Virtual Reality Demos at VRlab

3D Virtual Calligraphy

ICDVRAT 2006

We have explored a new type of light painting interface in the framework of the European Union Network of Excellence "Enactive Interfaces". Full body movements are exploited to created 3D entities with either ribbon, tube or spray. The entities are visualized on a transparent canvas.

Damien Maupu, José Rosales, Ronan Boulic and the painter Muma

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Alter Body

We have collaborated with the University of Geneva (anthropometric body meshes) and the CEIT in Spain (real-time motion capture) to assess the importance of scaling the virtual environment when controlling an avatar that may have a different body height. The study shows that the avatar control is much more effective when working with a third person viewpoint in front of a large immersive screen rather than with a head-Mounted Display. This work has been achieved in the framework of the European Union Network of Excellence "Enactive Interfaces".

EPFL VRLAB: Damien Maupu, Ronan Boulic
University of Geneva: Mustafa Kasap
CEIT: Luis Unzueta

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VR Exposure Therapy for Social Phobia

ICDVRAT 2006

Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy is a branch of psychotherapy speciallized in the treatment of anxiety disorders like phobias. The therapeutic protocol is highly based on exposure sessions to the feared stimuli (e.g. the spider for arachnophobia).
Virtual Reality Exposure is a technique that provides the therapists with flexible and efficient tools for simulating the targeted situation. Today, VRE is still in research stage but could quickly raise into the medical domain as a common psychotherapeutic support.
Among other things the VRLab has worked on VRE for social phobia and more specificall, on the use of virtual exposure to objectively evaluate a specific parameter present in social phobia, namely eye contact avoidance, by using an eye-tracking system.

Helena Grillon, Françoise Riquier, Bruno Herbelin

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Eye-tracking during immersive virtual reality session

The Gaze-Map 3D picking technique is a simple and generic solution to
perform gaze tracking during immersion. Eye-tracking technology provide 2D coordinate of gaze targets on display, and thus needs to be
integrated into the VR solution in order to allow for free user movements, free navigation into the virtual environment, as well as tracking of moving and articulated targets. In addition, the 3D picking algorithm based on color mapping uses a configurable picking area and provides a distance estimation toward the target. Dedicated to the detection of eye-to-eye contact in simulations with virtual humans, our application allows psychotherapists to evaluate the gaze avoidance behavior of social phobic patients.

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virtual Guide

The virtual guide scenario puts the user in front of a virtual museum/gallery. The goal is to explore the museum with the help of a virtual guide - a robot - which is able to guide the visitor to various places of interest and provide him with information about the works on display using sythetized voice. The guide is able to find the user in the museum (for example if he gets lost) and to guide him to the desired destination using gestures and synthesized voice. If the user gets lost or the robot loses contact with the user's avatar then the robot returns to pick the user up again and resume guiding.

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counting beers

The video demonstrates a scenario intended for virtual exposure therapy of social phobia. Autonomous behavior of the virtual characters is achieved using action planning, task delegation and environment sensing.
The animation is proceduraly generated, for example using automatic grasping and inverse kinematics for object manipulation and procedural walking for locomotion.

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Treating Social Phobia with VR a study at "Science et Cité"

A Virtual Reality Exposure platform was tested and validated during 9 days of intensive usage during the National Swiss Festival "Science et Cité" in Lausanne (March 21-29 2005). Our system simulates job interview or academic examination with a virtual assembly of 5 virtual humans. It is used to support the cognitive and behavioral therapy of social phobic persons who need to be trained in such situations in order to overcome their fear in reality. The study performed during the festival allowed to validate with 200 visitors the ability of our system to be used under clinical conditions.

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VR psychotherapy for social phobia

Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy is a branch of psychotherapy speciallized in the treatment of anxiety disorders like phobias. The therapeutic protocol is highly based on exposure sessions to the feared stimuli (e.g. the spider for arachnophobia).
Virtual Reality Exposure is a technique that provides the therapists with flexible and efficient tools for simulating the targeted situation. Today, VRE is still in research stage but could quickly raise into the medical domain as a common psychotherapeutic support.
In VRLab, we have been working since 2002 on the development of VR systems for the therapy of social phobia. We aim at providing the best quality simulation system (3D rendering, virtual humans animation, immersvemess) and tools for assessment and diagnostic.

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Sokollu

Virtual representation of the Kardirga Sokullu mosque in Istanbul. This virtual representation is one of the goal of the european project CAHRISMA : Conservation of the Acoustical Heritage by the Revival and Identification of the Sinan's Mosques' Acoustics. The methodology is based entirely on the archaeological, cultural and two-dimensional architectural and photographic data.

link to the complete description of the project

Virtual Project

The main objective of the project is to develop an integrated platform, based on Virtual Reality (VR) technology, including systems for testing and related experimental procedures, to be used for better studying and improving the ergonomic design of the vehicles, in the process of making the driving tasks simpler and more comfortable and then of increasing safety.

link to the complete description of the project

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Virtual Fighting

A hierarchical model of human actions is used to capture the human body posture in real-time, via sensors attached to the user. The demo shows a life participant with ten sensors used to animate the avatar in the virtual scene. The participant performs fight gestures which are recognized by the virtual opponent. The latter responds by playing back a pre-recorded keyframe sequence.

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Cyber Tennis'97

This demo of a real time, virtual, networked, interactive tennis game simulation, was presented at the opening and closing session of Telecom Interactive'97 in Geneva. The game brings together different computer technologies and software including network (VLNET), motion capture, virtual reality, shared environment, controlled and autonomous virtual humans.

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VPARK

The Virtual Amusement Park is a virtual environment distributed over the network. This version of VPARK presented at IST2000 in Nice allows two distant users (Geneva-Nice) to share the same virtual environment for a lesson of aerobic dancing.

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