Applied virtual environments to support learning of social interaction skills in users with Asperger's Syndrome

Asperger's Syndrome (AS) is an autistic spectrum disorder characterised by normal to high IQ but with marked impairment in social skills. Successful social skills training appears to be best achieved either in situ or in role-play situations where users can explore different outcomes resulting from their social behaviour. Single user virtual environments (SVEs) provide an opportunity for users with AS to learn social interaction skills in a safe environment which they can visit as many times as they like.The use of game-like tasks can provide an incentive and can also be used to guide the user through progressive learning stages. Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) allow several users to interact simultaneously within the virtual environment, each taking different perspectives or role-play characters. Within the AS interactive project a series of SVEs and CVEs have been developed in collaboration with users and professional groups with an overall aim of supporting social skills learning. Initial evaluation studies have been carried out which have been used to both inform and refine the design of these virtual environments (VEs) as well as giving an insight into the understanding and interpretation of these technologies by users with AS.     

一种基于NPR的虚拟环境生成方法

非真实感绘制(NPR)为传统虚拟现实技术的使用开辟了新的空间。针对传统基于图像的绘制无法满足艺术风格虚拟环境需要的问题,通过将非真实感绘制技术引入虚拟场景构建中,提出了一种基于非真实感绘制的虚拟环境生成方法。该方法首先通过计算结构张量刻画图像局部结构,并采用全变分偏微分方程自适应滤波处理来得到平滑张量场;然后在此基础上采用线积分卷积指导画笔走向来模拟生成线条波动感艺术图像;最后将其融入3维场景来生成可漫游的艺术感虚拟环境。实验结果表明,采用该新算法不仅可以较好地模拟线条波动感艺术图像,而且可实现艺术风格虚拟环境的构建。     

A Survey of Haptic Rendering Techniques

Computer Graphics technologies have developed considerably over the past decades. Realistic virtual environments can be produced incorporating complex geometry for graphical objects and utilising hardware acceleration for per pixel effects. To enhance these environments, in terms of the immersive experience perceived by users, the human's sense of touch, or haptic system, can be exploited. To this end haptic feedback devices capable of exerting forces on the user are incorporated. The process of determining a reaction force for a given position of the haptic device is known as haptic rendering. For over a decade users have been able to interact with a virtual environment with a haptic device. This paper focuses on the haptic rendering algorithms which have been developed to compute forces as users manipulate the haptic device in the virtual environment.     

Virtual teamwork in very large undergraduate classes

Collaborative work is an important part of tertiary education but it is very difficult to arrange and supervise for extremely large classes of students in their first year. The possibility that computer-mediated communication can be used to facilitate this type of learning is appealing from a pragmatic organisational point of view. This paper explains in detail what a ‘virtual team’ is in the educational context. It reports on an interpretive field study where students taking an introductory course were allowed to choose where and when they did the required collaborative work. The paper discusses the factors that should be taken into account when offering students the option of working as a virtual team. These include factors that influence the students’ choice. The project cannot be considered to have been successful but indicates reasons for the lack of success and suggests contexts in which it would be valuable to repeat the project. The importance of extensive preparation in terms of teaching the students necessary social and technological skills cannot be over emphasised.     

交互分析模型在协作虚拟环境中实现动态兴趣管理

目前，许多传统的协作式虚拟环境应用主要采用Grid和Locale概念来实现虚拟环境中用户的兴趣管理．但是，当其应用在基于虚拟人的社交性协作仿真时，这些基于位置的兴趣管理方法具有一定的局限性．针对社交性协作仿真这一类虚拟环境应用，提出一种新的在协作虚拟环境中采用动态交互分析的兴趣管理模型．首先定义了兴趣网络和兴趣矩阵的概念；然后描述了交互分析方法，通过该方法来实时分析虚拟人的兴趣焦点；最后在该模型的基础上实现了一个原型虚拟环境系统，并演示了该模型在优化场景绘制和协同感知上的作用．     

The impact of computer-mediated immediate feedback on developing oral presentation skills: An exploratory study in virtual reality

Feedback plays a central role in learning. Crucial to this is the nature and timing of the feedback. This experimental study explores the efficacy of immediate computer-mediated feedback within a virtual reality environment designed to facilitate the development of pre-university students' presentation skills. Two conditions were established to assess the efficacy: immediate computer-mediated feedback; a control condition of delayed expert-mediated feedback. Results showed improvement but no statistically relevant difference in performance gains between the two conditions, suggesting both can facilitate learning. Furthermore, students perceived the environment to be an effective and motivating platform in which to practise presentation skills. For educators seeking viable alternatives to face-to-face presentation practice and feedback, the finding that immediate computer-mediated feedback is potentially as effective in aiding presentation performance is crucial for two reasons: first, it expands practice opportunities for students; second, it could result in less pressure on resources, including time and staffing.     

一个基于全景图的虚拟环境漫游系统

虚拟现实的实现有两种方法。传统上,使用三维图形学方法进行建模和绘制,这种方法需要繁琐的建模工作和昂贵的专用绘图硬件,而且用三维模型很难真实表现自然景观。基于图像的绘制是实现虚拟现实系统的一种新方法,它克服了三维图形方法的上述缺点,近年来得到了日益广泛的应用。文章讨论了一个基于图像的虚拟环境漫游系统的实现,分析了此类系统的模型,介绍了系统实现中摄像机定标、图像拼接、实时图像变换等关键技术。     

Online site visits using virtual collaborative spaces: A plan-reading activity on a digital building site

Site visits or field trips have been a tool utilized by construction educators to engage students in active learning, assist traditional lessons, and attain stronger and deeper student learning experiences. Nevertheless, site visits present major logistical and accessibility challenges for educational institutions and instructors, reducing the number of students that have access to the benefits of such a technique. The limitations for site visits have further broadened recently, as the reality of the COVID-19 public health concerns has forced educators to move to online course delivery quickly and the majority of site visits have been canceled. The research goal of this paper is to present construction students with opportunities to enable online location-independent site visits where contextualized learning is dangerous, unsafe, or impossible to achieve. In this project, a virtual online learning environment was created to offer the affordances that provide an in-depth learning experience through collaborative communication for a plan-reading activity in a virtual space that resembles a real-world site visit to a building facility. This virtual online learning environment helped students to experience the physical and social aspects of the site visit while getting a collaborative opportunity to practice their plan-reading skills. A comparative study with a business-as-usual condition (online delivery through Zoom®) was conducted and the students’ plan-reading performance and their feedback on the sense of presence, social presence, fatigue, and system usability was reported. The outcome of the study shows that such virtual collaborative site visits present unique opportunities to enable online delivery of spatiotemporal contexts of sites and offer an effective remote alternative when these learning opportunities are not available.     

虚拟机技术在《计算机组装与维护》课程中的应用

针对《计算机组装与维护》课程在教学中遇到的设备紧张、硬件损坏率高和机房维护困难的实际问题,采用虚拟机技术进行实验教学,不仅大大降低了真实环境下的硬件损坏率,节约了消耗,同时虚拟机技术也丰富了教师教学的环境,增加了学生动手的机会,使课程的教学效果大大提高。     

基于多体动力学理论的赛车游戏引擎的设计与实现

运动车辆的实时建模、动力学行为仿真是赛车虚拟环境中的重要组成部分。论文设计并实现了一实时赛车游戏引擎,在引擎车辆建模中提出了一种基于多体动力学理论实时逼真的赛车建模方法,对赛车的真实受力状况进行简化,模拟车辆的各种动力学行为和车辆运动的真实感绘制。并实现了引擎中的碰撞检测技术、音效处理技术、虚拟环境的实时绘制技术。增强用户漫游虚拟环境的沉浸感。     

虚拟网络安全实验的教学与研究

计算机网络与信息安全课程是要求实践动手能力很强的课程。实验教学是课堂理论教学的重要补充,通过实验,学生能够更好地理解课程中的基本原理,同时通过动手体验,提高实践能力,对于培养学生的创新精神与创新能力具有重要意义。通过虚拟机搭建虚拟网络与安全实验平台,实现计算机网络和信息安全的实验,丰富了教师的教学手段,也为学生提供了一种实践性强及效果良好的实验环境。借助该实验环境,使学生更能自觉自主的学习,更有兴趣地参加课外学习实践活动,最后给出了虚拟入侵远程主机、开启后门具体实现及其计算机网络安全防御的措施。     

A hybrid rendering algorithm for textile objects

Although realistic textile rendering has been widely used in virtual garment and try-on systems, a robust method to simulate textile with a realistic appearance and high fidelity is yet to be established. We propose to use a novel hybrid geometric- and image-based rendering (GIBR) method to achieve photo realistic representation of textile products. The image-based technique, with its radiance synthesis algorithm, enables us to recover the reflectance properties of textile in an environment photo, and thus can render the appearance of textile material. The geometry-based technique, with its traditional illumination model of assigning illumination parameters extracted from the original scene (such as radiance and chroma dispatch), makes it possible to interactively manipulate 3D virtual objects in the “real” environment. Our realistic textile rendering method has advantages over the traditional ones in its easiness to implement and its wide range of applications.     

视野驱动的自适应阴影图

阴影图是当前实时阴影绘制中的一种经典算法。该算法基于图像空间,当有限分辨率的阴影图映射到较大场景中时,就会由于采样不足造成锯齿形变走样。提出了一种实时的反走样阴影图算法,该算法首先获取当前视点所能够看到的场景范围,然后绘制该范围内的阴影图,并映射到场景中生成实时阴影。该方法同经典的阴影图算法相比,避免了场景中不必要的阴影绘制,提高了阴影图的利用率,反走样的效果很好。而且,该方法只需要绘制一到两幅阴影图,算法的实时性很强,可以满足一个上百万面片的大规模场景中实时阴影绘制的需要。     

Learning leadership skills in a simulated business environment

In today’s unstable market economy, individuals have to be skilled to work efficiently in constantly changing and complex situations. Thus, graduate students have to be trained to cope with unpredictable situations before they enter the workforce. They need to exercise occupational skills, such as leadership skills, during higher education. Simulation gaming opens up possibilities for active learning of the leadership and other occupational skills needed in complex work environments. The aim of this study is to explore if participation in business simulation gaming sessions can make different leadership types visible and if the simulation gaming sessions provide students with experiences beneficial for the development of leadership skills. In the experiment, a group of multicultural graduate business students (N = 41) participated in gaming sessions with a computerised business simulation game. The participants played the game in virtual teams; some teams had a “satellite member” geographically distant from the rest of the team members. Data consist of the teams’ observations during the simulation game and students’ reflective essays written after the gaming sessions. The results indicate that in the business simulation gaming environment, certain leadership characteristics emerged spontaneously. Experiences about leadership varied between the teams and were dependent on the role individual students had in their team. However, it can be concluded that simulation gaming environment has the potential to be used in higher education to exercise the leadership skills relevant in real-world work contexts.     

FARMTASIA: an online game-based learning environment based on the VISOLE pedagogy

Virtual interactive student-oriented learning environment (VISOLE) is a game-based constructivist pedagogical approach that encompasses the creation of an online interactive world modeled upon a set of interdisciplinary domains, in which students participate as “citizens” to take part cooperatively and competitively in shaping the development of the virtual world as a means to construct their knowledge and skills. FARMTASIA is the first online game designed using the VISOLE philosophy, encompassing the subject areas of biology, government, economics, technology, production system and natural environment. The “virtual world” deployed is a farming system covering the domains of cultivation, horticulture and pasturage, situated in a competitive economy governed by good public policies. The design and implementation of FARMTASIA pursue three vital principles. The first one is to make the game as realistic as possible so that students can learn in a near-real life environment; the second one is to inject motivational elements so that students can sustain to learn and acquire various knowledge and skills with the game; and the third one is to make easy for teachers to conduct various VISOLE facilitation tasks. According to our exploratory educational study, we show evidentially that positive perceptions and an advancement of subject-specific and interdisciplinary knowledge appeared among the students who participated in VISOLE learning with FARMTASIA.     

Hybrid client-server architecture and control techniques for collaborative product development using haptic interfaces

In this paper, a collaborative product development and prototyping framework is proposed by using distributed haptic interfaces along with deformable objects modeling. Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a promising technique for industrial product development and virtual prototyping. Network control problems such as network traffic and network delay in communication have greatly limited collaborative virtual environment applications. The problems become more difficult when high-update-rate haptic interfaces and computation intensive deformable objects modeling are integrated into CVEs for intuitive manipulation and enhanced realism. A hybrid network architecture is proposed to balance the computational burden of haptic rendering and deformable object simulation. Adaptive artificial time compensation is used to reduce the time discrepancy between the server and the client. Interpolation and extrapolation approaches are used to synchronize graphic and haptic data transmitted over the network. The proposed techniques can be used for collaborative product development, virtual assembly, remote product simulation and other collaborative virtual environments where both haptic interfaces and deformable object models are involved.     

Social facilitation effects of virtual humans

OBJECTIVE: To investigate whether virtual humans produce social facilitation effects. BACKGROUND: When people do an easy task and another person is nearby, they tend to do that task better than when they are alone. Conversely, when people do a hard task and another person is nearby, they tend to do that task less well than when they are alone. This phenomenon is referred to in the social psychology literature as social facilitation. The present study investigated whether virtual humans can evoke a social facilitation response. METHOD: Participants were given different tasks to do that varied in difficulty. The tasks involved anagrams, mazes, and modular arithmetic. They did the tasks alone, in the company of another person, or in the company of a virtual human on a computer screen. RESULTS: For easy tasks, performance in the virtual human condition was better than in the alone condition, and for difficult tasks, performance in the virtual human condition was worse than in the alone condition. CONCLUSION: As with a human, virtual humans can produce social facilitation. APPLICATION: The results suggest that designers of virtual humans should be mindful about the social nature of virtual humans; a design decision as to when and how to present a virtual human should be a deliberate and informed decision. An ever-present virtual human might make learning and performance difficult for challenging tasks.     

基于图象绘制的虚拟现实系统环境

虚拟现实的一个重要目标是使用计算机生成逼真的视觉世界,使用户可以对虚拟世界的客体进行交互式考察．虚拟现实的实现有两种方法．传统上,用三维图形学的方法实行建模和绘制．此方法需要繁琐的建模和昂贵的专用绘制硬件,而且图形绘制的质量和场景的复杂性受到很大的限制．基于图象的绘制是实现虚拟现实系统的一种新方法．它克服了三维图形方法的缺点．本文在总结已有技术的基础上,提出一个实现基于图象绘制的虚拟现实系统模型,并据此模型实现一个实验系统及相应的图象工具．     

HVS：一种基于实景图象的虚拟现实系统

大多数的虚拟现实比试在于计算机图形技术,先由多边形构造虚拟场景的三维几何模型,再由计算机根据用户的观察点和观察方向实时绘制出用户所看到的虚拟场景,ＨＶＳ 另一种思路,由计算机自动拉接、变形与组织许多幅度散的实景图象或连续视频,生成虚拟场景,这种虚拟场人有照片质量的视觉效果,被我们称为虚拟实景空间,虚拟实时空间能为用户提供、后退、仰视、俯视、３６０度环境、近看、远看等漫游能力,运行它不需要高性能的图     

Collaborative Virtual Simulation Environment for Radiotherapy Treatment Planning

The simulation of Radiotherapy Treatment Planning (RTP) is a normal procedure in oncology clinics carried out on a Simulator machine. The Virtual Simulation of RTP replaces the real Simulator machine with a virtual one by using the CT data sets of a patient instead of the real patient. In this paper, we present a collaborative virtual simulation environment of RTP, named EU-VIRTUOSO, which is based on volume rendering and telecommunication techniques. The RTP procedure is visualised on a virtual patient, which is created by using the CT data of the patient. Different volume rendering and volume interaction techniques, such as DRR, MIP, gradient surface, and iso-surface, supply physicians with high quality rendering images to simulate the real working environment of the Simulator machine. In the collaborative environment, physicians distributed at different locations can work together via network to plan the treatment or to validate the treatment plan on-line by a collaborative application sharing approach. Both concepts virtualised planning and collaborative planning improve the efficiency and accuracy of a radiotherapy treatment while reducing the effort for an individual patient.