings. We also found significant effects of animation realism on perceived realism and emotion intensity levels. Our study sheds light into how appearance and animation realism effects the perception of highly realistic virtual humans in emotionally expressive scenarios and points out to future directions.

Robotic ultrasound systems can enhance medical diagnostics, but patient acceptance is a challenge. We propose a system combining an AI-powered conversational virtual agent with three mixed reality visualizations to improve trust and comfort. The virtual agent, powered by a large language model, engages in natural conversations and guides the ultrasound robot, enhancing interaction reliability. The visualizations include augmented reality, augmented virtuality, and fully immersive virtual reality, each designed to create patient-friendly experiences. A user study demonstrated significant improvements in trust and acceptance, offering valuable insights for designing mixed reality and virtual agents in autonomous medical procedures.

Virtual humans play a pivotal role in social virtual environments, shaping users' VR experiences. The diversity in available options and users' preferences can result in a heterogeneous mix of appearances among a group of virtual humans. The resulting variety in higher-order anthropomorphic and realistic cues introduces multiple (in)congruencies, eventually impacting the plausibility of the experience. In this work, we consider the impact of (in)congruencies in the realism of a group of virtual humans, including co-located others and one's self-avatar. In a 2 x 3 mixed design, participants embodied either (1) a personalized realistic or (2) a customized stylized self-avatar across three consecutive VR exposures in which they were accompanied by a group of virtual others being either (1) all realistic, (2) all stylized, or (3) mixed. Our results indicate groups of virtual others of higher realism, i.e., potentially more congruent with participants' real-world experiences and expectations, were considered more human-like, increasing the feeling of co-presence and the impression of interaction possibilities. (In)congruencies concerning the homogeneity of the group did not cause consid

Virtual machines have been widely adapted for high-level programming language implementations and for providing a degree of platform neutrality. As the overall use and adaptation of virtual machines grow, the overall performance of virtual machines has become a widely-discussed topic. In this paper, we present a survey on the performance differences of the two most widely adapted types of virtual machines - the stack-based virtual machine and the register-based virtual machine - using various benchmark programs. Additionally, we adopted a new approach of measuring performance by measuring the overall dispatch time, amount of dispatches, fetch time, and execution time while running benchmarks on custom-implemented, lightweight virtual machines. Finally, we present two lightweight, custom-designed, Turing-equivalent virtual machines that are specifically designed in benchmarking virtual machine performance - the "Conceptum" stack-based virtual machine, and the "Inertia" register-based virtual machine. Our result showed that while on average the register machine spends 20.39% less time in executing benchmarks than the stack machine, the stack-based virtual machine is still faster than

The rapid progress in AI and Robotics may lead to a profound societal transformation, as humans and robots begin to coexist within shared communities, introducing both opportunities and challenges. To explore this future, we present Virtual Community-an open-world platform for humans, robots, and society-built on a universal physics engine and grounded in real-world 3D scenes. With Virtual Community, we aim to enable the study of embodied social intelligence at scale. To support these, Virtual Community features: 1) An open-source multi-agent physics simulator that supports robots, humans, and their interactions within a society; 2) A large-scale, real-world aligned community generation pipeline, including vast outdoor space, diverse indoor scenes, and a community of grounded agents with rich characters and appearances. Leveraging Virtual Community, we propose two novel challenges. The Community Planning Challenge evaluates multi-agent reasoning and planning ability in open-world settings, such as cooperating to help agents with daily activities and efficiently connecting other agents. The Community Robot Challenge requires multiple heterogeneous robots to collaborate in solving co

In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many events and conferences hastily converted to a virtual format, and many commercial ventures promptly developed tools promising seamless transitions to virtual spaces. In particular, efforts to expand and monetize augmented and virtual reality environments increased. While these spaces increased accessibility for some, others were left behind. In 2024, many events returned to on-site venues, yet virtual spaces remain central in academic and research communities, particularly for disabled scholars. As such, in this paper, we advocate for continued virtual access and improved virtual spaces; we also identify some potentially overlooked harms in immersive and embodied virtual spaces.

Virtual space offers innovative ways for individuals to engage with one another in a digital setting. Prominent virtual social platforms, such as Facebook Spaces, VR Chat, and AltspaceVR, facilitate social connections, allowing users to interact seamlessly. Additionally, certain video games, like Second Life and World of Warcraft, are set within these virtual spaces as well, providing immersive player experiences. As the popularity of virtual space grows, various companies have begun to democratize the process of creating these spaces, shifting the development from skilled professionals to hobbyist creators. Platforms like Minecraft, Roblox, and RecRoom enable users to create and publish their own virtual environments, hosting a wide range of interactions and narratives. This shift echoes the rise of user-generated content, where content creators create and publish content on platforms, such as social media platforms [6]. For example, YouTubers upload videos on YouTube and Reddit users post text-based content on Reddit. For a long time, user-generated content has predominantly contained text, videos, and images. However, with the emergence of virtual spaces, some platforms now allo

This paper investigates how the size of virtual space and objects within it affect the threshold range of relative translation gains, a Redirected Walking (RDW) technique that scales the user's movement in virtual space in different ratios for the width and depth. While previous studies assert that a virtual room's size affects relative translation gain thresholds on account of the virtual horizon's location, additional research is needed to explore this assumption through a structured approach to visual perception in Virtual Reality (VR). We estimate the relative translation gain thresholds in six spatial conditions configured by three room sizes and the presence of virtual objects (3 X 2), which were set according to differing Angles of Declination (AoDs) between eye-gaze and the forward-gaze. Results show that both size and virtual objects significantly affect the threshold range, it being greater in the large-sized condition and furnished condition. This indicates that the effect of relative translation gains can be further increased by constructing a perceived virtual movable space that is even larger than the adjusted virtual movable space and placing objects in it. Our study

Technological advancements have undoubtedly revolutionized various aspects of human life, altering the ways we perceive the world, engage with others, build relationships, and conduct our daily work routines. Among the recent advancements, the proliferation of virtual and mixed reality technologies stands out as a significant leap forward, promising to elevate our experiences and interactions to unprecedented levels. However, alongside the benefits, these emerging technologies also introduce novel avenues for harm and misuse, particularly in virtual and embodied spaces such as Zoom and virtual reality (VR) environments. The immersive nature of virtual reality environments raises unique challenges regarding psychological and emotional well-being. While VR can offer captivating and immersive experiences, prolonged exposure to virtual environments may lead to phenomena like cybersickness, disorientation, and even psychological distress in susceptible individuals. Additionally, the blurring of boundaries between virtual and real-world interactions in VR raises ethical concerns regarding consent, harassment, and the potential for virtual experiences to influence real-life behavior. Addi

Many people often take walking for granted, but for individuals with mobility disabilities, this seemingly simple act can feel out of reach. This reality can foster a sense of disconnect from the world since walking is a fundamental way in which people interact with each other and the environment. Advances in virtual reality and its immersive capabilities have made it possible to enable those who have never walked in their life to virtually experience walking. We co-designed a VR walking experience with a person with Spinal Muscular Atrophy who has been a lifelong wheelchair user. Over 9 days, we collected data on this person's experience through a diary study and analyzed this data to better understand the design elements required. Given that they had only ever seen others walking and had not experienced it first-hand, determining which design parameters must be considered in order to match the virtual experience to their idea of walking was challenging. Generally, we found the experience of walking to be quite positive, providing a perspective from a higher vantage point than what was available in a wheelchair. Our findings provide insights into the emotional complexities and evo

Modern computer vision algorithms typically require expensive data acquisition and accurate manual labeling. In this work, we instead leverage the recent progress in computer graphics to generate fully labeled, dynamic, and photo-realistic proxy virtual worlds. We propose an efficient real-to-virtual world cloning method, and validate our approach by building and publicly releasing a new video dataset, called Virtual KITTI (see http://www.xrce.xerox.com/Research-Development/Computer-Vision/Proxy-Virtual-Worlds), automatically labeled with accurate ground truth for object detection, tracking, scene and instance segmentation, depth, and optical flow. We provide quantitative experimental evidence suggesting that (i) modern deep learning algorithms pre-trained on real data behave similarly in real and virtual worlds, and (ii) pre-training on virtual data improves performance. As the gap between real and virtual worlds is small, virtual worlds enable measuring the impact of various weather and imaging conditions on recognition performance, all other things being equal. We show these factors may affect drastically otherwise high-performing deep models for tracking.

Machine learning approaches to Structure-Based Drug Design (SBDD) have proven quite fertile over the last few years. In particular, diffusion-based approaches to SBDD have shown great promise. We present a technique which expands on this diffusion approach in two crucial ways. First, we address the size disparity between the drug molecule and the target/receptor, which makes learning more challenging and inference slower. We do so through the notion of a Virtual Receptor, which is a compressed version of the receptor; it is learned so as to preserve key aspects of the structural information of the original receptor, while respecting the relevant group equivariance. Second, we incorporate a protein language embedding used originally in the context of protein folding. We experimentally demonstrate the contributions of both the virtual receptors and the protein embeddings: in practice, they lead to both better performance, as well as significantly faster computations.

This paper addresses the impact of Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) technique in provisioning virtual machines (VMs) in cloud environment. VMS is a scaling virtualization technology that allows different virtual machines rapid scale, high performance, and increase hardware utilization. Traditional hypervisors do not support true no-downtime live migration, and its lack of memory oversubscription can hurt the economics of a private cloud deployment by limiting the number of VMs on each host. VMS brings together several advanced hypervisor memory management techniques including granular page sharing, dynamic memory footprint management, live migration, read caching, and a unique virtual machine cloning capability. An architecture model is described, together with a proof-of-concept implementation, that VMS dynamically scaling of virtualized infrastructure with true live migration and cloning of VMs. This paper argues that VMS for Cloud allows requiring significantly reduced server memory and reducing the time for virtualized resource scaling by instantly adding more virtual machines.

After an overview of the use of digital shadows in computing science research projects with cultural and social impacts and a focus on recent researches and insights on virtual theaters, this paper introduces a research mixing the manipulation of shadow avatars and the building of a virtual theater setup inspired by traditional shadow theater (or ``castelet'' in french) in a mixed reality environment. It describes the virtual 3D setup, the nature of the shadow avatars and the issues of directing believable interactions between virtual avatars and physical performers on stage. Two modalities of shadow avatars direction are exposed. Some results of the research are illustrated in two use cases: the development of theatrical creativity in mixed reality through pedagogical workshops; and an artistic achievement in ''The Shadow'' performance, after H. C. Andersen.

A robust $C^0$-continuous nonconforming virtual element method (VEM) is developed for a boundary value problem arising from strain gradient elasticity in two dimensions, with the family of polygonal meshes satisfying a very general geometric assumption given in Brezzi et al. (2009) and Chen and Huang (2018). The stability condition of the VEMs is derived by establishing Korn-type inequalities and inverse inequalities. Some crucial commutative relations for locking-free analysis as in elastic problems are derived. The sharp and uniform error estimates with respect to both the microscopic parameter and the Lamé coefficient are achieved in the lowest-order case, which is also verified by numerical results.

Virtual human simulation integrated into virtual reality applications is mainly used for virtual representation of the user in virtual environment or for interactions between the user and the virtual avatar for cognitive tasks. In this paper, in order to prevent musculoskeletal disorders, the integration of virtual human simulation and VR application is presented to facilitate physical ergonomic evaluation, especially for physical fatigue evaluation of a given population. Immersive working environments are created to avoid expensive physical mock-up in conventional evaluation methods. Peripheral motion capture systems are used to capture natural movements and then to simulate the physical operations in virtual human simulation. Physical aspects of human's movement are then analyzed to determine the effort level of each key joint using inverse kinematics. The physical fatigue level of each joint is further analyzed by integrating a fatigue and recovery model on the basis of physical task parameters. All the process has been realized based on VRHIT platform and a case study is presented to demonstrate the function of the physical fatigue for a given population and its usefulness for

Large curved displays have emerged as a powerful platform for collaboration, data visualization, and entertainment. These displays provide highly immersive experiences, a wider field of view, and higher satisfaction levels. Yet, large curved displays are not commonly available due to their high costs. With the recent advancement of Head Mounted Displays (HMDs), large curved displays can be simulated in Virtual Reality (VR) with minimal cost and space requirements. However, to consider the virtual display as an alternative to the physical display, it is necessary to uncover user performance differences (e.g., pointing speed and accuracy) between these two platforms. In this paper, we explored users' pointing performance on both physical and virtual large curved displays. Specifically, with two studies, we investigate users' performance between the two platforms for standard pointing factors such as target width, target amplitude as well as users' position relative to the screen. Results from user studies reveal no significant difference in pointing performance between the two platforms when users are located at the same position relative to the screen. In addition, we observe users'

In this paper, we define the virtual fundamental cycle of a global Kuranishi chart as an element in the (analytic) orbispace K-homology of the virtual orbifold and verify that it defines the same invariants as those in \cite{Abouzaid23}.

In virtual worlds, objects fall straight down. By replacing a few lines of code to include Newton's gravity, virtual world software can become an N-body simulation code with visualization included where objects move under their mutual gravitational attraction as stars in a cluster. We report on our recent experience of adding a gravitational N-body simulator to the OpenSim virtual world physics engine. OpenSim is an open-source, virtual world server that provides a 3D immersive experience to users who connect using the popular "Second Life" client software from Linden Labs. With the addition of the N-body simulation engine, which we are calling NEO, short for N-Body Experiments in OpenSim, multiple users can collaboratively create point-mass gravitating objects in the virtual world and then observe the subsequent gravitational evolution of their "stellar" system. We view this work as an experiment examining the suitability of virtual worlds for scientific visualization, and we report on future work to enhance and expand the prototype we have built. We also discuss some standardization and technology issues raised by our unusual use of virtual worlds.