Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

INFRA-FP7: VISIONAIR

Participants : Georges Dumont [contact] , Bruno Arnaldi, Valérie Gouranton, Thierry Duval, Alain Chauffaut, Ronan Gaugne.

Our actual Virtual Reality systems allowed us to be a key partner within the European Project VISIONAIR (http://www.infra-visionair.eu/ ) that began in February 2011 in the infrastructure call of FP7. Our Immersia (see section  6.4 ) Virtual Reality room is now, in Europe, a key place for virtual reality. We are leading the Work Package 9 on Advanced methods for interaction and collaboration of this project and are deeply involved in the directory board and in the scientific piloting committee. The VISIONAIR project's goal is to create a European infrastructure that should be a unique, visible and attractive entry towards high level visualization facilities. These facilities will be open to the access of a wide set of research communities. By integrating our existing facilities, we will create a world-class research infrastructure enabling to conduct frontier research. This integration will provide a significant attractiveness and visibility of the European Research Area. The partners of this project have proposed to build a common infrastructure that would grant access to high level visualization and interaction facilities and resources to researchers. Indeed, researchers from Europe and from around the world will be welcome to carry out research projects using the visualization facilities provided by the infrastructure [6] . Visibility and attractiveness will be increased by the invitation of external projects.

This project is built with the participation of 26 partners, INPG ENTREPRISE SA IESA France , Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble France, University of Patras LMS Greece, Cranfield University United Kingdom, Universiteit Twente Utwente Netherlands, Universitaet Stuttgart Germany, Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej Pan Psnc Poland, Université De La Méditerranée D'aix-Marseille II France, Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche CNR Italy, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique INRIA France, Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan Sweden, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Israel, Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen RWTH Germany, Poznan University of Technology Poland, Arts et Métiers ParisTech AMPT France, Technische Universitaet Kaiserslautern Germany, The University of Salford United Kingdom, Fraunhofer-gesellschaft zur foerderung der Angewandten Forschung Germany, fundacio privada I2CAT Spain, University of Essex United Kingdom, Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia Szamitastechnikai Es Automatizalasi Kutato Intezet Hungary, École Centrale de Nantes France, University College of London United Kingdom, Politecnico di Milano Polimi Italy, European Manufacturing and Innovation Research Association (cluster leading excellence).

STREP: NIW

Participants : Gabriel Cirio, Anatole Lécuyer [contact] , Maud Marchal, Léo Terziman.

The Natural Interactive Walking Project (NIW) is a 3-year project funded by the European Commission under the FET Open STREP call. NIW involves 5 partners: INRIA/VR4i (Bunraku), University of Verona (leader), University of Aalborg, University of Paris 6, and McGill University. The Natural Interactive Walking (NIW) project aims at taking advantage of multisensory information about the ground to develop knowledge for designing walking experiences. This will be accomplished through the engineering and perceptual validation of human-computer interfaces conveying virtual cues of everyday ground attributes and events. Such cues may be conveyed by auditory, haptic, pseudo-haptic, and visual augmentation of otherwise neutral grounds. The project is focused on creating efficient and scalable display methods across these modalities that can be easily and cost-effectively reproduced, via augmented floors and footwear.

It is expected that the NIW project will contribute to scientific knowledge in two key areas. First, it will reinforce the understanding of how our feet interact with surfaces on which we walk. Second, it will inform the design of such interactions, by forging links with recent advances in the haptics of direct manipulation and in locomotion in real-world environments. The methods that will be created could impact a wide range of future applications that have become prominent in recently funded research within Europe and North America. Examples include floor-based navigational aids for airports or railway stations, guidance systems for the visually impaired, augmented reality training systems for search and rescue, interactive entertainment, and physical rehabilitation.

ADT-Mixed Reality Technological Development: VCore

Participants : Georges Dumont [contact] , Thierry Duval, Valérie Gouranton, Alain Chauffaut [contact] , Ronan Gaugne [contact] , Rémi Félix.

The Mixed Reality Project is a shared collaboration between Fraunhoffer IGD and five INRIA research centers: Rennes, Grenoble, Sophia, Lille and Saclay. On the INRIA side, the project started in october 2011, with a four years outlook, as an ADT with two IJDs, one in Rennes and one in Sophia. The goal of the project is to build a modular shared source software framework, fostering the development of new and unique research topics and application areas, which can be used alike by research teams and innovative companies. The goal is to make it a de facto standard, favoring interoperability between various developments in the mixed reality area. Research teams will get a sound software base that helps them focus their efforts on innovative software libraries or applications. Companies will benefit from implementations of state-of-the-art algorithms as well as a full-fledged framework strongly connected with 3D-related emerging standards like Collada, X3D and WebGL.