Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry
National Initiatives
ARC NIEVE: Navigation and Interfaces in Emotional Virtual Environments
Participants : Peter Vangorp, Adrien David, George Drettakis, Gaurav Chaurasia, Emmanuelle Chapoulie.
The goal of this joint research project is to develop and evaluate improved interfaces for navigation in immersive virtual environments (VEs) such as the 4-wall stereoscopic ISpace system in the Immersive Space Gouraud-Phong.
This project is in collaboration with G. Cirio, M.Marchal, A. Lécuyer (VR4I, Rennes) and I. Viaud-Delmon (IRCAM).
There is evidence of significant overlap in brain structures related to spatial memory and orientation and those related to emotion. We will examine the influence of high-quality 3D visual and auditory stimuli on the emotions evoked by the virtual environment. Our study will focus on the phobia of dogs as a way to modulate emotion in audiovisual VEs (Figure 14 ).
Navigation in VEs involves the use of different views, i.e., egocentric (“first person”) and allocentric (“bird's eye”) views during navigation tasks. We will study appropriate visual representations for each view (for example, the level of realism ranging from abstract map-like rendering for top-down views to photorealistic rendering for first-person views), and appropriate transitions between the different views.
We will develop an appropriate methodology to evaluate such navigation interfaces in stressful environments, based on the insights gained by the emotion modulation study in phobic settings. This novel methodology can be seen as a “stress-test” for navigation interfaces: if the navigation interfaces developed are successful even in stressful setups, they will definitely be successful under “normal conditions”.
ARC NIEVE has resulted in several publications this year: [22] , [20] , [16] , [17] .
This is a joint research project with Isabelle Viaud-Delmon (IRCAM, CNRS), Anatole Lécuyer and Maud Marchal (VR4I / INRIA Rennes), and Jean-Christophe Lombardo (DREAM / INRIA Sophia Antipolis). Interact3D (Section 7.2.3 ) is associated with this ARC.
ANR ALTA
Participants : Emmanuelle Chapoulie, Adrien David, George Drettakis.
The ANR ALTA project started in October 2011, and focuses on the development of novel algorithms for realistic and efficient global illumination. The project is coordinated by the Grenoble INRIA group ARTIS (N.Holzschuch), and the Bordeaux INRIA group IPARLA (X. Granier) is also a partner.
Our participation will mainly be in the study of error bounds for these algorithms and the development of interactive global illumination solutions that can be used in Virtual Reality solutions, for example in the context of the immersive space.
ADT Interact3D
Participants : Adrien David, George Drettakis.
This ADT involves half time software development for ARC NIEVE, and the other half general support to the new Immersive Space Gouraud-Phong in Sophia-Antipolis (supervised by Jean-Christophe Lombardo of the DREAM service). The main contribution was the complete rewrite of our VR application environment with the development of the Imerse software. This platform will allow first experiments, and the development of a generic Virtual Reality framework addressing neuroscience/psychology applications. This generic platform is based on osgVR which aims at a high-quality context abstraction to be usable in several domains, as well as distributed rendering capacities. These improvements, deployable for a variety of applications to come, are tightly coupled with the current ARC NIEVE, thus contributing to its implementation. Future prospects for the ADT Interact 3D include developing novel multimodal interaction techniques for example for gesture-based interaction etc.
National French Bilateral Collaboration
We have ongoing collaborations with J. Thollot (INPG/INRIA Grenoble) [14] , , M. Hachet (IPARLA, Bordeaux) [22] , and B. Galerne (ENST/ENS Cachan) and Sylvain Lefebvre (ALICE/Nancy) [19]