period Jan. 2009 - Sep. 2009: del7.1.metrics.pdf
period Oct. 2009 - Dec. 2009: 08_01_2009-12_31_2009.pdf
period Jan. 2010 - Sep. 2010: 01_01_2010-09_20_2010.pdf
period Oct. 2010 - Dec. 2010: 10_01_2010-12_31_2010.pdf
period Jan. 2011 - Sep. 2011: 01_01_2011-09_30_2011.pdf

• Snow:
  
  
• Beach sand:
  
  
• Dry Leaves:
  
  
• Forest underbrush:
  
  
• Gravel:
  
  
• Country road (dirt and pebbles):
  
  
• High grass:
  
  

UNIVR: niwmeeting_udineunivr.pdf

UNIUD: presentazionemarcouniud.pdf

McGILL: mcgill-niw-italy.pdf

AAU: niwmeeting_udineaau.pdf

INRIA: niw_udinemeeting_inria_advancement_report.ppt

UPMC: niw-meeting-feb-23-upmc2.pdf (updated Mar. 3, 2011)


--- MINUTES FROM THE *NIW* MEETING ---

23-24 FEBRUARY 2011

Università di Udine
Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica (DIMI)
Sala Riunioni - Piano II
via delle Scienze 208
33100 UDINE

Author: F. Fontana


FEB. 23 - The meeting starts at noon, with technical operations to enable connection with physically absent participants. Thanks to multiparty audio and video conferencing capability offered by Skype 5.0 for free 7 days trial, all remote participants successfully connect to the meeting room. Screen projection and voice communication is ensured by usual devices. In the end, all attendees will be recognizing that Skype can be used as a productive tool for multiconferencing.

Participants:

UNIUD: F. Fontana, M. Civolani
McGill: J. Cooperstock, G. Millet, plus four students (all in teleconference)
UNIVR: S. Papetti, P. Polotti
INRIA: A. Lecuyér, G. Cirio (both in teleconference)
UPMC: V. Hayward (in teleconference)
AAU: S. Serafin

1.15pm - Lunch at the cafeteria

2.30pm - Tour the table. Professor Davide Rocchesso from Venice IUAV and Dr. Roberto Ranon from UNIUD are welcome as interested external attendants.

2.30pm Project status

- FF opinion is that the project is running well, pending the state of advancement that will be shortly presented by the participants. By informal news, it seems that NIW has been accepted to FET 2011 in Budapest. He nevertheless urges not to forget the salient points of the Consolidated report from the EC: although claiming in general good achievent during the second year, it asks to the consortium to document the third year activites better. In particular, FF solicits everybody to provide pointers to the overall 2010 project production for the official Monitoring of the ICT-RTD Implementation in 2010, to be compiled shortly by the coordinator.

- FF informs that the payment process for the second year should be soon initiated by the Commission. The meeting of the General Assembly is opened and closed immediately. No further communications from the Coordinator.

- VH informs that Yon Visell will be moving to UPMC as soon as possible. JC confirms that Yon Visell will be in condition to start a post-doc grant as soon as the administration at McGill releases the official certificate of doctorate. Holding this situation, VH asks for a possible 6 month extension of the project: FF suggests to make a request to the coordinator say at least three months before the project ends, i.e., by the end of June.

3.10pm Plans for the future

- JC informs that McGill's Shared Reality Lab has submitted an application with a specific focus on developments of NIW, especially on rehabilitation. He wishes that the consortium will work on a corresponding project follow-up. SS would be in favor of this idea. AL is positive as well, and echoes that rehabilitation is a promising application field of the project results. Both SS and AL have resources to support part of the current NIW personnel after the project end. JC includes also entertainment and simulation as possible application fields. FF probes the interest on this idea around the consortium. He proposes to establish contacts with the Project Officer concerning ways to implement a follow-up process. After receiving agreement on possibilities to launch a proposal follow-up, FF asks to defer further discussions on this point to the following day, when YV will be joining the meeting from remotely.

- Agreement is reached on organizing the next meeting at UPMC, on July 12-13. A fifteen minutes break is proposed before the technical presentations.

4.00pm Technical presentations

- 4.00pm - 5.00pm UNIVR/UNIUD (see companion slides in the website)

- 5.05pm - 5.35pm McGill University (see companion slides in the website)

- 5.40pm - 6.05pm AAU (see companion slides in the website)

- Yon Visell occasionally enters the conference. FF and AL agree with him on meeting times and main topics for the following day

- 6.20pm - 6.40pm INRIA (see companion slides in the website)

- 6.45pm - 7.05pm UPMC (see companion slides in the website)

All participants appreciate the unusually broad set of results that continues to spring out from the project people. SS and AL agree on later talking to understand each other work better, for possible collaborations.

Everybody judge the multi-party teleconference fruitful more than expected.

The meeting closes at 7.10pm.

Dinner scheduled at 8pm at restaurant "Conte di Carmagnola".


FEB. 24 - The meeting starts at 10.30am

Participants:

UNIUD: F. Fontana
McGill: Y. Visell (in teleconference)
INRIA: A. Lécuyer, G. Cirio (both in teleconference)

10.30am - Discussion on possible project follow-up

- FF and AL ask YV about possibilities to collaborate from UPMC to a new project proposal. YV solicits ideas as a pre-condition to create shared involvement. Possible fields may include moving to self-motion perception. Applications could embrace in particular video games, rehabilitation. FF proposes electronic gaming for rehabilitation. AL includes vestibular rehabilitation for recoverying balance/equilibrium

- FF proposes to trim such ideas together into a simple, basic core, and try to obtain feedback from the project officer on the prospetive potential of this core. FF will transmit to AL and YV an initial platform for this core

- Provided that the research is moving to a more applicative field, collaborations with reahabilitation centres, industry, and game factories should take place. AL lists French UBISOFT (games), Immersion (VR/3D), Haption (Haptics) as potential subjects. Other partners maybe A. Steed (UCL) and related indistrial contacts, F. Steinicke (Geramny), A. Kohlraush (Philips research)

11.20am - Discussion on the book deliverable

Assorted questions on overlap between chapters 6, 7, 8, as by the latest YV's proposed list of contents, bring to the following revised outline:

- Chapter 1: Introduction (F. Fontana, Y. Visell)
- Chapter 2: Haptic Displays (V. Hayward LEAD., A. Berrezag, Y. Visell)
- Chapter 3: Pedestrian tracking (Y. Visell LEAD, R. Rajalingham, J. Cooperstock)
- Chapter 4: Distributed floor surface interaction (Y. Visell LEAD, input from McGill, possibly Verona (acoustic sensing?))
- Chapter 5: Navigation in VR (Leo Terziman or Anatole, LEAD)
- Chapter 6: Visual and pseudo-haptic rendering (Maud Marchal LEAD, others)
- Chapter 7: Auditory rendering (algorithms) and display techniques (shoes, loudspeakers) (S. Serafin, LEAD - input from Verona, Udine)
- Chapter 8: Multisensory and haptic rendering (Gabriel Cirio, LEAD, input from McGill)
- Chapter 9: Results on unimodal, multimodal, and cross-modal/pseudo-haptic perception (Survey of results, not a detailed presentation of individual experiments) (Rolf Nordahl, LEAD, input from all)

- FF needs further offers, that his administration must compare with the existing one from Logos Verlag. YV will enter into touch with Springer, FF will contact an Italian open publisher.

The meeting closes at 11.50am.


When: Wednesday 23 February 2011 at 1200 Ends: Thursday 24 February 2011 at 1300
Location: "Sala riunioni" (2 floor) - Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica - Via delle Scienze 206 - Udine 33100 - Italy
http://www.dimi.uniud.it/
========================

HOW TO GET THERE FROM THE UDINE TRAIN STATION:

i) buy some bus tickets (at least two; four if you join the entire meeting) at the ticket store across the main road, right behind the bus stop opposite of the station

ii) go to the bus stop exactly nearby

iii) take the 10 Circolare (Destra, if I remember well, but Sinistra would bring you there anyway in longer time). Only during peak student hours there is also a "SPECIALE UNIVERSITA'", quite faster

iv) after a while off the city center you will note an isolated pink, wet building with blue window frames. When the road becomes narrow and winding, if needed call for the stop and get off with the students

v) the building is a good example of the possibility to cancel human orientation. It has been designed by an architect with a record in prison design. I will put ads along the way

========================

HOW TO GET TO UDINE TRAIN STATION

Trieste Ronchi dei Legionari and Venezia Marco Polo are the airports closest to Udine.

========================

PROGRAMME

WEDNESDAY 23
-------------------
12.00 Welcome. Trying to make teleconference systems working if needed.

13.15 Lunch at the cafeteria.

14.30 Communications from the coordinator. Financial issues. Management issues. Meeting of the General Assembly.

15.00 Communications from the rest of the consortium. Plans for the next meeting.

15.20 Current activity at UNIVR and UNIUD (S. Papetti, M. Civolani)

15.40 Current activity at McGill (J. Cooperstock, from remotely)

16.00 Current activity at AAU (S. Serafin)

16.20 Current activity at INRIA (A. Lecuyér, from remotely)

16.40 Current activity at UPMC (V. Hayward, from remotely)

17.00 Future plans. Exchanges of personnel. Dissemination plans.

17.20 Further issues, discussion.

19.00 Bus 10 to downtown. Good for reaching the restaurant (see below), and the station.

19.30 Sightseeing of the center (my knowledge about Udine is even scarcer than that of Verona, but there are some lovely places)

20.00 Dinner at the Conte di Carmagnola: traditional Udinese food, which usually means "not much for vegetarians"... Please let us know your needs in this regard.


THURSDAY 24
-----------------
10.00 Opening.

10.15 NIW book (i.e. Del. 7.3) - Plan and Coordination among editors, Chapter leaders, and authors.

13.00 End of the meeting

13.15 Lunch

14.30 Free tail, for those who wish to.

========================


Maud with shoes (2009 prototype): maudwithshoes.mp4

Stefano D.M. with shoes (2009 prototype): stemwithshoes.mp4

Stefano P. with shoes (2010 prototype):

Sensitive floor concept:

Marco with shoes (2011 prototype):


Summary financial report formc_allparticipants.pdf


Latest version:

- v. 2.0 - Final (Nov. 29, 2010): periodicreportii_2_0-1.pdf

Previous versions:

- v. 1.2 - Draft (Oct. 3, 2010): periodicreportII_1_5.pdf
- v. 1.1 - Draft (Sep. 30, 2010): periodicreportII_1_3.pdf
- v. 1.0 - Draft (Sep. 29, 2010): periodicreportII_1_2.pdf


--- MINUTES FROM THE *NIW* MEETING ---

11-13 OCTOBER 2010

INRIA - Campus Beaulieu
Room Sardeigne
Rennes - France

Author: F. Fontana

OCT. 11 - The meeting starts at 10.00am

Participants:

UNIUD: F. Fontana
McGill University: Y. Visell
AAU: S. Serafin, L. Turchet
INRIA: A. Lecuyer, G. Cirio, L. Terziman
UPMC: V. Hayward, A. Berrezag
UNIVR: S. Papetti, M. Civolani

The Coordinator opens the meeting.

10.20am Management issues

- VH is welcomed, whose recent state of health prevented him to provide a timely submission of Deliverable 2.2.

- FF recalls that participant UNIUD now coordinates the project officially. He informs that D2.2 has been delivered two days ago.

- Since only few days have passed from the end date of the second period, all participants have provided only preliminary financial data. Such data have been included in the current draft of the periodic report. In parallel, there is a NEF session already open waiting for the official financial figures and periodic report to be uploaded. FF recommends every participant to monitor its own administrations, so as to acquire such data as soon as possible.

- No specific administration issues are raised by the consortium.

10.40am Preparation of the review meeting

- FF shows the slides he has produced for the review introduction to NIW. They are essentially an elaboration of previous material, updated where needed. Comments, improvements, and fresh images are collected from all participants.

- A couple of slides on the use of resources are prepared by FF, based on current inputs on person/months coming from the beneficiaries. VH adds novel data referring to UPMC persons effort.

- Few slides are generated for the technical overview. In particular, every participant adds its own ongoing openings to other projects and research institutions.

1.00pm Lunch

2.00pm Preparation of the review meeting

- LT, MC, and LuT go to the demonstration room to set up the prototypes that will be respectively presented by AAU, UNIVR, and INRIA.

- All participants share, then group and assemble together materials that will be provided during the technical overview. Consistency with the review agenda is checked. Minor modifications are introduced in the same agenda.

- All slides are finally reviewed and put together. Handouts and paper materials are prepared accordingly.

6.00pm All demos working, the meeting is closed.

OCT. 12 - The meeting starts at 10.00am

Participants:

UNIUD: F. Fontana
McGill University: Y. Visell
AAU: S. Serafin, L. Turchet
INRIA: A. Lecuyer, M. Marchal, G. Cirio, L. Terziman
UPMC: V. Hayward, A. Berrezag
UNIVR: S. Papetti, M. Civolani
EC: P. Hearn
Reviewers: S. Glasauer

All day is devoted to the review meeting, whose final agenda is reported here below for convenience.

10.20am: Welcome and tour de table
10.30am: 2nd year project overview - F. Fontana (UNIUD)
10.50am: Management and financial overview - F. Fontana (UNIUD)
11.10am: Technical overview - F. Fontana (UNIUD)
11.20am: Hardware interfaces - V. Hayward (UPMC), M. Civolani (UNIVR), Y. Visell (McGill)
11.50am: Simulation and interactions - A. Lecuyer (INRIA), Y. Visell (McGill), S.Serafin (AAU)
12.20pm: Experiments and evaluation - A. Lecuyer (INRIA), S. Papetti (UNIVR), S.Serafin (AAU), Y. Visell (McGill)
1.00pm: Demos and Lunch
2.20pm: Plans for year 3
2.40pm: General discussion
3.10pm: Private meeting of review panel
3.50pm: Feedback and close

- PH recalls that two out of three reviewers are physically absent, also due to the strike affecting public transport in France. Review reports prepared by the absent reviewers will be considered during the meeting.

- The agenda is followed, except for an earlier start and a later conclusion. The private meeting is compressed in time by force majeure, due to uncertainty of train and flight connections to Paris and Brussels caused by the same strike.

- Clarifications on the delivered material are often requested by the review panel during the individual presentations.

- At feedback time, the Project officer notes the special effort that has been made for rapidly pointing out sufficiently insightful feedback, given the absence of two reviewers. The feedback form the panel is summarized in the following points:
* the second period has generally seen a very good progress;
* the corpus of products, especially the paper production, testifies sufficient breakthrough; the new haptic technologies and the number of perceptual validations is impressive;
* it is recommended to keep going with good publications, as well as stay oriented toward the best scientific products;
* the review material is not sufficiently supported by available references; a booklet of all published products would make the work easier to the reviewers;
* year three should continue to see research negotiation and exchanges among participants;
* any wrap-up of project products, such as for instance an integrated prototype, is welcome as far as it will not limit the consortium horizons;
* more conclusive ideas for the third year would be expected by the consortium. For this reason, PH suggests to promptly inform the Commission and review panel with such ideas.

More peculiar observations on the specific research results have come from the panel as well: the consortium should try to see how things work in real world before simulating it (for example the visual motion of walking on a bump with velocity is not realistic, so it is probably not surprising that the auditory feedback was dominant in that case); sometimes the simulation of one modality is not realistic enough, in a way that it is easily dominated by another one; the shoes produce realistic vibrations, conversely sound is affected by too many high frequencies; vibrotactile actuators may be perhaps positioned better inside the shoes.

The meeting closes at 4.00pm


OCT. 13 - The internal meeting starts at 10.00am

Participants:

UNIUD: F. Fontana
McGill University: Y. Visell
AAU: S. Serafin
INRIA: A. Lecuyer, M. Marchal
UNIVR: S. Papetti

10.00am Actions based on reviewers' feedback

- Supplementary material needed by McGill University, AAU, and INRIA, is solicited. The web site content must be fixed accordingly.

11.00am Management issues

- Tentative date and location of meetings: 15-16 February at UNIUD; somewhere/sometime in June/July; last (review) meeting in October at AAU.

- Deliverable in WP7 about the Book.
* The book will be an overview of results from NIW Project
* The tentative outline of material made in July is kept
* Submission of Walking in Virtual Worlds (Springer Book) in 2012; Any materials should appear there
* Budget available: Approximately 4000 Euros
* FF will probe at Logos Verlag. SS will contact Springer's open publishing branch
* YV will create a temporal schedule for submission of chapter outlines by chapter authors / coordinators

11.30am Scientific plan for final year

- The Consortium notes that many ideas and already ongoing activities have been not highlighted during the review meeting even if they easily could. Each participant is then asked to list such activities now, along with its short-term plans.

- INRIA is working on:
* novel input components such as new sensing devices for walking detection
* novel simulation paradigms, such as a multimodal display model for various states of ground (deformable, liquid, solid)
* evolved feedback based on visual camera motions
* integration efforts, resulting in (INRIA + UNIVR) "Shoes Your Style" interaction prototype, and (INRIA + McGILL) experiments on wet floors.

- McGill will be mainly carrying on activities on interaction techniques and floor-based touch user interfaces.

- UPMC later on provides an insightful list, through an evening VH's email:
* postural effects due to chirp-like signals. Preliminary data showed problems that have been probably understood. New experiments is under way.
* it was found that certain vibrotactile signals to the feet could elicit "vection". The effect is however weak, robust and may involve strong cognitive factors (as well as learning). On the other hand, UPMC found that when combined with sub-threshold visual stimulation, the haptic foot stimulation could reliably raise the threshold and trigger the effect where each stimulus in isolation wouldn't. An experimental study will be aimed at replicating these studies but with combined stimulation.
* in audition is is known that phase information in a signal contributes weakly to the perceptual outcome, except in some specific conditions. The aim of an UPMC study is to compare vibrotaction to audition in this respect, where it is predicted that vibrotaction relies on phase information (that is waveform as opposed to spectrum) to a greater extent that audition. This idea poses difficult conceptual problems, like in all studies motivated by the comparison between different sensory modalities (the banana-apple problem) which UPMC proposes to address through signal energy considerations. This study has important implications in terms of interface design as well as in the neurophysiology of touch.
* the "sense of presence" is an important issue in virtual reality systems. The simulation of foot-ground/floor interaction during locomotion or station is expected to contribute greatly to the sense of presence in virtual reality systems. This observation applies equally to large screens (stationary viewing), cave-like environments (locomotion permitted), as well as HMD-based environments, including auditory stimulation with spatialization. There are established methods to measure "presence" (e.g Slater). It is therefore planned to measure, with AAU, the contribution of foot haptic stimulation to the sense of presence in some of these experimental settings.
* UPMC will continue investigating the theoretical underpinnings of electromagnetic actuation miniaturization techniques using a multi-physics approach. The fluidic actuator prototyping will also be pursued. These two technologies are expected to make fundamental contribution to the art and technology of haptic interfaces.
* UPMC has started to study the physics of propagation of mechanical deformation in living tissues which is at the basis of vibrotactile sensing. It is anticipated that the related findings will further our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying haptic perception general. Implications concern both the technology and the biology of touch (to be made with several collaborators outside NIW).
* In addition, UPMC will complete the construction and testing of the distributed haptic components.

- UNIVR is carrying on bio-mechanical experiments, also based on trans-magnetic stimulation; this participant would also develop more realistic models for the synthesis of feedback

- Current and foreseen collaborations in the third year are listed by the consortium:
* INRIA-UNIVR-AAU: Collaboration on multimodal walking-in-place techniques
* INRIA-AAU: Interactive bumps and holes
* AAU-UPMC: Balance board experiments
* McGill-INRIA: Tile corridor and haptic walking experiments
* McGill-INRIA: Physics / simulation methods – fracture
* UNIVR-McGill: Sounding object models for walking

Recollection of the demos.

The meeting closes at noon.


PDF draft (for internal review use only): dafx10bumpsholes.pdf