Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics

In rehabilitation medicine and in occupational therapy (OT) in particular the assessment tool is essentially the human eye observing the person performing activities of daily living to evaluate his/her level of independence, efficacy, effort, and safety, in order to design an individualized treatment program. On the contrary, in other clinical settings, diagnostics have very sophisticated technological tools such as the Computed Axial Tomography, 3D ultrasound, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Positron Emission Tomography and many others. Now it is possible to fill this gap in rehabilitation using various enabling technologies currently in a phase of real explosion, through which it will be possible to provide the rehabilitator, in addition to the evidence provided by the human eye, also a large amount of data describing the person’s motion in 3D, the interaction with the environment (forces, contact pressure maps, motion parameters related to the manipulation of objects, etc.), and the ‘internal’ parameters (heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, sweating, etc.). This amount of information can be fed back to the clinician in an animation that represents the reality augmented with all the above parameters using methodologies of Augmented Reality (AR). The main benefit of this new interaction methodology is twofold: the observed scenarios depicted in animations contain all the relevant parameters simultaneously and the related data are well defined and contextualized. This new methodology is a revolution in rehabilitative evaluation methods that allow on one hand to increase the objectivity and effectiveness of clinical observation, and on the other hand to re-define more reliable assessment scales and more effective rehabilitation programs, more user-centered.

This paper focuses on the development of a novel Human Machine Interaction strategy based on Augmented Reality for the semi-autonomous navigation of a power wheelchair. The final goal is the development of a shared control, combining direct control by the user with the comfort of an autonomous navigation based on augmented reality markers. A first evaluation has been performed on the real test bed.

Simultaneous localization and mapping based augmented reality (AR) is trending in mobile AR applications. With the help of depth sensors, both accuracy and speed have improved. However, the method that performs the initial registration to align virtual objects with real scenery is not well developed, especially for some applications requiring very accurate registration (e.g., systems used in medical applications). For the iRay system, which is a mobile AR system using the Structure Sensor, we propose to use an iterative closest point algorithm to initially register the scanned mesh with the torso surface obtained pre-operatively, and then use SLAM to track pose. In this paper, a semi-automatic initial registration strategy is evaluated by a user study. This strategy is designed to help the user modify the selection of the 3D scanning area, so that the errors introduced by subjective differences can be reduced. The results indicate that the proposed strategy helps the users improve initial registration quality and reduces the average needed time.

In order to have students enjoy experimental practice and exercises, it is important to acquire information beforehand on how to use the measuring instruments used in experiments. In this research we developed educational teaching materials that let students learn the principle and usage of an oscilloscope in an enjoyable way using Augmented Reality (AR) technology and Virtual Reality (VR) technology with a tablet. The most important feature of the tools is that they use not only explanations by the text-based 2D world, but also effective explanations by 3D modeling using AR and VR technology. The results of a questionnaire by the students who used the teaching materials of the oscilloscopes for the first time show a very good response.

Maxillo-facial surgery is a surgical field where surgical planning and navigation tools are commonly used but there is still a visualization gap among planned surgical activities and those in the operating room. We propose an Augmented Reality platform that includes a planning module and a drill guidance system. Some laboratory tests on 3D printed mandibles have been carried out in order to evaluate the system guidance uncertainty with different sets of fiducial points. The obtained mean value of guidance uncertainty has been of 1.37 mm when 2 anatomical points and 3 implanted screws were used and 1.43 mm when 5 anatomical points were used. The use of three fixed screws reduces the system mean guidance uncertainty and surgeons judged the augmented reality technology helpful in this kind of surgical procedures.

Recent years have seen revolutionary changes in CAS field thanks to the introduction of advanced Augmented Reality technologies. In this brief will be presented the overall study carried out in order to develop an AR application to support the doctor during the surgery. It will be described the way the surgeon can perform a more accurate diagnosis by using not just the traditional bidimensional grey-scale CT/MRI images, but also a more realistic three-dimensional marker-based visualization of the patient’s organs. Specific focus will be given to the extremely beneficial way the surgeon can interact with this kind of digital information in the operating room. It will be presented a highly innovative gesture-control device which allows the doctor to interact with IT equipment in a touchless and as natural as possible way, without coming into contact with it or interrupting the surgery, thus preserving the surgical environment from the danger of contamination.

Being reintegrated at work after an accident constitutes an important milestone to recover a good quality of life, especially for severely injured people forced on a wheelchair after a trauma. The presented framework exploits virtual reality technologies with the aim of supporting these people in gaining awareness of their new conditions, providing them training in simulated and riskless environments. During the training, that addresses key aspects related to mobility, upper body preservations and return to work, the behaviors of the users are tracked to assess their functional level. The evaluation of these data, in addition to the expertise of the clinical personnel, is used to determine the wheelchairs user’s health condition, which is properly formalized in a semantic data model. This model then allows inferring the jobs that are still suitable for each specific user and the most appropriate level of difficulty of the tasks proposed in the virtual environments.

This work aims at providing an evaluation of the acceptability and the usability of a virtual reality-based intervention developed for the physical and cognitive training of mild cognitive impaired elderlies. To perform this evaluation, participants enrolled in the intervention group (n = 4) of a randomized controlled trial to test the system were interviewed, and their adherence and their performances in the virtual environments for cognitive training were evaluated. In spite of the small sample, the active participation and the unanimous positive judgement of all the participants led to the conclusion that the training program was well accepted and enjoyable. Participants also claimed reduced level of anxiety in their ADL. On the basis of these encouraging results, a second trial, with enlarged sample and with a system implementing the improvements required to overcome the limitations and the problems highlighted with this pilot study, will be performed in the next future.

A virtual system is presented for upper limbs rehabilitation in children using a haptic device and oculus rift. Two interactive games were created in Unity 3D with daily tasks and easy execution. In addition, the virtual system was used by two groups of children (CP and Down Syndrome) with mild spasticity, the same ones who performed the exercise. The movements allowed by the system help in the rehabilitation of the hands and in hand-eye coordination. The participants completed a SEQ usability test with results (52 ± 0.43) by group 1 and (53,5 ± 0,72) by group 2. The outcomes allow determining that the system has a good acceptance to be used in rehabilitation. Children in group 2 (Down Syndrome) achieved to manage the system successfully despite intellectual and ocular difficulties.

A 3D virtual system is presented for rehabilitation of lower limbs trough 3 Space Mocap Sensors and the Unity 3D environment, also, two games are designed to allow the flexion, extension and strengthening movements. The games have some difficulty levels thought for every rehabilitation stage. The system was used by 4 people with knee problems, which completed the whole exercise. In addition the participants performed a SEQ usability test with results of (53 ± 0,56), this shows that the systems has a good acceptation to be used for rehabilitation.

To assist surgeons in the acquisition of the required skills for the proper execution of the laparoscopic procedure, surgical simulators are used. During training with simulators it is useful to provide a surgical performance quantitative evaluation. Recent research works showed that such evaluation can be obtained by tracking the laparoscopic instruments, using only the images provided by the laparoscope and without hindering the surgical scene. In this work the state of the art method is improved so that a robust tracking can run even with the noisy background provided by realistic simulators. The method was validated by comparison with the tracking of a “chess-board” pattern and following tests were performed to check the robustness of the developed algorithm. Despite the noisy environment, the implemented method was found to be able to track the tip of the surgical instrument with a good accuracy compared to the other studies in the literature.

The children suffering of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present several limitations in social communication and interactive skills. State of the art showed that Virtual Reality (VR) represents a valid alternative to learn social skills in ASD. In particular VR offers the advantage to simulate daily life interaction in a replicable and controlled environment. In this paper, we present a novel methodology to evaluate social competence in ASD based on the immersive VR system, featuring natural interaction. The VR system is based on the theoretical model which aims to evaluate the intersubjective interchange in everyday relationship between autistic population and the surrounding environment. We suggest that this technological setup can be a useful tool to increase social competence in ASD and it can become a sophisticated outcome measurement tool for studying the improvement of social competence.

In this paper, we offer a virtual bronchoscopy simulator as an assistance exploration tool and diagnosis of peripheral lung nodule lesions. We present a proposal for motion planning to a interest region in the lung nodule based on RRT. Navigation will be guided by this path in a 3d virtual lung reconstructed from CT images. We compare several RRT-algorithm looking for the optimal option for the virtual bronchoscopy problem.

This article proposes a non-invasive system to stimulate the rehabilitation of motor skills, both of the upper limbs and lower limbs. The system contemplates two ambiances for human-computer interaction, depending on the type of motor deficiency that the patient possesses, i.e., for patients with chronic injuries, an augmented reality environment is considered, while virtual reality environments are used in people with minor injuries. In the cases mentioned, the interface allows visualizing both the routine of movements performed by the patient and the actual movement executed by him. This information is relevant for the purpose of (i) stimulating the patient during the execution of rehabilitation, and (ii) evaluation of the movements made so that the therapist can diagnose the progress of the patient’s rehabilitation process. The visual environment developed for this type of rehabilitation provides a systematic application in which the user first analyzes and generates the necessary movements in order to complete the defined task. The results show the efficiency of the system generated by the human-computer interaction oriented to the development of motor skills.

In this paper, it proposes the development of a virtual reality system that works simultaneously with the physical environment, by creating an atmosphere that stimulates the abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder. This system is implemented through a human - machine interface, which has the possibility to simulate and work with functions focused on rehabilitation, so the patient will be involved in assisted therapies based on DSM - 5 protocols. Therefore, multiple environments and applications are presented for the interaction with the physical media to increase the stimulus of the affected one. The results of the application are presented to validate the project using the information collected through the interaction between the developer, therapist and patient.

This article proposes a system of perception of the real world through audiovisual stimulation for the treatment of different types of phobias. The proposed system is made up of various virtual environments which will be selected according to the phobia to be treated, i.e., the user-environment integration depends on the type and degree of the phobia. The interface allows visualize the environment where the patient must comply with a predetermined therapy by the psychotherapist, in which the biometric signals of the patient are feed back in real time through wearables devices. This information is processed in order to ingest directly in the algorithm of the user’s behavior; algorithm that controls the audiovisual stimuli related to the phobia during the interaction of the virtual environment with the user. In addition, the parameters of the biometric signals are displayed graphically/numerically in the virtual environment in order for the patient to control their behavior and face their irrational fear-phobia. The results are validated based on the realism of the virtual environments developed, and the audio-visual stimuli applied to the patient based on the change of the parameters of the biometric signals acquired through wearable devices.

The last wave of commercially available virtual reality (VR) devices opened ways to more immersive medical applications. We present a virtual reality system that exploits the virtual out-of-body experience to assist the acknowledgment of the transplanted body organ. We give an overview of the physiological background and set goals towards the VR system. An implementation using Oculus Rift hardware is presented. We describe the applied physiological evaluation process for kidney transplantation. The studies are currently still ongoing.

Recently, minimally invasive cardiothoracic surgery (MICS) has grown in popularity thanks to its advantages over conventional surgery and advancements in surgical robotics.This paper presents a patient-specific virtual surgical simulator for the movability evaluation of single-port MICS robots. This simulator can be used for both the pre-operative planning to rehearse the case before the surgery, and to test the robot in the early stage of development before physical prototypes are built.A physical simulator is also proposed to test the robot prototype in a tangible environment. Synthetic replicas of the patient organs are able to replicate the mechanical behaviors of biological tissues, allowing the simulation of the physical interactions robot-anatomy.The preliminary tests of the virtual simulator showed good performance for both the visual and physics processes.After reviewing the physical simulator, a surgeon provided a positive evaluation of the organ replicas in terms of geometry and mechanical behaviors.

Virtual Reality (VR) is promising not just for the game and entertainment industry, but also for the medical and surgical fields, to develop simulation systems and navigation tools for the intra-operative assistance. Electromagnetic (EM) tracking technology is today widely proposed in the context of computer-assisted medical interventions.In this work we preliminary evaluate whether a three-Dimensional (3D) virtual reality EM navigator could simplify a challenging endovascular procedure, the fenestrated endovascular aneurysm repair (FEVAR), facilitating the collateral arteries cannulation. This paper describes the navigation system and presents results of in-vitro trials which provide preliminary evidence to prove the potentialities of the proposed technology for the specific surgical application.

Serious games have shown to be particularly adapted to address fall prevention and rehabilitation issues because they engage the elderly in performing physical exercices in an entertaining way. A tailored serious game was developed to take into account the ageing process, an adaptation to the physical status of the senior, and a 3D-visualization to better perform the exercices. The Health professional creates the exergame-based program according to the needs and capabilities of the elderly. The proposed solution is easy to use, personalized and based on low-cost and non-invasive technologies. An experimentation was carried out in a day care center for the elderly. The pilot evaluation illustrates the benefit of the system in terms of performance enhancement and points out the improvements that should be addressed in the future.

Cultural heritage refers to the objects or symbolic attributes which resembles the identity of a society inherited from the previous generations, and will be preserved for the future generations. Despite of the importance of the cultural heritage, the interest of modern society for historic building has been decreased, as the cultural heritage is not considered as the main priority of development by the local government. This condition increases the necessity to restore the interest of modern society for historic building by implementing augmented reality. In this research, the finger recognition is utilized as the media of interaction between the 3-D objects and User. The system will identify the structure of human hand and calculate the number of fingers detected from the image obtained from web camera, by using convex hull and convexity defects. The research shows that the distance required to obtain the best performance is 30 to 50 cm with adequate light condition, while the distance required to perform marker detection in augmented reality is between 2.5 to 5 m, with the camera angle of 40°.

Due to the popularity of music, motion tracking and augmented reality in recent years, the research topic in these fields is extremely popular. In contrast to every previous work, in this paper, we present an innovative real-time mobile application in arts for helping musicians by integrating motion tracking into augmented reality technology. A kinematic filtering algorithm is utilized for calculating the parameters. According to the computed parameters, each hand of musicians is then tracked by using the Microsoft Kinect. After that, an augmented reality application with an integrated multimedia feature is built based on the PixLive Maker synchronized with music being played. This hybrid application allows musicians to interact with the virtual piano in a new way that is similar to the way in which they are playing a real piano. By pressing any selected piano key on the air, the sound of each note is generated continuously into a song and incorporated with an interface in the smartphone. The new application achieves a suitable computed rate for real-time use. Representative experimental results have shown that the application is beneficial for piano players in arts by allowing them to practice and touch the virtual piano with lower cost and an interactive experience.

In addition to the current use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in archaeology, oriented to rebuild the historical evolution of an archaeological area by using aerial photogrammetry and relief of archaeological objects, is possible to consider the fruition through augmented reality. By using jointly UAVs and augmented reality, it is possible to explore sites which are not often directly accessible from the user and from different perspectives, by providing various types of contextual information (3d models, textual information, etc.) and directly on site. This work deals with a feasibility study for the development of a location-based AR Android application supporting the fruition of a given archaeological site from an aerial perspective, by exploiting UAVs and augmented reality. The main contribution of the work was the integration between the Wikitude SDK augmented reality framework and the DJI Mobile SDK and led to the development of DJIARcheoDrone, a first prototype of the application.

The photogrammetrical techniques are, in this moment, experimenting new approaches based on innovative algorithms. The recent availability of high resolution cameras and sensors made possible the fast and accurate acquisition of complex geometries. On the other hand, manage such amount of data need for optimized procedure to automatize the geometric extraction of the geometric features. In this paper different photogrammetric techniques will be compared with direct measurement of the same site with laser scanner. The test site is the main door of the palace of the ex seminar archbishop’s palace of Taranto town, whose construction goes up again to the XVII century, was surveyed. The survey has been realized, as we said, using two techniques: photogrammetrical survey and terrestrial digital laser scanner. In the portal the frieze is attributable to the Baroque style, while the molding has Rococo style features. The use of the photogrammetry has been finalized to the virtual reconstruction of the aforesaid portal, of which only lateral pillars and parts of the decoration are present in situ; the other elements found by the archaeologists have been summarily recomposed in laboratory. The photogrammetric survey has been performed on every element, moreover with the aid of the laser scanning survey, we have performed the resetting of the frieze, so that the whole portal has been semi-qualitatively reconstructed on the base of precise measurements.The visualization of this element could be used for future interventions of portal restauration.

A web-browser allows discovering and navigating between the bas-reliefs. This latter part of the exhibition represents the main novelty and it will be deepening during the dissertation.The importance of the whole set of data gathered is twofold: first of all a complete metrical reconstruction of the site provides conservators with a fundamental starting point for restoration works; secondly, these data provide the possibility to create a virtual corner for their exposition, moving from the scheme of a classical exposition of findings towards a digital and interactive visualization.

This paper presents the process for a case study concerning fully immersive application of physical environment. The paper considers intelligent systems integration to VR and self-learning activities with sociological aspects by significant experimental platform. Authors aim to detail the process of systematical design including modelling, computing, intelligence and an initial evolution of virtual environment. Also practical usage and futuristic aspects are included for the concept. As the project based on physical environment, target of the work is concentrated to give high presence feeling for end-users. To increasing presence feeling, authors aim to maximize immersion level. Self-learning activities based on the perception of supervised and unsupervised learning. The activities are engaged to immersive and entertaining structure. Heterogeneous intercontinental participants provide unique feedback source. The environment is research and development center of Tallinn University of Technology. The virtual environment of the center has been evaluated based on realistic conditions.

This paper presents a museum exhibition based on Immersive Multimedia (IM) and Virtual Reality (VR). Several researches showed that the use of IM and VR in exhibition increase the involvement of the visitor and improve communication with the public. The goal of our project is relive the ancient Leonardo’s manuscript “Codex of Flight” using immersive multimedia, video projection systems and VR technology. In a museum tour, the visitors contemplate projections and 3D installation and become aware of the historical research process which led to the birth of the Leonardo’s manuscript and the subsequent achievements.

We describe a technique developed using C++ language and Unreal Engine 4 that allows users to visualise software systems written in object-oriented Java through virtual reality and using the city metaphor. Our aim is to use virtual reality to visualise the metrics of classes and packages of a software system. In this paper, we present a prototype. The ultimate goal will be to demonstrate that it is possible to use virtual reality to better understand software.

Previously we had developed 3d model in virtual environment for palace in Tanjug Pura Region. For enchachment and enrichment of this application in order to introduce historical place in Tanjung Pura region, such as Darul Aman Palace, Darussalam Palace and the other historical buildings, we developed player positioning monitoring feature and implement it on its virtual environment. In this research, the player position mapping is performed inside a mini-map in Tanjung Pura Palace virtual reality application. The result of this research shows that the implemented method can be used to track the location of the user Tanjung Pura Palace virtual reality application.

Physically-based approaches are increasingly used in a wide field of computer graphics. By that, modern graphic engines can provide a realistic output using physical correct values instead of an analytical approximation. Such applications apply the final lighting on a geometry buffer to reduce the complexity. Using this approach for Mediated Reality applications, some changes have to be made in order to fuse the real with the virtual world. In this paper, we present an approach with a focusing on the extraction of real world environment information and saving them directly to the geometry buffer. Therefore, we introduce a solution using spatial geometry to integrate the real world into the virtual environment. Hereby, the approach is usable in real-time and allows for visual interaction between virtual and real world objects. Moreover, a manipulation of the real world is easily possible.

We derive a new approximation of ambient obscurance to improve the quality of state-of-the-art techniques used in real-time rendering. We attempt to stay close to the original definition of ambient obscurance and, while building on the deferred rendering approach, bring into image-space information that is suitable for accurate estimations of visibility that take account of the position and orientation of near occluding geometry. The approach is based on the approximation of a covered solid angle, considering the area of surfaces, and hemisphere partitioning that gives directional information about coverage, both done in image space. The immediate advantage of our technique is that we avoid over-occlusion caused by multiple occluders covering each other but covering from the same direction. In some cases our implementation achieves lower performance with respect to some currently popular and widely adopted screen-space ambient obscurance approximations, but still obtains real-time frame rates on the current generation of hardware.

This paper presents a new shape descriptor for 3D meshes, that aims at representing an arbitrary triangular polyhedron using a graph, called SCG for “Shape-Curvature-Graph”. This entity can be used to perform self-similarity detection, or more generally to extract patterns within a shape. Our method uses discrete curvature maps and divides the meshes into eight categories of patches (peak, ridge, saddle ridge, minimal, saddle valley, valley, pit and flat). Then an adjacency graph is constructed with a node for each patch. All categories of patches cannot be neighbors in a continuous context, thus additional intermediary patches are added as boundaries to ensure a continuous consistency at the transitions between areas. To validate the relevance of this modular structure, an approach based of these shape descriptor graphs is developed in order to extract similar patterns within a surface mesh. It illustrates that these “augmented” graphs obtained using differential properties on meshes can be used to analyze shape and extract features.

Interactive 3D techniques offer a new quality in the design of user interfaces of computer applications, in particular when 3D applications are accessible remotely over the internet. A critical element for building practical 3D applications is adequate 3D synthetic content. However, designing high-quality interactive 3D content is a complex and challenging task. This difficulty is one of the major obstacles preventing widespread use of 3D techniques on the web in many promising application domains. In this paper, a new approach to 3D content creation is presented. The approach employs a range of techniques for simplification of the content creation process, but its main novelty lies in the fact that properly structured content can be created by communities of designers, regardless of whether they explicitly collaborate or not. Appropriate organization and consistency of the user-contributed content is enforced by the use of semantic web techniques with external domain ontologies. The presented approach is consistent both with the existing content creation pipelines and business models, aiming at enhancing and not replacing the current practices in digital content creation. A prototype of a tool for 3D content design implemented as an extension to the Unity IDE is also presented.

Recognizing smile conveys the information about the happy mood and the acceptability of the message. The Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) has been used to find out the face detection and the facial expression recognition. However, due to the large feature length of facial expression, there is a challenge to decrease the size of the feature vector. This paper demonstrates the proposed method for smile recognition on JAFFE dataset and Cohn-Kanade dataset by combining the HOG with Graph Signal Processing (GSP). Not only, the feature length is significantly reduced but also, the accuracy has been increased in the smile recognition using the proposed method.

In this article we present a three dimensional modeling system that generates precise real-time mapping using a RGB-D camera. With the use of the light weight sensors Microsoft Kinect and small and powerful computers like the Intel Stick Core M3 Processor, our system can run all the computation and sensing required to smoothly run SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) on-board and in real-time, removing the dependence on unreliable wireless communication. We use visual odometry, loop closure and graph optimization. Our approach is capable of generating accurate maps of several objects analyzing the data yielded by several tests of the system.

In this paper, we propose an algorithm for abnormal crowd behavior detection and simulation for real time surveillance applications. Our method is a low computational cost approach based on moved pixel density modelling. Using statistical methods, we obtain the model of pixel densities in normal behaviors based on datasets available in the literature. During abnormal anomalous event detection we run a simulation of people motion and save the data for future analysis. We test the execution time of our algorithm for motion detection to validate its usage in fast applications. Finally we validate our method comparing it with other approaches in the literature in two datasets.

We compared the ability to navigate from one point to another in a virtual environment using Gaze-Directed, Pointing and Teleport locomotion. Participant’s start position and destination were shown to them on a map at the beginning of each trial. Participants also had to deviate from their route to collect ‘Pokémon’ tokens: testing their spatial updating ability. Results showed that the two steering methods resulted in increased levels of cybersickness compared to teleporting. In terms of performance, teleporting resulted in faster traversal times but surprisingly was just as effective in allowing users to complete their journey, indicating that user disorientation was not a major issue. The main failing of the teleport method was that it increased the likelihood of missing collectable tokens en route. These results suggest that restricted variants of the teleport method should be explored for use in commercialized VR applications in which real walking is not necessary.

The continuous progress in the field of robotics and the diffusion of its related application scenarios in today’s modern world makes human interaction and communication with robots an aspect of fundamental importance. The development of interfaces based on natural interaction paradigms is getting an increasingly captivating topic in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), due to their intrinsic capabilities in providing ever more intuitive and effective control modalities. Teleoperation systems require to handle a non-negligible amount of information coming from on-board sensors as well as input devices, thus increasing the workload of remote users. This paper presents the design of a 3D User Interface (3DUI) for the control of teleoperated robotic platforms aimed at increasing the interaction efficiency. A hand gesture driven controller is used as input modality to naturally map the position and gestures of the user’s hand to suitable commands for controlling the platform components. The designed interface leverages on mixed reality to provide a visual feedback to the control commands issued by the user. The visualization of the 3DUI is superimposed to the video stream provided by an on-board camera. A user study confirmed that the proposed solution is able to improve the interaction efficiency by significantly reducing the completion time for tasks assigned in a remote reach-and-pick scenario.

This paper introduces HCI design approach for an online shopping gestural-based interface. The proposed semi-immersive Virtual Reality (VR) interface aims to elevate the user experience in such indirect environment, where effective delivering of functional yet distinguishable experience effectively is crucial. The system comprises product customisation and personalization service, in which the product is visualized in a three-dimensional highly interactive manner. The level of flexibility and realism of the aforementioned system and its impact on the experience presents new prospects for e-commerce systems, particularly for luxury markets. A preliminary heuristic evaluation was conducted by HCI experts prior to user trials to uncover potential usability issues. The heuristic session’s outcome emphasised valuable components and design aspects within the system with regards to the system functionality, visualisation and interaction quality. Some factors and design issues for optimising and further enhancing the system were also highlighted.

The use of 3D models to document archaeological findings witnessed to boost in the latest years, mainly thanks to the large adoption of digital photogrammetry for the virtual reconstruction of ancient artifatcs. For this reason, the widespread availability of digital 3D objects obliges the research community to face with a hard challenge: which is the best way for allowing visitors being in contact with the real estate of cultural goods? The work described in these pages answers to these questions by describing a novel solution for the enhanced interaction and visualization of a complex 3D model. The installation consists in an autostereoscopic display paired with a remotely connected (with a wired connection) touch-pad for the interaction with the contents displayed in it. The main advantage of using such technology is represented by the fact that one is not obliged to wear cumbersome devices but at the same time one can have a 3D view of the object without any additional aid. The system allows, through a touch-pad, to manage the 3D views and interact with a very small object that in its virtual dimension is magnified with respect to a classical museum arrangement. The research results, applied to the real case exhibition presented, have proved the innovation and usability of the multimedia solutions, which required the use of complex hardware components and a tricky implementation of the whole software architecture. The digital disruption in the CH domain should be also entrusted in the use of advanced interfaces that at the same time are intuitive and usable interaction methods.

An increasing interest of large IT companies in the area of augmented reality (AR) technology has been observed recently. This opens up new possibilities for a wide adoption of the AR technology in the daily lives of users. However, a major problem is the lack of useful AR content, which could be presented in different real-world environments of multiple users. In this paper, a new approach to AR content creation is presented. The approach, called VARS (Versatile Augmented Reality Scenes), enables to create versatile AR scenes that can be presented in a variety of real-world environments containing different physical objects. This approach is based on semantic loose coupling of physical objects present in the user’s environment with abstract objects defined in the AR scenes. Also, an example application of the proposed approach in an education domain is presented.

In this paper, we propose algorithm and dataset for pedestrian detection focused on HCI and Augmented Reality applications. We combine cascade classifiers with saliency maps for improving the performance of the detectors. We train a HAAR-LBP and HOG cascade classifier and introduce CICTE_PeopleDetection dataset with images from surveillance cameras at different angles and altitudes. Our algorithm performance is compared with other approaches from the state of art. In the results, we can see that cascade classifiers with saliency maps improve the performance of pedestrian detection due to the rejection of false positives in the image.