Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics

Head mounted displays (HMDs) are visualization devices that provide high levels of immersion in virtual environments (VEs), which have been recently used to enhance the experience of subjects performing a physical exercise. However, the use of these devices in rehabilitation is discussed as it could cause cybersickness and other physical drawbacks. In this context, we conducted a preliminary study investigating the experiences of navigating in the same VEs using a cycle-ergometer and either a projected screen (PS) or a HMD, considering whether the “the Sense of Presence” influenced the device’s preference. Thirty-three healthy young adults were enrolled and randomized in four groups to counterbalance the two conditions and to investigate the effects of 5-days washout. Most of the subjects (n = 26) preferred the HMD with respect to PS; sense of presence was higher using HMD than using projector (t = −11.47, p < 0.001), but the difference between conditions was higher for those who preferred the HMD (t = −14.64, p < 0.001), compared to those who chose projector (t = −2.70, p < 0.05). The correlation of presence with cybersickness revealed that, despite higher levels of sickness, sense of presence probably counts more in choosing the HMD as the preferred device.

The OMERO 2.0 system (Organized Multimodal Exploration of Relevant Virtual Objects) is an innovative system that enables visually impaired users to explore and edit 3D virtual models. It involves three interaction modalities: visual, haptic and auditory. Virtual models are properly designed to convey the information of interest in a polymorphous and redundant way: the user can therefore choose the sensorial modalities best suited to his/her characteristics, accounting for specific limitations and/or impairments. Virtual models are specially organized to help visually impaired people in building an integrated mental scheme of complex realities (cultural heritage objects and sites, large buildings, abstract concepts in fields such as geometry or chemistry etc.): a challenging task when using a serial sense such as touch. Different semantic layers of the scene (scenarios) convey logically different views of the scene at hand and can be selected separately or in combination depending on the user’s needs: that prevents users from being overwhelmed by too many simultaneous details. The software tools used in this new version of OMERO increase the generality of the system and support a larger number of haptic devices. Moreover, the completely new Interactive Haptic Editor of OMERO offers an innovative haptic interface: the haptic properties of the virtual models can be edited even without using the GUI. This redundant combination of vision and touch improves the efficiency for sighted people and enables visually impaired users (that cannot use a GUI) to modify autonomously the rendering of virtual scenes. This results in their active involvement even in the design phase, improving their ability to match the rendering with their specific and individual needs.

Redirected walking applications allow a user to explore large virtual environments in a smaller physical space by employing so-called redirection techniques. To further improve the immersion of a virtual experience, path planning algorithms were developed which choose redirection techniques based on the current position and orientation of the user. Furthermore, additional algorithms were developed to guarantee the user’s safety at all times. In order to ensure a reliable performance, both safety and planning algorithms depend on accurate position tracking which is commonly provided by an external tracking system. The disadvantage of this kind of tracking is the time-consuming preparation of the physical environment, which renders the system immobile. A possible solution to eliminate this dependency is to replace the external tracking system with a state-of-the-art inside-out tracker based on the concept of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). SLAM algorithms track the position and orientation of a sensor by fusing various measurements and using a continuously generated and expanding map of its surroundings. However, the information contained in this map is not suitable for existing safety and planning algorithms due to its feature-based localization properties.In this paper, we present an approach in which we attach a commercially available SLAM device to a head-mounted display to track the head motion of a user. From sensor recordings of the device, we extract environmental information specifically suitable for existing path planner and safety algorithms of a redirected walking application using a sequence of algorithms. Accordingly, the resulting spatial data consists of 2D coordinates describing closed polygons which are used to approximate the geometry of the walkable area. This geometrical data can then be streamed to the redirected walking application.

Virtual musical instruments (VMIs) are Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) based applications that focus on the interaction with real or virtual musical objects through AR or VR mediums. For such purpose, different interaction tools and techniques such as fiducial markers, RGB and depth cameras, VR and AR headsets are used. Though modern AR and VR devices provide better interaction interfaces, they are more expensive than traditional ones that are unfortunately not robust as the modern devices. To provide a robust and affordable AR and VR interaction interface for real-time applications, we investigate the use of affordable body-worn inertial measurement unit (IMU), a web camera, an RGB light as a simple, cheaper and reliable solution for the interaction with virtual percussion instruments. The performance of the proposed system was evaluated through a series of feedback from fifteen users. In general, the framework was considered as intuitive and tangible.

This document presents a virtual training system oriented for learning of electric welding applied to automotive body assembly industry. The training tasks are developed in a virtual immersion environment created with Unity 3D graphic software, in order to improve the user’s skills and welding skills through a teaching-learning process that allows the virtual manipulation of industrial instruments. In this way, the experience in welding task is obtained, risks of industrial accidents are reduced and waste is eliminated. The experimental results show the behavior of the system and the evolution of the user’s skills.

This article describes an analysis of the demand of a product or service through virtual environments to measure the acceptance of it in consumers. The developed system consists of a virtual reality environment, which involves both designers in the characterization of the prototype and users in measuring the acceptability of the product in the market, in order to optimize human and economic resources for the company. The developed application considers a multi-user system where a user should enter at the beginning of the application inviting a certain number of people to participate in the analysis of the prototype of the product and make the changes that are considered convenient. Modification options allow users to interact simultaneously with the product, creating different models. The interaction of users subject to testing, contributes to the measurement of the acceptability of the characteristics of the product through manipulation and observation in virtual environments.

Cinematic Virtual Reality has been increasing in popularity the last years. Watching 360° movies with a Virtual Reality device, viewers can freely choose the viewing direction, and thus the visible section of the movie. In order to ensure that the viewer observes all important details, we investigated three methods of implicitly guiding the attention of the viewer: lights, movements, and sounds. We developed a measurement technique to obtain heat maps of viewing direction and applied statistical analysis methods for spatial data. The results of our work show that the attention of the viewer can be directed by sound and movements. New sound induces the viewer to search for the source of the sound, even if not all participants paid attention to the direction of the sound. In our experiments, lights without movements did not draw more attention than other objects. However, a moving light cone changed the viewing direction considerably.

This article proposes a teaching-learning system for children of initial education through haptic devices and 3D Unity software. The system has several virtual interfaces that will be chosen according to the age, skills and knowledge that the child needs to acquire or improve. The interface allows to view the environment where the user must do a task or activity by the teacher in charge. Which it can listen to the instructions issued by the system and then be executed, also it has an introduction that remembers the objective to be fulfilled according to the interface. Through the haptic device geomagic Touch, a trajectory tracking control is carried out, which allows the child to perceive by means of feedback of forces if the movement and the direction with which he makes the stroke is the correct one. In addition, it allows to acquire the input signals the same that are sent to an algorithm that validates the stroke of the uppercase, lowercase vowels and basic figures made by the child. Also, it indicates to the teacher the results in a qualitative way.

This work presents VirtualCruiseTour, an AR/VR-based application dedicated to ship cruises’ guests for the promotion of organized shore excursions. It can be exploited also in travel agencies to showcase future customers the sites of interest that can be visited during the cruise. The AR module allows augmenting a map showing the cruise route, the ship current position and the ports in which the liner will stop. Tapping one of the port (or the ship), the user is shown more details about the shore excursions organized for that stop (or the ship facilities) and has the chance to experience the site of interests watching 360° pictures or videos either in an immersive (VR) or non-immersive mode. A pilot study to validate the application as a marketing tool is foreseen. The experiment evaluates the customers’ purchase intentions and their knowledge of the product in comparison to traditional marketing media (web sites and brochures). Preliminary results of the study conducted enrolling nine participants are presented and discussed.

Many studies on distance perception in a virtual environment exist. Most of them were conducted using head-mounted displays (HMD) and less with large screen displays such as CAVE systems. In this paper, we propose to measure the accuracy of perceived distances in a virtual space ranging from 0 to 15 m in a CAVE system compared to an HMD. Eight subjects with different vision performances took part in an experiment. Results show that the HMD provides the best results for distances above 8 m while the CAVE provides the best results for close distances.

This article proposes the development of a virtual application as a planning and government management tool, focused on the digitization of objects, monuments-buildings, and real environments using 2D and 3D virtualization techniques. The application considers two modes of use: PLANNER for use by managers and planners of offices and technical units linked to tourism; and TOURIST created for travelers, hikers or tourists in general. The first allows recreating new scenes incorporating objects that make it attractive to the tourist recourse, and thus achieve a projected image of the vision of development proposed by the planner; and the second designed to recreate touristic environments and program circuits, provoking a tourist avatar through HTC VIVE, Oculus Rift and GearVR Headsets to make the application available to the largest market segment of virtual reality viewers. In addition, the app allows the interaction of several users in the same scenario to exchange information and experiences of the place.

Thermography has become more frequently used in rescue operations when used together with flight technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This is due to its non-invasive and powerful supervision characteristics in the spectrum range not perceivable for the human eye or for a standard camera. This paper presents a developed system based on the synergy of a UAV and a counting and geolocation algorithm that detects people with aerial shots in areas of difficult access. The system integrates a thermal camera to a UAV, thus being useful in different scenarios such as floods, fires or wooded areas. For this purpose, the UAV navigation paths are configured from an earth station using a telemetry-specific software. Thermal images will be recorded during the mission at a height determined by the operator, which will later be processed to filter, discriminate, count and geolocalize people at risk. The processing of the images is done by means of artificial vision tools combined with Artificial Neural Networks (ANN).

Redirection techniques enable users to explore a virtual environment larger than the real physical space by manipulating the mapping between the virtual and real trajectories without breaking immersion. These techniques can be applied continuously over time (using translational, rotational and curvature gains) or discretely (utilizing change blindness, visual suppression etc.). While most attention has been devoted to continuous techniques, not much has been done on discrete techniques, particularly those utilizing visual suppression.In this paper, we propose a study to investigate the effect of discrete rotation of the virtual environment during eye-blink. More specifically, we describe our methodology and experiment design for identifying rotation detection thresholds during blinking. We also discuss preliminary results from a pilot study.

Inappropriate designed VR contents may cause visual discomfort (dizziness, vertigo) to users when they experience with VR head mounted displays (HMDs), This paper explored the human factors of binocular stereoscopic effects and provide some guidelines on how to achieve visual comfort in VR games.

An immersive multimedia project, namely “Changes”, is presented to show the potential and effectiveness of an immersive experience based on spatial audio narration. The experience allows the listener to live an experience that begins by immersing him in a natural environment, then taking him to a war scenario and then back again to nature. The purpose of the paper is to explain the importance of the audio component in a multi-sensory storytelling.Also, the will of the experience is to use free or low cost tools, in order that other people can easily take up the work and continue it or modify it.

“Mnemosyne” is an Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) application designed to increase memory recall. The application simulates the processes of the ancient mnemonic “the Method of Loci” (MOL), also referred to as the “Memory Palace” technique. The application allows users to create personalised Memory Palaces by navigating and storing “memory cubes” in a Virtual Environment (VE) through a Head-Mounted Display (HMD). Results from a pilot study with 18 participants indicate that those with higher spatial reasoning abilities benefit more from use of the MOL. An evaluation of the pilot study raised a number of interesting issues to take into consideration in the redesign of a larger study.

In this paper we present a web-based visualization system developed for visualizing real-time point cloud data obtained from LADAR (or other) sensors. The system allows direct visualization of captured data, visualization of data from database or visualization of preprocessed data (e.g. labeled or classified data). The system allows the concurrent visualization from same or different data-sources on multiple clients in the web browser. Due to the use of modern web technologies the client can also be used on mobile devices. The system is developed using modern client- and server-side web technologies. The system allows connection with an existing LADAR sensor grabber applications through use of UDP sockets. Both server- and client-side parts of the system are modular and allow the integration of newly developed modules and designing a specific work-flow scenarios for target end-user groups. The system allows the interactive visualization of datasets with millions of points as well as streaming visualization with high throughput speeds.

With the popularization of VR head mounted displays (HMD), the demands for VR movies are rising rapidly. Traditionally, time lapse movies are usually used for educational purpose, but they can be significantly more vivid if they can be viewed in VR ways. The authors designed a kind of automatic control system targeted to record VR movies showing the slow process of change such as plant growing, astronomical phenomena, etc. The system is mainly consist of hardware module and software part. The system hardware includes five parts consisting of the main-control chip using FPGA, dual H-bridge motor drive circuit using L298N drive chip, two channels relay circuit with isolation using optical coupler, the three channels DC output switched-mode power supply, a slide track with a two phase four wire step motor as mechanical parts, which are used to support the camera controlled by a cable release. For the software part, Quartus II and Verilog HDL were used to program and control. It has many advantages, including adjustable micro spur, simple design, unattended operation for a long time, safe and convenient operations.

We present and validate a novel and portable IVR setup conceived for studying the predictive mechanisms associated to action observation. The setup implements an interactive throwing-catching task in which participants have to intercept balls thrown from a virtual character. To validate the setup, we performed a preliminary experiment in which participants had to intercept balls thrown by different throwers, under different ball/thrower visibility conditions. Non-expert adult participants were able to extract information from an observed throwing action to improve their interceptive performances. This ability was modulated by the throwing strategy (e.g. throwing from a fixed stance with respect to throwing with stepping corresponded to worse interceptive performances). These preliminary results validate our setup as a novel tool for exploring how humans access and make use of information from observed actions to optimize interpersonal interactions. Importantly, the proposed setup could be used as a tool for early diagnosis of pathologies in which predictive skills are progressively impaired.

This work presents the development of an interactive didactic system for the learning of the cascade control technique of industrial processes, which uses an immersive virtual environment for the emulation of a plant behavior which can be monitored and controlled through an HMI (Human-Machine Interface). The virtual environment has been created through Computer Aided Design software and a graphic engine and, in addition, peripheral devices are used to achieve the immersion and interaction with the environment. Finally, the experimental results that validate the system when it is tested with a real or simulated process are presented.

In the fields of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is an important component that allows the user to interact with its virtual environment. Though different approaches are adopted to meet the requirements of individual applications, the development of efficient, non-obtrusive and fast HCI interfaces is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a new AR and VR interaction interface based on Human Action Recognition (HAR) with a new binary motion descriptor that can efficiently describe and recognize different actions in videos. The descriptor is computed by comparing the changes in the texture of a patch centered on a detected keypoint to each of a set of patches compactly surrounding the central patch. Experimental results on the Weizmann and KTH datasets show the advantage of our method over the current-state-of-the-art spatio-temporal descriptor in term of a good tradeoff among accuracy, speed, and memory consumption.

This paper describes the development of an interactive virtual tool, in order to encourage the ability to crawl in infants. The virtual environment in the system is implemented with the graphics engine Unity3D. The application is tested in the MagixBox platform with a high brightness projector. The environment has colorful and novel designs which are projected on a suitable floor space. User can interact with the projection due to the mapping that makes the infrared sensor and HD 2D camera in MagixBox. The sensor will continually scanning the objects that are close to the projection. The system helps in the process of activities record and saving important data for the assessment by the specialist.

Older adults experience several diseases related to the habits of their daily lives, many times resulting in cognitive problems when they reach ages that overcome eighty years. This work presents the development of an application aimed at older adults, integrating scenarios in virtual reality to facilitate the immersion of people with signs of memory loss. Through the application, various tasks related to daily activities, professions, face recognition and weekend games are proposed, all evaluated to show scores at the end of the activities. As a result, the work presents real experiments executed to validate the proposal, showing first and third person views within several built virtual environments.

This article describes the development of games within virtual reality environments oriented to early childhood education children between 3 and 5 years old. These games are developed according to the Cone of Learning and have been developed with a Unity 3D graphic engine. They are very attractive and allow children’s learning through playing. They also stimulate the skills and abilities required to be developed and strengthened during this learning stage. The proposed games allow the teacher to select several difficulty levels on each game in order to stimulate the child to accomplish more complex tasks during this initial stage. At the end, the areas intended to be covered are presented according to the goals set.

In this paper, we present a novel mixed reality system for supporting stock market trading. The system is designed to enhance traders’ working environment by displaying an array of virtual screens visualizing financial stock data and related news feeds within the user’s surroundings. We combined the nVisor ST50 headset with InteriaCube4 and Leap Motion devices to enable tracking of head orientation and controlling the VR/AR environment with hands. Users can create and control the virtual screens directly using their hands in 3D space.

Augmented Reality (AR) helps students to understand abstract and invisible concepts in our daily life. There are several applications of AR in areas such as Medical, Cricket, Tourism, and in Education. AR delivers information (physical and abstract concepts) in a simple and meaningful ways which improve students learning along with increased motivation. In this paper, we propose a generalized framework for the automatic registration and augmentation of information (3D objects and audio information) of primary school books to achieve improved learning and motivation. A desktop based GUI is designed which uses an easy and step by step approach during the whole process. The experiments resulted in high accuracy with improved motivation and easiness.

In this paper it is presented a markerless multi-view vision-based system to create a spatial representation of an indoor environment. Mixed reality integrates real-world elements into a virtual world. The modeling of such elements should be accurate to avoid interaction inconsistencies. The goal of this work is to achieve the virtualization of a room and its elements, providing seamless user navigation and interaction. This spatial representation based on grid maps provides a clear distinction between occupied and free cells. Scene objects are segmented using clustering techniques. The proposed approach has several potential applications, such as interactive virtual visits to heritage museums, real estate, and training scenarios. Preliminary qualitative results evidence a visually accurate modeling of the considered scenes, identifying elements and free space, encouraging future work towards the identification and tracking of static and dynamic elements on the scene.

Augmented Reality (AR) adds virtual elements to the real environment, providing relevant information to the user through the implementation of different IT infrastructures. Thus, the real environment is enriched with extra information that enhances the experience of the user. This technology can be applied in a wide range of areas, for instance: entertainment industry, healthcare, manufacturing industry and educational environment. This paper presents a framework designed for mobile platforms that allows the integration of augmented content like multiple choice questions and videos on a goose board game with the main purpose to reinforce concepts presented in class. We choose this gamification methodology because students can relearn concepts playing collaboratively with questions created by the teacher or students themselves.

This article proposes the development of an augmented reality application that allows the user to preview in real time the product you want to buy, in the same way you can modify the characteristics you want to adjust it to your tastes and needs before making the purchase. The proposal includes the design of the application that incorporates a catalog of living room, dining room and bedroom furniture; the user will be able to modify characteristics of size, color and texture in a way that emphasizes the interaction with the consumer, to this is added the possibility of showing relevant information about the furniture as they are visualized and modified, it allows to reduce the uncertainty of the user and at the same time allow a participatory action where the user is the protagonist. The augmented reality application My Style AR can be used in handheld devices that have support for augmented reality level 2.0.

By using Microsoft Kinect, virtual objects could be fused with presenter in a real-time video for educational purpose. Unfortunately Kinect’s video quality is not good also it could not overcome the issues of occlusion. In this paper, real-time high quality RGB video from a professional video camera was calibrated with the depth image from Kinect to achieve real-virtual fusion, and a hand shape blue-color mask was attach to the presenter’s hand to realize high quality occlusion between virtual objects and real presenter.

This paper combs the pattern of the combination of contents in physical book and augmented reality content in AR publication. Through case studies on narrative patterns which have emerged in different types of augmented reality publications, the authors summarize the respective advantages in the integration between traditional text-narration and AR-narration, and come to some noteworthy points emerged in the narration design. These considerations and discussions can be useful for guiding the design and implementation of augmented reality publication, thus promote the communication effect and social function of AR publication.

Indonesia is a country known for its natural resource. Various flora and fauna lives on this fertile land in the country, such as one-horned rhinoceros (Javanese rhinoceros), Sumateran elephant, Bawean deer or even komodo can be found here. But as the technology evolves, author will apply Augmented Reality (AR) technology to present these Indonesia’s animals in real scale without disturbing their population. This technology is equipped with features to apply realistic shadow so the object of virtual animals will have shadow similar to real animals. Phase to create this realistic shadow is receive light, which is a process receiving light from sun object in virtual environment, then setting plane is a setting in virtual plane to receive shadow’s projection and projection shadow is method to projecting shadow on a plane in virtual environment. The result of applying realistic shadow augmented reality is a projection reference on virtual objects. Applied realistic shadow will give a realistic impression on virtual animals of Indonesia that is showed.

In this article, we proposed an augmented reality system that was developed in Unity-Vuforia. The system simulates a war environment using three-dimensional objects and audiovisual resources to create a real war conflict. Vuforia software makes use of the database for the creation of the target image and, in conjunction with the Unity video game engine resources, animation algorithms are developed and implemented in 3D objects. That is used at the hardware level are physical images and a camera of a mobile device that combined with the programming allows to visualize the interaction of the objects through the recognition and tracking of images, said algorithms are belonging to Vuforia. The system allows the user to interact with the physical field and the digital objects through the virtual button. To specify, the system was tested and designed for mobile devices that have the Android operating system as they show acceptable performance and easy integration of applications.

The current work demonstrates the use of augmented reality technology for the development of an application that can be employed as an additional teaching tool within physics in secondary educational institutions in Kazakhstan. The application contains a set of problem tasks in “Mechanics”. The physical processes within tasks are visualized with help of augmented reality and this helps pupils to imagine and understand deeper the studied phenomena. One of the advantages and distinctive features of the developed application is that it provides the user interface in Kazakh, Russian and English languages. This corresponds to the multilingual policy adopted by the government of the country. In the article the existing analogs worldwide are presented, development software is described and the main results of the project are discussed.

Agritourism is an extension of ecotourism, which encourages visitors to experience agricultural life at firsthand. The growing interest in this industry worldwide poses new challenges to the environment. Traditional tourism models have somehow endangered local biodiversity and, consequently, it is necessary to promote new models that include education. Eco-education is commonly conducted through passive learning approaches within educational institutions, which often result in poor student performance in real life. Therefore, it is necessary to generate active methodologies to enrich learning experiences. Augmented Reality holds the power to add multiple benefits to the learning processes. Accordingly, this study introduces “ARtour”. ARtour combines an Augmented Reality experience with on-site experiences to learn about agritourism while encourages tourists to maintain responsible environmental behavior. The project considers two outdoor learning scenarios: aquaponics and subsistence crops. We posit that ARtour will enhance outdoor learning experiences and will be a useful guide to promote agritourism.

Marker-based AR is widely used in outdoors applications enabling the augmentation of physical objects with virtual elements. However, the diversification of lighting conditions may severely affect the accuracy of marker tracking in outdoors environments. In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of geolocative raycasting, a technique which enables the real-time estimation of the user’s field of view in outdoors mobile applications, as a complementary method for enhancing the robustness of marker-based AR applications, thus mitigating the effect of lighting sensitivity.

Transpilation allows to write code once and re-use it across multiple runtime environments. In this paper, we propose a software development practice to implement once the motion controllers of virtual humans and re-use the implementation in multiple game engines. In a case study, three common human behaviors – blinking, text-to-speech, and eye-gaze – were developed in the Haxe programming language and deployed in the free, open-source Blender Game Engine and the commercial Unity engine. Performance tests show that transpiled code executes within 67% faster to 127% slower with respect to an implementation manually written in the game engine target languages.

One of the methods of non-realistic rendering - sketching and its use and outcomes with utilization of modern graphic cards is presented in the paper. First we outline individual aspects of the drawing and their basic inscriptions. The goal of the proposed sketching method and the subject of its visualization outputs are artist-made-like images. We describe the process of this kind of creation. Our goal is also real-time processing. Therefore, the proposed method combines CPU and GPU processing. Multi-passes through the graphical pipeline of programmable GPUs are used. Finally appropriate evaluation criteria are set and evaluation is performed using this criteria.

The esthetics and personality of animated agents play an important role in enhancing the experience of human-computer interactions. In the context of online learning and instruction, research shows that the personality of pedagogical agents can have a significant impact on students’ learning. The study reported in the paper focused on the expression of agents’ personality through non-verbal cues. In particular, it investigated whether certain gait parameters affect how the audience perceives the personality of a stylized animated pedagogical agent walking in a virtual classroom. While evidence exists that the way a character walks can affect the viewer’s perception of his/her personality, it is not clear yet which specific gait attributes contribute the most to identifying the personality of the character. In this study, six different parameters of gait were examined to see how slight changes in their values could help the audience perceive the agent as an extrovert. The study included 18 video stimuli and data was collected from 79 participants. Findings confirmed the effect gait can have on the perception of personality. They further suggest that stride length, beat of the walk (e.g. walking speed) beltline tilt, and upper body twist contribute the most towards this end.

New graphics APIs require users to implement a lot of needed functionality, such as memory management, by themselves. In this paper we present an abstraction layer build on top of such API, in our case the Vulkan API, for purpose of off-screen rendering of large data. We also present a use case for such abstraction layer implementation – a remote rendering system for simple Path Tracing accessible through web-based client-side application. The preliminary evaluation results show that implementation of simple Path Tracer is significantly faster then comparable implementation in OpenCL. In conclusion we also present possible extension and improvements of the developed abstraction layer.

Visualization of the results of the ab initio calculations is important for the analysis of these results. It improves the quality of the analysis by supplementing the plain numbers received as the output of the calculations with various graphical images and facilitates the analysis of the results. In addition to that visualization helps avoiding some mistakes or inconsistencies. Various tools have been used in this work to construct the unit cell models of the calculated lattices, to check and analyze the calculated lattice structure before and after the relaxation, to plot total and difference electron charge density maps.

In this paper we propose a secure lossy image compression method based on Adaptive Vector Quantization. The proposed approach is founded on the principles of the Entropy-restricted Semantic Security and the logical functioning of the Squeeze Cipher algorithm. It could be useful in several application domains, including Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR), for its security aspects and for its asymmetrical compression/decompression behavior. Indeed, decompression is more efficient and significantly faster with respect to compression. This aspect could be relevant in many scenarios where images are compressed once and decompressed several times, sometimes on devices with limited hardware capabilities. In the proposed approach a single key is used for the compression and the simultaneous encryption of the input image. Such a key must also be used for decryption (and the associated simultaneous decompression). We report preliminary experimental results achieved by a proof-of-concept implementation of our approach. Such results seem to be quite promising and meaningful for future investigations of the proposed approach.

The paper introduces a simple and computationally efficient algorithm for dynamic and interactive water simulation in applications where physical accuracy is not required, but a credible look and little impact on rendering speed are of crucial importance.