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 The NIW Project Documentation Deliverables Private
Area NIW@SMC2011 NIW@FET11 |  Audiovisual DocumentationVirtual environment scenario  icecrackingsmall.mp4 (~8.8Mb)Virtual control surface controlsurfacenotitles.mov Supplementary materials, Intrinsic contact (force) sensing for floor surfacesReport referenced in the deliverable: niwsrefloordraft.pdf Minutes--- MINUTES FROM THE *NIW* MEETING --- 15-16 JULY 2009 INRIA Rennes - France Room Sardeigne Author: F. Fontana Jul. 15 - The meeting starts at 10:45am Participants: UNIVR: F. Fontana, M. Civolani McGill University: J. Cooperstock, Y. Visell AAU: R. Nordahl, S. Serafin, L. Turchet INRIA: G. Cirio, A. Lecuyer, M. Marchal, T. Regia Corte, L. Bonnet UPMC: N. Ouarti The Coordinator opens the meeting and welcomes the participants. A. Lecuyer introduces the host institution and illustrates the meeting agenda for the two days. Each participants briefly introduces her or himself. 11.15 Management issues: - As the end of the first year is approaching, a discussion is opened on how to best manage the temporal process leading to the end of month 12 from now. The Coordinator will start interacting by email with the PO, to have feedback concerning the drafting of an agenda for these two months. - McGill University has a new signing representative in substitution of Francois Carrier, who is the original signing person of the GA. The Coordinator has sent an email to the PO, to get feedback on this point. If not otherwise advised by the Commission, UNIVR will first receive a formal declaration from McGill University, then prepare an official letter containing the approval of the changed signature on behalf of the Consortium. This letter will be sent to the Commission before the end of the first year. 11.45 Meeting of the general assembly: - The Coordinator distributes copies of an updated version of the CA, as proposed by McGill University concerning the protection of IP. The amendment is very similar to that included by INRIA. The GA accepts the proposed update. - It is also decided that the new version of the CA will enter in force after the new McGill University's representative will be approved by the EC 12.10 Communication of project activities - The Coordinator reports about the Coordinator's Day, attended in Brussels in June. On top of the several issues emerged during that day, at least two points are important to be communicated to all participants: i) the Coordinator will have to sign a declaration of completeness and timeliness of the web site. For this reason, all participants are urged to collaborate to improve the structure and content of the web site; ii) The Coordinator reminds to all participants that exchanges of funding can be planned between participants in the case that one participant is for any reason unable to spend the money awarded by the EC. - The Coordinator reports about the Science Beyond Fiction FET event, happened in Prague on March. Overall the event has been a big success, instructive for all participants. Concerning the specific NIW exhibit, this has been a success as well. In spite of the relative youth of the project, the NIW stand in fact has been visited by many curious attendants. Most of them were engaged by the interaction with the tile and shoe interfaces, and positively impressed by their features. Above all, the project has been object of a press release from the BBC which has later proposed part of this release in the popular international TV program 'Click' A discussion on how to organize the agenda for the rest of the meeting is discussed among the participants. 12.45 Lunch 14.00 Individual Participant activities - UNIVR illustrates the first steps of the development of the sensing floor. Differently from existing prototypes such as those made in TAI-CHI, indeed well known by key persons in UNIVR, the idea is rather that of making a portable (floor-less) interface made of only four accelerometers. Once the accelerometers are attached onto the floor, this interface should detect presence as well as approximate position and gesture of walkers, as well as enable real-time acoustic interactions with them. For this reason, the idea is to avoid heavy analytical approaches during the design of the interface and rather use some kind of real time 'light' processing. Comments and hints come from McGill University participants. - INRIA i) G. Cirio illustrates the the Magic Barrier Tape (paper submitted to VR). The model applies a pseudo-haptic illusion to limit the mobility of walkers when they are at the boundary of the physical space where they are making a VR experience, whereas allowing for a virtual extension of this mobility. The presentation of this system will be completed later in the afternoon, in the VR lab. ii) L. Bonnet shows results obtained with a VR model that simulates walking on a slope. Pseudo-haptics illusions of walking over peaks and holes will be provided in the VR lab during the afternoon. iii) T. Regia Corte presents experimental results on the perception of affordances in walking. Preliminary results are shown from experiments using inclined wooden surfaces as affordances. 15.30 Visit to the virtual reality laboratory A. Lecuyer presents the visual VR facilities of the INRIA laboratory. Implementations of the aforementioned models are presented: holes and peaks, inclination (affordances), and virtual boundary extension (magic tape). 16.30 AAU (L. Turchet) shows slides presenting the research activity developed so far for the project. Ideas for experiments assessing sensations of holes and peaks are discussed: Collaboration with Paola Cesari is proposed, maybe in the context of an articulate experimental session involving also other tasks. The meeting closes at 17.45. Jul. 16 - The meeting starts at 10:00am Same participants as the day before. 10.15 Individual Participant activities (2) - UPMC A Skype connection is opened with Vincent Hayward: possibilities for the next (review) meeting are discussed; feedback on the state of advancement of the shoe-based haptic actuators at UPMC is collected. The first prototypes will be realistically present at the end of the summer. - Mc Gill University's recent work is presented. A strong corpus of activities id presented, fertilized also by parallel projects run by the participant. An update on active floor tile display is provided, now undertaking a thorough physical analysis of the system aimed at increasing control of the stimuli. Current floor technology and facilities at McGill are shown. Experiments on foot and body pose from force data are shown, along with running activities on foot motion tracking from floor textures. 12.00 Discussions. Overall, the Consortium acknowledges that all participants have individually gained interesting new results during the first project months, and are now in ideal conditions for initiating the integration that has been planned to start at the second year. 12.45 Lunch 14.00 UNIVR shows further developments of the active shoes. Now the prototype is more developed toward the form of a normal shoe. Sliding sensors have been integrated, that will be soon in condition to provide sonic feedback. A new auditory display system has been mounted, making use of a low-frequency loudspeaker and improved shoe-based small loudspeaker models. 15.00 AAU shows its first version of the rendering system. It makes use of audio microphones located at ground level, that control a sound synthesis system providing different ecological sounds in real-time. 16.30 A final discussion is started on perspectives for the second and third year. - Concerning the plan of the experiments, the roadmap for the second year is already clear: McGill University and INRIA have already started to make experiments based on real as well as virtual multimodal feedback in walking settings (audio-haptic at McGill; visual at INRIA). More experiments are expected to start in a few months, tentatively one (audio only) at UNIVR. Concerning the third year, decisions about the experimental scenario have yet to be taken. Much will depend on the results coming out from the planned experiments. - Concerning integration, it is time for the consortium to activate the necessary exchanges between researchers. Plans for collaborations between UNIVR and INRIA have been delayed, but they still hold. AAU and UNIVR will collaborate in the issue of sound synthesis more tightly. As soon as UPMC delivers prototypes for haptic feedback, their solutions will be immediately circulated by the partners. The meeting closes at 17.45. Guidelines for the deliverablesI have just adapted some latex files used in Verona for delivering in a former project (many thanks to the CLOSED crew). I think that the .zip enclosed here is largely self-explaining. It contains in particular an easily adaptable skeleton for Deliverable 4.1. I suggest to maintain this skeleton in a way that i) any leader changes the title, level of permission, author names etcetera of her/his own deliverable, and ii) he/she receives subfolders from co-workers, that are consequently collated in the deliverable as sections (or chapters, parts, or whatever needed: at the moment I have foreseen only sections for del. 4.1, but let's see...) deliverablestemplate.zipConcerning the bibliography, I would like to implement a concurrent access that, if correctly performed, in the end will allow us to have an amazing collection of the state of the art in the literature of interactive walking. Together with the latex material I uploaded the .bib file named niw_1_0.bib, that you already have in the current archive. It was first compiled when some of us were working on the IJHCI manuscript, now in press. Would be great if any of us will regularly download in this same category the Nth latest (i.e. niw_1_N.bib) version of the .bib file from the website before compiling (with pdflatex), then possibly upload an (N+1)th version niw_1_(N*1).bib if further titles are added in the same. I think this effort will be greatly rewarding at the end of the project. CAUTION: (UNFORTUNATELY THE WEB SITE DOES NOT ACCEPTS .BIB FILES (why?). SHOULD BE ZIPPED BEFORE THE UPLOAD FET link Link to the conference web site. Pictures from PragueSome shots I took at the conference and in the downtown.  Federico at the NIW stand.  Another view of the stand.  The blue sabots.  Some people of the NIW and the Closed teams.  The Cogniron robot.  GTec: a brain-computer interface.  One of the poster sessions.  A part of the exhibition.  Another view.   A view from the Charles Bridge.  A part of the Castle.  Another one.  In the downtown (1/4).  In the downtown (2/4).  In the downtown (3/4).  In the downtown (4/4).  Guards.  View from the castle.  The clock (1/2).  The clock (2/2). Few photos        Maud's walk, Stefano's walk maudwithshoes.mp4 stemwithshoes.mp4 Minutes--- MINUTES FROM THE *NIW* MEETING --- 2-4 MARCH 2009 LABORATORIO DI ACUSTICA MUSICALE E ARCHITETTONICA OF THE FONDAZIONE SCUOLA DI SAN GIORGIO Isola di San Giorgio - Venezia http://www.scuoladisangiorgio.it/lab_it.php Author: F. Fontana Mar. 2 - The meeting starts at 11:00am Participants: - UNIVR: F. Fontana, S. Papetti, P. Polotti, D. Rocchesso, M. Civolani, G. Borin - McGill University: Y. Visell, J. Anlauff, B. Giordano - AAU: S. Serafin, R. Nordahl, L. Turchet - INRIA: A. Lecuyer, M. Marchal - UPMC: V. Hayward, G. Dietz The Coordinator opens the meeting. He recognizes the considerably high participation of delegates. There are no management issues to be communicated. The Coordinator reminds pt. 2 of Art. 7.2 of GA to Y. Visell concerning the financial reporting of McGill University to the EC. Meeting of the General Assembly: nothing to deliberate. V. Hayward tells UPMC during the meeting will present designs that are intended to be covered by patent. All participants agree in that this is a private meeting, and recognize it is important for the project success not to disclose the specification of these designs for the moment. The best trade-off between project and industrial exploitation of the UPMC designs will be understood and negotiated in due project course, by guaranteeing the rights of the Consortium to use them to achieve the goals of the project with no damage for the rights of UPMC. 11.30 B. Giordano joins the meeting as an expert who is going to be involved in the project, concerning in particular the research on psychophysical aspects of floor perception. He gives an overview of his experiments, entitled "Nonvisual identification of walking grounds": Experiment, Materials, Conditions, Results. He claims the need to repeat the experiments in the virtual setup/simulated materials. 12.00 Lunch 13.30 F. Fontana presents the web site 13.40 Dissemination issues: - F. Fontana and S. Serafin inform about the contact in due course with the Scientific Committee of the HAID Conference. NIW is likely to organize the 2011 edition of this conference, as well as to steer to another event if that Committee will not assign the 2011 edition to AAU - Concerning the organization of a panel at IEEE VR, a check between project participants will be made at end of August considering the opportunity to make a workshop or tutorial session at the 2010 edition of that conference. - F. Fontana and S. Serafin communicate that they have been selected to tutor a student group participating to the SMC summer school in Porto. The student group will work along three daya on the theme "Natural Interactive Walking in Porto" 14.00 A. Lecuyer provides a comprehensive slide presentation of the achievements made by INRIA on the use of virtual camera motion to simulate walking on different floors. He then introduces forthcoming activities in: Infinite walking in VR; Visual perception of inclination in virtual materials; Pseudo-haptic effects in walking 15.15 Break 15.40 Y. Visell documents McGill University achievements in the multimodal display of floors: snowscape and frozen pond. 16.15 V. Hayward and G. Dietz introduce design specifications for vertical rubber pegs based magnetic and hydro-piezo technologies. As such designs are particularly innovative, further months are needed to turn them into physical working prototypes. 17.00 M. Civolani and S. Papetti present an early prototype for sonic shoes. Although the real-time synthesis as well as the diffusion system needs improvement in sound quality, nevertheless the interactivity of the system and the acoustic field are already convincing. M. Marchal confirms this judgment while informally testing the shoes. The meeting closes at 18.00. Mar. 3 - The meeting starts at 10:00am Participants: - UNIVR: F. Fontana, S. Papetti, P. Polotti, D. Rocchesso, M. Civolani, G. Borin, P. Cesari - McGill University: Y. Visell, J. Anlauff - AAU: L. Turchet - INRIA: A. Lecuyer, M. Marchal - UPMC: V. Hayward, G. Dietz - INVITED: K. Franinovic (University of the Arts in Zurich), S. Delle Monache (IUAV - University of Venice) The Coordinator proposes a full day of hands-on activity, informal evaluation of prototypes, discussion. - Y. Visell makes transfer of knowledge of McGill active tiles while setting up the system. - P. Cesari tests the UNIVR sonic shoes - V. Hayward suggests means to improve the acoustic quality of the diffusion system of the shoes especially in the low frequency. A fruitful discussion springs out in which constraints of quality, wearability, and feasibility of several types of acoustic systems are dealt with. - J. Anlauff sets up, then shows his square mesh of FSRs and possible applications of spatial detection of forces. 12.00 Lunch 13.00 Short visit of San Giorgio 14.30 P. Cesari introduces her research on movement analysis to the Consortium. Kinematic and dynamic experiments are shown: determination of invariants, goal equivalent manifolds, and studies with basketball players. Applications to the study of movement in interactions with walking interfaces are outlined: use of sensing socks, and sonic biofeedback. The Consortium acknowledges the importance of having P. Cesari as part of the research team. 15.15 Open discussion and activities start again. - A. Lecuyer proposes to P. Cesari to think of augmenting/distorting real-time self-observations of walkers as a mean to study changes in their perception 16.00 Coffee break 17.00 Y. Visell get the active tiles running. Almost everybody tests the tiles and plays with parameters. Walking over snow flakes appears convincing. Further impressions are collected by users while the tiles are in this configuration. Also, vibration patterns are experienced and positively judged by the participants to the meeting, who attempt different configurations of the system under this mode. The meeting closes at 18.00. Mar. 4 - The meeting starts at 10:00am Participants: - UNIVR: F. Fontana, S. Papetti, P. Polotti, D. Rocchesso, M. Civolani, P. Cesari - McGill University: Y. Visell, J. Anlauff, B. Giordano - AAU: S. Serafin, L. Turchet - INRIA: A. Lecuyer, M. Marchal - UPMC: V. Hayward, G. Dietz - INVITED: K. Franinovic, S. Delle Monache Y. Visell shows prototypes of postcards that will be used in the project. Initial public prints of such postcards should be ready for FET'09 Prague. The Coordinator acknowledges that during the previous day of the meeting several components have been presented by all partners, at different development levels. The existing ground that NIW has contributed to fertilize in these six months of activity is strongly promising for fruitful collaborations between the partners, as envisioned by the project proposal, which can start immediately. A timely starting point to initiate a discussion in this sense is the NIW participation to FET'09 in Prague. The F. Fontana reads and forwards to the project mailing list the email sent by Walter Van De Velde to all FET-Open coordinators. A discussion starts on how to maximize the impact of the NIW participation to the event based on the latest news coming from the EC. It is decided that F. Fontana, P. Polotti, and M. Civolani (UNIVR) will bring to Prague the prototypes that have been presented during the meeting and there judged to be as most interesting. In parallel, S. Serafin will parachute her PhD student Smilen Dimitrov, who has current responsibility of the physical design of active shoes and sensing floors in AAU and will bring a poster in Prague. More contributions may possibly come from other partners, depending on decisions they will take before the deadline. In the same afternoon NIW will ask the CLOSED Coordinator, whose project has been selected by FET'09 as well, to ask the event organizers for being located on adjacent stands. This logistics will further empower the presentation of both projects. Next, some collaborations between partners are proposed which will start in the next weeks, whose dynamics will be checked in the next project meeting: 1) (INRIA <-> UNIVR) The two participants will undertake a six-month shared task: UNIVR will immediately forward to INRIA guidelines for using its Sound Design Tools (SDT) library. Even if its models are not tailored for walking sounds, nevertheless the software architecture is well established and open for third party use. In the meantime, UNIVR will improve both such models and the design of active shoes. In parallel to this activity, INRIA will orient its virtual walking camera simulations to account for different floor properties, possibly by also making use of head-mounted displays. At the end of May/beginning of June a students or young researchers exchange between will take place, in which transfer of knowledge as well as merge of designs and technology will be initiated, in an aim to start dealing with the huge problems that integration of visual and auditory hw/sw components poses in the project. Results from this cross-activity will be collected after six months from now. 2) (UPMC <-> UNIVR) The two participants envision that the feedback generated by the sound models can be straightforwardly re-used to feed the haptic actuators after some light processing. In spite of this, questions concerning the synchronization of the auditory and haptic channels exist, which require to detail the software architectures and/or communication protocols that will be used. UPMC will start to inherit from UNIVR guidelines for the use of the SDT library, then will interact with the same participant in the establishing of constraints for the correct functioning of the audio-haptic sw platform. 3) (Mc Gill University <-> UNIVR) B. Giordano in May-June will start to conduct psychophysical experiments on perception of floors conveying virtual sonic attributes of material. UNIVR promises it will forward to Mc Gill University proper real-time synthesis models as soon as the STD library will be added with more specific walking sw for sound generation. 4) (AAU <-> INRIA) A PhD student now working at AAU in the visual display of floor events will draw knowledge from, and interface with INRIA to get accustomed with sw and tools that will be chosen for NIW. 5) (Mc Gill University <-> INRIA) INRIA will be using active tiles to start defining multimodal experiments based on visual display and active floors 6) (AAU <-> UNIVR) These participants will jointly work on basic research on new sound synthesis models for the synthesis of distributed impacts and scraping sounds. Both such sounds are considered to have major importance in auditory walking interfaces. Finally, plans for the next meeting are outlined. INRIA candidates for hosting the meeting either on July 8-10 or July 29-31. A final decision will be taken in the next weeks. The meeting closes at 12.00. 12.00 Lunch. Welcome to CLOSED delegates. From 13.30-18.00 a joint NIW-CLOSED meeting takes place: mutual presentations, exchange of knowledge and possibilities for future collaborations. Joint participation to FET'09 in Prague. Accomodation and preliminary agenda2nd NIW meeting 2-4 March, 2009 Fondazione Scuola di San Giorgio Laboratorio di Acustica Musicale e Architettonica Isola di San Giorgio - Venezia http://www.scuoladisangiorgio.it/lab_it.php How to get there From Venice Airport to Venice (Piazzale Roma) by public transportation: - take the ACTV bus (line no. 5). Tickets on sale in the airport. About 20-30 mins journey. From Stazione (railway station) or Piazzale Roma by public transportation, using vaporetti ACTV (http://www.actv.it/english/home.php): - buy your vaporetto tickets: best if a ticket that is valid for several days, at least a return ticket. ISOLA DI SAN GIORGIO HAS NOT A TICKET SALE. Buying single tickets for may times can result in impressive expenditure. - take the linea 2 (line 2) direzione Canale della Giudecca - enjoy for about 30 mins, less if you are taking the vaporetto from some other stop - leave the boat at S. Giorgio - on the left of the church entrance there is a green door. The first day we will gather together around the entrance before 11.00 o' clock, then be let in. San Giorgio is a private island and apparently control of the is quite strict to avoid intrusion of tourists into restricted areas, so please be in time. Monday 02.03.2009 - opens at 11.00, closes at 18.00 - Management -
12.00/13.00 - Lunch - Dissemination issues -
- NIW advertising -
- RTD -
Tuesday 03.03.2009 - opens at 9.00, closes at 18.00 - Hands on morning: workgroups working on physical devices - 12.00/13.00 - Lunch - Hands on afternoon: workgroups working on software components -
Wednesday 04.03.2009 - opens at 9.00, closes at 18.00 - Further hands-on, fill in your points, and conclusions -
12.00/13.30 - Joint NIW-CLOSED Lunch - Joint NIW-CLOSED panel -
[b]Only CLOSED Project Events from now on (just for information)[\b] Thursday 05.03.2009
Friday 06.03.2009
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