--- 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.