Monday, May 9, 2011

Summary of the Metaverse1 in 3D3CWorlds (12 Videos)


Members of the Metaverse1 project participated in the 3D3CWorlds in Israel.

The meeting was chaired by Dr. Yesha Sivan, of Metaverse Labs, and Jean H.A. Gelissen of Philips research.


Meeting Agenda with Links to related videos...

1. Welcome Address (Video) (see more details)
Uzi Bar-Sadeh, Israeli Eureka Chairmanship Office

2. Vision - The Challenge (Video) (See more details).
Dr. Yesha Sivan, Metaverse Labs and The Tel-Aviv-Yafo Academic College, Israel
3D3C Worlds will change, enhance, and at times hamper, how we learn, enjoy, work, and perform other human actions. High levels of 3D3C (3D, Community, Creation, and Commerce) must be attained in order to harness the potential. This event will benefit from the fruits of research conducted by the members of the Meraverse1 consortia.

3. Vision - The Promise of MPEG-V (Video)
Jean Gelissen, Philips Research, Netherlands
Virtual worlds integrate existing and emerging (media) technologies that allow for the support of existing and the development of new kinds of networked services. The emergence of virtual worlds as platforms for networked services is recognized by businesses as an important enabler as it offers the power to reshape the way companies interact with their environments.

4. Vision – A Global Infrastructure (Video)
Samuel Cruz-Lara, Loria/Inrea, France
Virtual worlds are a new way for people to communicate, to meet and to socialize. They are now pushing the boundaries of multilingual communication.
The need for multilingual support is increasing every day making virtual worlds a very good example of fields of development where applications supporting multilinguality are becoming an absolute necessity. In order to enhance interoperability between virtual worlds, applications and corpora, it is obvious that standards should come into place. This is the main goal of MLIF and, on a more global perspective, of the Metaverse1 project.

5. Use Case - Tourism (Video)
Antonio Collado Gonzalez, Innovalia, Spain
David Oyarzun, Vicomtech, Spain
• A real application of virtual world’s integrated technologies into a real case of Virtual Travel in the Canary Islands
• Virtual Travel is an evolving research validation field where the innovative technologies are tested and validated
• ADML- Avatar Definition Markup Language.
• Actual examples about technology exploitation into real solutions

6. Use Case - Presence (Video)
Sigurd Van Broeck, Bell Labs, Belgium
Senka Zubic, Bell labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Belgium
Koen Willaert, IBBT SMIT-Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Presence has been studied for employees as well as family members or friends.
• Employees working together on a single project from different locations are often missing the social interactions that their colleagues have when in the same location. PresenceScape brings these employees together again in a single virtual location where they can feel together, have the capability to start informal communications at any time about any subject and provide more detailed presence information about the task they are doing.
• A group of friends or family members that live apart and want to spend pastime together from the comfort of their homes can do this in a 3D virtual location on the Internet. Instead of being represented by avatars, the Alcatel-Lucent solution represents friends and family members by their streaming stereo image, allowing them to express facial emotions and gestures without the need to handle keyboard or mouse.
Both solutions have been guided by extensive formative user research.

7. Use Case - Interactive Physical Simulation in Social Presence (Video)
Philippe Gravez, CEA-List, France
Interactive simulation addresses the needs of virtual prototyping for the industry:
• interactive simulation of physical phenomena, with a particular interest in mechanical systems featuring rigid and deformable parts, multi-body systems …
• interactive and/or autonomous virtual humans able both to display realistic behaviours and to interact with their environment
• interactions (motion capture, metaphors, avatar high-level control …).
Current developments and recent trends in the gaming industry are turning this technology into an attractive proposition for Virtual Worlds. In Metaverse1, this has been developed to enhance the feeling of social presence through sharing unusual experience.

8. Use Case - Serious Gaming and Ambient Assisted Living (Video)
Job Zwiers,University of Twente, Human Media Interaction
Virtual Worlds are about Interaction between real and virtual humans. Talking and listening, body language, facial expressions are all vital. Behavior Markup Language is the “HTML” for controlling virtual humans in this respect. The Human Media Interaction group from the University of Twente, Netherlands, is implementing and using these techniques for applications like Virtual Guides, Sports Coaches, Health applications, or Caretaking.

9. Technology - Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Internet Of Things (IOT) (Video)

Herman Tuininga, SallandElectronics, The Netherlands
WSN-SI is a shared infrastructure for Wireless Sensor Networks and can be used for indoor localization, sensor integration etc. WSN-SI is invented by Joost van Velzen and Houwer de Gues of SallandElectronics BV. WSN in general is a promising technology for different kind of applications such as; building- , industrial- and agricultural automation. It also can play a major role in low level integration for the Internet Of Things and perhaps will evolve in a new standard.

10. Technology - Path Planning in Virtual Worlds (Video)
Roland Geraerts, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Navigating within a virtual world can be hard, especially for novice users. We provide automatic navigation through the world without directly controlling the motion of the avatar. Besides steering a single avatar, our technique can be used for steering thousands of non-player characters in real-time. The novelty is that we can efficiently create a 3D dynamic navigation mesh for a layered environment which can be used by characters to generate visually convincing paths in real-time.

11. Technology - Virtual Cities (Video)

Victor Shenkar, GeoSim Cities, Israel
GeoSim integrated Virtual Cities are mirror replicas of real cities (‘3D-Mirror Worlds’), in which you can navigate, get useful info or network with other users. By accomplishing a remarkable 10X reduction in modeling cost and schedule GeoSim defines the leading edge of high-precision, large-scale 3D-modeling.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Every month, Alcatel-Lucent puts the spotlights on a person or team for their contributions to the company in terms of innovation. This time, team members of the Visual Communication Department were selected for their work on Mixed Reality, a solution that paints partial 3D live images of people inside virtual worlds as a replacement for avatars. The realization was just one of the objectives of the team within the ITEA2 Metaverse1 project. Here's a couple of images from the article as it appeared in the Alcatel-Lucent April newspaper providing more details about the solution.



The referenced video's are not yet publicly available. Check out the June issue of the Bell Labs Technical Journal for more info.