IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS,
VOL. 13,
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
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Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Section on ACM VRST 2005 Yiorgos L. Chrysanthou, Member, IEEE, Rynson W.H. Lau, and Gurminder Singh
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Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST) is an annual conference devoted to the technical aspects of virtual reality. It was first started in 1994 and VRST 2005 was the 12th conference. This special section contains extended versions of three of the best papers from VRST 2005. The selection of these three papers for this special section was done by the guest editors after considering the quality of the papers, reviews of the papers from the conference, and their suitability to this journal. The extended papers were reviewed again as journal submissions. The three papers range over some of the diverse topics addressed at VRST. The first paper deals with the compression of motion capture data for low-powered systems. The second paper looks at some of the design issues of a demanding application—a fast moving tabletennis game. The third paper presents a usability study of object manipulation in projection-based display systems. Virtual humans have become an indispensable part of many VR applications and motion capture (MoCap) data are commonly used for realistically animating them. The first paper is by Siddhartha Chattopadhyay, Suchendra M. Bhandarkar, and Kang Li, entitled ”Human Motion Capture Data Compression by Model-Based Indexing: A Power Aware Approach.” It investigates how to make MoCap data more accessible to low-powered distributed VR systems. The authors propose an algorithm for compression of MoCap data, which is based on smart indexing by exploiting structural information derived from the skeletal virtual human model. The method has advantages in terms of both improved compression ratio and computationally simple reconstruction of the motion data via a lookup table included in the compressed file, thus eliminating the need for explicit decompression. When compared to standard MPEG-4 compression, this has both reduced the throughput requirement for networked applications requiring motion data exchange and reduced client power consumption for data reception and decompression. The second paper is by Stephan Rusdorf, Guido Brunnett, Mario Lorenz, and Tobias Winkle, entitled ”Real-Time Interaction with a Humanoid Avatar in an Immersive Table Tennis Simulation.” It presents the CM
realization of an immersive table tennis simulation. Table tennis is a very fast moving sport. Achieving a realistic and enjoyable game requires addressing a number of issues such as physics, collision detection, game strategy, animation of the avatar, and interactivity. It is also important to address the synchronization problem between the human player’s movement and the visual output delivered by the VR display. This paper describes the hardware and software components used to develop a system that addresses these problems. The third paper is by Andreas Simon, entitled ”Usability of Multiviewpoint Images for Spatial Interaction in Projection-Based Display Systems.” It presents a qualitative and quantitative study comparing usability and interaction performance for multiviewpoint images to non-headtracked and head-tracked interaction for raycasting selection and in-hand object manipulation. Results show that, while direct first-person interaction in projection-based displays without head-tracking is difficult or even completely impractical, interaction with multiviewpoint images can produce similar or even better performance than fully head-tracked interaction. We would like to thank the people who helped us make this special section possible. Most important of all, we would like to thank David Ebert, the former Editor-in-Chief of IEEE TVCG, for his support in having this special section. We would also like to thank the authors for contributing their work and for their efforts in revising their papers and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.
Yiorgos L. Chrysanthou Rynson W.H. Lau Gurminder Singh Guest Editors
. Y.L. Chrysanthou is with the Department of Computer Science, University if Cyprus, 75 Kallipoleos Street, PO Box 20537, CY-1678 Nicosia, Cyprus. E-mail:
[email protected]. . R.W.H. Lau is with the Department of Computer Science, University of Durham, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, England. E-mail:
[email protected]. . G. Singh is with the Department of Computer Science, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA 93943. E-mail:
[email protected]. For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to:
[email protected]. 1077-2626/07/$20.00 ß 2007 IEEE
Published by the IEEE Computer Society
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS,
Yiorgos L. Chrysanthou received the BSc degree in computer science and statistics (1990) and the PhD degree in computer graphics (1996) from Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. He is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Cyprus, where he leads the Graphics and Hypermedia Lab. He worked at University College London (UCL), first as a research fellow (1996-1998) and later as a lecturer (1998-2001). He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed papers and is a coauthor of the book Computer Graphics and Virtual Environments: From Realism to Real-Time (Addison-Wesley, 2001). He has served as program cochair for VAST 2004, ACM VRST 2005, and ACM VRST 2006. He is a member of several program committees of international conferences and workshops as well as professional bodies such as the ACM, the IEEE, and Eurographics. His research interests are in the general area of computer graphics and virtual/augmented reality. They include visibility algorithms, image-based rendering, crowd rendering, and simulation and real-time rendering of large environments. Rynson W.H. Lau received the BSc degree in computer systems engineering in 1988 from the University of Kent and the PhD degree in computer graphics in 1992 from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a professor at the University of Durham. Prior to his current appointment, he taught at the City University of Hong Kong from 1998 to 2006 and Hong Kong Polytechnic University from 1993 to 1998. He serves on the editorial board of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds and the International Journal of Virtual Reality. He has served as the guest editor of a number of journal special issues, including ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Presence, and IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications. In addition, he has also served on the conference committees of a number of conferences, including program cochair of ACM VRST 2004 and ICAT 2006, and conference cochair of ACM VRST 2005 and CASA 2005.
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Gurminder Singh received the PhD degree in computing science from the University of Alberta, Canada. He is a professor of computer science and director of the Center for the Study of Mobile Devices and Communications at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), California. His primary area of focus is wireless technology and applications. He is currently involved in the research of wireless sensor networks and mobile devices. Prior to NPS, he was the president and CEO of NewsTakes, Inc., a company specializing in repurposing of multimedia content for delivery to wireless networks and devices. Prior to NewsTakes, Dr. Singh was the director at the Kent Ridge Digital Lab (now I2R), where his responsibilities included strategic directions for research, management of research staff, and commercialization of intellectual property. He has helped mentor and spin-off several start-ups in wireless, Internet, and multimedia in recent years. He has been on the management and advisory boards of start-up companies, and has advised companies and VCs on business plans, intellectual property issues, and management teams. Dr. Singh has been involved with the ACM and the IEEE for many years in organizing conferences, editing special issues of journals, and publishing in their journals. He has published extensively and edited special issues of the Communications of ACM, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, IEEE Multimedia, ACM Multimedia Systems, etc. Professor Singh founded the ACM Virtual Reality Software and Technology Conference in 1994 and cochaired VRST 2005.
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