Virtual Reality

SEMINAR REPORT SUBMITTED TO MANIPAL UNIVERSITY, MANIPAL

FOR THE PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT OF THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF COMPUTER APPLICATION

By Vignesh Kamath (Reg. No: 100919009)

DEPARTMENT OF MASTER OF COMPUTER APPLICATION MANIPAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MANIPAL UNIVERSITY, MANIPAL-576104 KARNATAKA, INDIA JAN 2012

DECLARATION
I hereby declare that this seminar report entitled Virtual Reality is original and has been carried out by me in the Department of Master of Computer Application, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, a constituent Institute of Manipal University. No part of this work has been submitted for the award of a degree or diploma either to this University or to any other Universities. Place: Manipal Date: 18-01-2012

Vignesh Kamath (100919009)

Contents
1 Introduction 2 Overview of Existing Technologies
2.1 Displays 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 Head-Mounted Displays BOOM CAVEs and kin Panoramic Displays Workbenches Tracking

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3 3 4 4 4 4 5

3 Proposed Technology 4 Seminar Report

4.1 Components of a VR System 4.2 Factors of a VR System 4.3 Applications of VR

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5 7 10

5 Conclusions and Future Work 6 References

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Abstract
The hardware capabilities have evolved over the past decade or two, which has helped a lot in developing high-end computer graphics on this present day. Virtual Reality(VR), a step further in the field of computer graphics, was limited by the system constraints due to the real-time rendering of equipment views which placed extreme demands on processor time and the invariable need for expensive hardware. As a result, VR solutions were largely ineffective, being unrealistically slow or oversimplified until recent times. However, ongoing advances in hardware processing power and software development will allow VR to be implemented with full precision. This report tries to explain what exactly the Virtual Reality means and how it differs from normal computer graphics. The report also extends the understandability of how a VR System works, types of devices used to create VR, its applications and also the future of such systems

Introduction

What actually is Virtual Reality? Virtual Reality can be defined as: A three-dimensional (3D) environment generated by a computer, with a run-time that closely resembles reality to the person interacting with the environment. Virtual Reality (VR) and Virtual Environments (VE) are used in computer community interchangeably. The key feature that VR brings to computer-aided process engineering is the real-time rendering capability. To create an effective virtual environment system one has to closely integrate the enabling hardware with software support tools. The very first idea of it was presented by Ivan Sutherland in 1965. The aim was to make that (virtual) world in the window look real, sound real, feel real, and respond realistically to the viewers actions. It has been a long time since then, a . lot of research has been done.

Overview of Existing Technologies

2. 1 Displays Display technology has advanced very rapidly, pulled along by the television, presentation-projection, and LCD-device markets, rather than just the still-small VR market. As VR was developing, much ink was spilled over the relative merits of various formats of displays: head-mounted displays (HMDs), CAVElike (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) surround projectors, panoramic projectors, workbench projectors, and desk-top displays. Most workers consider desktop displays not to be VR because they
1) hardly block out the real world, 2) do not present virtual-world objects in life size, and therefore 3) do not create the illusion of immersion.

2.2 Head-mounted displays The most noticeable advances in HMDs have occurred in resolution, although color saturation, brightness, and ergonomics have also improved considerably. In 1994, one had a choice of costly and cumbersome CRT HMDs, which had excellent resolution and color, or economical LCDs, which had coarse resolution and poor saturation. Today economical LCDs have acceptable resolution (640 480 tricolor pixels) and good color saturation.

2.3 Boom The BOOM (Binocular Omni-Orientation Monitor) from Fakespace is a headcoupled stereoscopic display device. Screens and optical system are housed in a box that is attached to a multi-link arm. The user looks into the box through two holes, sees the virtual world, and can guide the box to any position within the operational volume of the device. Head tracking is accomplished via sensors in the links of the arm that holds the box.

2.4 CAVEs and kin[1] Many major VR installations now use the surround-projection technology rst introduced in the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle CAVE. From three to six faces of a rectangular solid are tted with rear-projection screens, each driven by one of a set of coordinated image-generation systems. Standard off-the-shelf projector resolution is now up to 1280 1024, better than SVGA (super video graphics array) and even XGA (extended graphics array). In a 10 foot cave, this gives an angular resolution of about 4 minutes of arc; human visual acuity is 1 minute of arc for 20/20 vision. The principal advantages of surround-projection displays are
1) a wide, surrounding eld of view, and 2) the ability to give a shared experience to a small group (of whom one or none are head-tracked).

2.5 Panoramic displays One or more screens are alternatively arranged in a panoramic configuration. This suits groups especially, and multidisciplinary design reviews commonly use this type of display. One person drives the viewpoint.

2.6 Workbenches[1] The workbench con guration lays a rear-projection screen at and positions the projector so that the workbenchs length approximates that of a human body. One, two, or conceivably more tracked viewers each perceive a custom-generated image. Angular resolution typically is about 4 minutes of arc near the center of the display. Since the eye-to-far-screen-border plane limits the apparent height of an object, many workbenches can be tilted to resemble drafting tables.

2.7 Tracking[1] In 1994, tracking the viewers head motion was a major problem. Tracker ranges tethered the viewer to an effective radius of about four feet. Tracker accuracy suffered from severe field distortion caused by metal objects and magnetic fields. Unlike display technology and image-generation technology, tracking technology has not had a substantial non-VR market to pull it along. The most important collateral market has been motion capture for entertainment applications, and that market has not pressed the technology on accuracy. So progress in tracking has not matched that of displays and image generation.
Nevertheless, progress has occurred. The UNC-Chapel Hill outward-looking optical tracker is routinely operated over an 18 32-foot range, with accuracy of 1mm and 0.1 degree at 1,500 updates per second. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) trackers give working range radii of 8 to 10 feet. Hybrid-technology trackers seem most promising, combining inertial, optical, ultrasonic, and/or magnetic technologies.

Proposed Technology

Head-Mounted Display and Data Gloves Head-Mounted Display along with Data Gloves(using Haptic Feedback) provide the best experience of the Virtual Environment. The HMDs provide a wide viewing angle and a stereoscopic view of the environment while the Data Gloves have flexible sensors which accurately and repeatably measure the position and movement of the fingers and wrist enabling the user to sense and feel the forcefeedback of any virtual object.

Seminar Report

Virtual Reality cannot be considered just as normal computer graphics, it is beyond that. Computer Graphics can only provide a 2D or a 3D viewing experience where as in VR Systems we can interact with the virtual objects. This interaction, also known as immersion, holds the key issue in VR Systems as it is central to the paradigm where the user becomes part of the simulated world, rather than the simulated world being a feature of the users own world.[2]

4.1 Components of a VR System

Virtual Reality System generally consists of Input devices, Output devices and Software.The input devices are responsible for interaction, output devices for the feeling of immersion and software for a proper control and synchronization of the whole environment.

4.1.1 Input devices Input devices determine the way a user communicates with the computer. Ideally all these devices together, should make users environment control as intuitive and natural as possible - they should be practically invisible. Unfortunately, the current state of technology is not advanced enough to support this, so naturalness may be reached in some very limited cases.
In most of cases we still have to introduce some interaction metaphors that may become a difficulty for an unskilled user.

4.1.2 Output devices Output devices are responsible for the presentation of the virtual environment and its phenomena to the user - they contribute to the generation of an immersive feeling at most. These include visual, auditory or haptic displays. As it is the case with input, the output devices are also underdeveloped. The current state of technology does not allow to stimulate human senses in a perfect manner, because VR output devices are far from ideal: they are heavy, low-quality and low-resolution. In fact most systems support visual feedback, and only some of them enhance it by audio or haptic information. 4.1.3 Software Beyond input and output hardware, the underlying software plays a very important role. It is responsible for the managing of I/O devices, analyzing incoming data and generating proper feedback. The difference to conventional systems is that VR devices are much more complicated than these used at the desktop - they require extremely precise handling and send large quantities

of data to the system. Moreover, the whole application is time-critical and software must manage it: input data must be handled timely and the system response that is sent to the output displays must be prompt in order not to destroy the feeling of immersion.

4.2 Factors of a VR System

4.2.1 Human factors[2] As virtual environments are supposed to simulate the real world, by constructing them we must have knowledge how to fool the users senses. This problem is not a trivial task and the sufficiently good solution has not yet been found: on the one hand we must give the user a good feeling of being immersed, and on the other hand this solution must be feasible. Which senses are most significant, what are the most important stimuli and of what quality do they have to be in order to be accepted by the user?
Let us start by examining the contribution of each of the five human senses: sight.................70 % hearing..............20 % smell...............5 % touch..............4 % taste ...................1 % This chart shows clearly that human vision provides the most of information passed to our brain and captures most of our attention. Therefore the stimulation of the visual system plays a principal role in fooling the sensesand has become the focus of research. The second most important sense is hearing, which is also quite often taken into consideration. Touch in general, does not play a significant role, except for precise manipulation tasks, when it becomes really essential. Smell and taste are not yet considered in most VR systems, because of their marginal role and difficulty in implementation.

The other aspects cannot be forgotten too: system synchronization (i.e. synchronization of all stimuli with usersactions), which contributes mainly to simulator sickness and finally the design issues (i.e. taking into account psychological aspects) responsible for the depth of presence in virtual environments.

4.2.2 Modeling, interaction and rendering Every VR application must be effective by means of performance and interaction. This requirement can be only fulfilled when all system parts input, interaction and output are properly integrated one with the other. Nowadays, even the best hardware cannot support this by itself it needs software assistance for precise control, resources management and synchronization.

4.2.3 Construction of virtual worlds Construction of virtual environments involves many different aspects that were not present in standard computer graphics. The biggest challenge to trade is performance vs. natural look and behavior. As already mentioned before, these requirements are contradictory: more convincing models and better physical simulation demand more resources, thereby increasing computational cost and affecting overall performance. Many different kinds of models representing virtual worlds can be imagined: from simple models like a single unfurnished room, to extremely complex ones like a the whole city with many buildings containing a lot of chambers, each modeled with high amount of detail. While it is trivial to display a simple model with adequate performance, but rendering millions of polygons would hinder interactive frame-rates, even if we were able to load the whole scene into main memory. Hence it will never be technically possible (the faster the hardware, the finer and more complex models will be), we must develop dedicated data structures and algorithms allowing to produce the best image quality with acceptable cost.

4.2.4 Data structures and modeling

For huge scenes containing millions of polygons, the challenge is to identify the relevant (potentially visible) portion of the model, load data into memory and render it at interactive frame-rates. In many cases it may still happen that the number of polygons of all visible objects dramatically exceeds rendering capabilities. Therefore the other important aspect of the data structure construction is level-of-detail (LOD) definition. Due to the perspective projection distant objects appear smaller on the screen that the close ones. In the extreme case they may cover as little as one pixel! In this situation it does not make sense to render them with the highest possible geometric resolution, because the user will not notice it. Nevertheless, when the same objects are closer to the user they must be rendered with a high resolution in order to let him/her see all the details.

To achieve the best image quality at interactive frame rates, several approaches may be used: Hierarchical scene database the scene is represented as a set of objects. Each object of the scene is described with multiple LODs that represent different accuracy of object representation (and contain different numbers of polygons). In extreme case objects can be represented by one textured polygon.

Visibility precomputation (analysis) - the whole visual database is spatially subdivided into cells connected by portals. The visibility analysis is performed on such a prepared model in two phases: the preprocessing phase (determination of cell-to-cell and cell-to-object visibility) and during the walkthrough phase (determination of eye-to-cell and eye-to-object visibility). To improve the performance of this process the splitting planes are chosen along the major obscuring elements e.g., walls, floors, ceilings or door frames.

Memory management - if the whole scene cannot be loaded into the main memory, special algorithms for swapping in the relevant parts must be used. The loading of objects from the disk can take relatively much time, so prediction of objects that might be potentially visible in the near future has to be done and loading should start in advance (prefetching), in order to avoid waiting in the rendering phase.

Constant frame-rate rendering - after all the potentially visible objects were determined in the visibility preprocessing phase, it still may happen that not all of them can be rendered with their highest resolution. To provide the best quality of the image within a given time, the selection of LOD and rendering algorithm for each object must be performed. Several properties of objects should be taken into account e.g., size on the screen, importance for the user, focus (position on the screen, where he/she is looking) or motion (for fast moving objects we cannot see many details). As the graphics pipeline in most graphical systems is used, the proper load balancing in each of the stages must be taken into account.

The demand for highly detail scenes has grown rapidly in the last years, so laborintensive, manual creation and processing became impractical. Automatic generation and processing of models offers great possibilities: for example, creation of objects from multiple stereoscopic images was proposed recently. Moreover, techniques that can generate automatically multiple levels-of-detail from one high resolution polygonal representation are very helpful, because they can accelerate the creation of hierarchical scene databases for interactive walkthrough applications.

4.3 Applications of VR
VR may offer enormous benefits to many different applications areas. This is one main reason why it has attracted so much interest. VR is currently used to explore and manipulate experimental data in ways that were not possible before.

4.3.1 Medicine Until now experimental research and education in medicine was mainly based on dissection and study of plastic models. Computerized 3D human models provide a new approach to research and education in medicine. Experimenting medical research with virtual patients will be a reality. We will be able to create not only realistic looking virtual patients, but also histological and bone structures. With the simulation of the entire physiology of the human body, the effects of various illnesses or organ replacement will be visible. Virtual humans associated with VR will certainly become one of the medical research tools of the next century.

4.3.2 Architectural visualization In this area, VR allows the future customer to live his/her a new house before in it is built. He/she could get a feel for the space, experiment with different lighting schemes, furnishings, or even the layout of the house itself. A VR architectural environment can provide that feeling of space. Once better HMDs become available, VR design environment will be a serious competitive advantage.

4.3.3 Design Many areas of design are typically 3D as for example, the design of a car shape, where the designer looks for sweeping curves and good aesthetics from every possible view. Todays design tools are mouse or stylus/digitizer based and thereby force the designer to work with 2D input devices. For many designers, this is difficult since it forces them to mentally reconstruct the 3D shape from 2D sections. A VR design environment can give to designers appropriate 3D tools.

4.3.4 Education and training VR promises many applications in simulation and training. The most common example is the flight simulator. This type of simulator has shown the benefits of simulation environments for training. They have lower operating costs and are

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safer to use than real aircraft. They also allow the simulation of dangerous scenarios not allowable with real aircraft. The main problem of current flight simulators is that they cannot be used for another type of training like submarine training for example.

4.3.5 Entertainment This is the area which starts to drive the development of VR technology. The biggest limiting factor in VR research today is the sheer expense of the technology. It is expensive because the volumes are low. For entertainment, mass production is required. Another alternative is the development of VirtualWorldsfor Lunaparks/casinos.

Conclusions and Future Work

The ability of Virtual Reality to produce realistic worlds of data, objects, with which the users can interact and manipulate in a realistic and an intuitive manner, opens up a vast wealth of possibilities for work-related applications.The concept of Virtual Reality provides an innovative mix of entertainment, education and State-ofArt. From waterbeds to gyroscopes and hydraulic units, a varietyof platforms will provide a new kind of travel; into Cyberspace; into virtual worlds where one can swim with the dolphins and experience intense sensory stimulation..Working in many fields like medicine, rocket launching, massive constructions, designing and modeling, war training andcockpit training, it is very important to be more precise and accurate and here Virtual Reality provides a solution by providing a platform which makes it possible by using the applications of Virtual Reality.

Yesterday Virtual Reality was a science fiction fantasy. Today it is a research topic in laboratories and amusement parks.Tomorrow it will certainly replace our televisions and computers. Many researches are being done to find more and more applications of Virtual Reality. In the forth coming days the web sites developed using Virtual Reality will replace the entire present web industry.

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References

[1] Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., What Real About Virtual Reality?; Univers

sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999

[2] Tomasz Mazuryk and Michael Gervautz, Virtual Reality - History,

Applications, Technology and Future; Institute of Computer Graphics Vi-enna University of Technology, Austria
[3] Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, Virtual Reality Software and Technolo-

gy; MIRALab, Centre Universitaire d Informatique, University of Geneva.

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