2011 VR Summer Workshop

This year World16 is engaged in virtual reality (VR) and computer graphics research with impacts in a variety of academic and professional fields. During this year's VR Summer Workshop, the group met at the University of Pisa, Italy to present current research endeavors and share new technologies.

The presentations at the workshop represent the middle stage of current research projects. Final results will be presented at the 5th International VR Symposium this November in Tokyo, Japan.

2011 World16 VR Research Projects:

"CityDesign - Procedural City Modeling Tools"
Prof. Yoshihiro Kobayashi,
Arizona State University



"Two 'Cloud' Technologies: Point Cloud Optimization
and VR Cloud Application for Townscape Design"
Prof. Tomohiro Fukuda,
Osaka University



"eParkingSim"
Prof. Kostas Terzidis,
Harvard University



"Digital Manga in UC-win/Road"
Prof. Marc Aurel Schnabel and Dr. Inge Yingge Qu,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong



"Media Field Navigation"
Prof. Marcos Novak,
University of California SB



"Shader Graphs for UC-win/Road"
Matthew Swarts,
Georgia Institute of Technology



"Multiple Stakeholders in the Shadows of the Datascape"
Prof. Michael Jemtrud, Prof. Nik Luka, Jason Crow, and Andrew Chung,
McGill University



"Visualizing Wadi Madaiq"
Prof. Ron Hawker,
Zayed University



"From Acoustic Simulation to Form Generation - a Case Study
in Noise Simulation and Visualization"
Prof. Ruth Ron,
University of Florida



"VR in Construction Monitoring"
Prof. Wael Abdelhameed,
University of Bahrain



"Character Development"
Prof. Thomas Tucker,
Winston-Salem State University



"SIM Lucca - VR for Italian Cities"
Prof. Paolo Fiamma and Pierluigi D'Acunto,
University of Pisa



"Implementing 'Traffic Derivation Protocol' in UC-win/Road
to Avoid Traffic Jams While Visualizing VR Models"
Prof. Amar Bennadji,
Robert Gordon University



"Extreme Interaction with UC-win/Road using a
Lightweight Character Representation Method"
Prof. Taro Narahara,
New Jersey Institute of Technology

So Sleepy: an Homage to a Busy Summer Workshop

World16's VR Summer Workshop in Italy was indeed packed with a busy schedule of seminars, new product demonstrations, VR research presentations, and - of course - recreation in beautiful Tuscany.

Time for sleep also made its way into the schedule, just not in hotel rooms:

VR Tutorials: Importing 3D Buildings from Sketchup into UC-win/Road

Getting 3D buildings from Google Earth and the Google 3D Warehouse into UC-win/Road is quick and easy with SketchUp Pro.

This tutorial guides you through the process of transferring 3D data between the two platforms, and also provides several tips for optimizing your data for VR use.



A few tips to remember to make your life easier when importing 3D buildings into UC-win/road from Sketchup:

• Export models from SketchUp Pro in the .FBX file format for the smoothest transfer to UC-win/Road. UC-win/Road can also read .3DS files, but this is only recommended if you are creating your buildings in 3D Studio Max or Maya
• UC-win/Road renders in real-time, so the simpler your objects are (think simple geometry and small textures), the faster and smoother they will render in your project.
• Not all models in the Google 3D Warehouse are made equal. In fact, most are made for rendering static images or animations and are extremely high-polygon and texture heavy. These models will render poorly in UC-win/Road and your fps (frames per second) will suffer.

VR Tutorials: Advanced Scenario Creation in UC-win/Road (Part 4 of 4)

This video is an overview of advanced scenario creation by seaming together all of the individual elements that were entire scenarios previously (speed, collision, pass/fail, etc). The scene has been edited to support the additional scenario.

1. The video opens by going through the 'chained' scenario to see what is to come.
2. New trigger types have been added and a chained pass fail condition.
3. Editing the 'context' is also covered and is useful to restructure the scene itself.
4. New movement types have been added, including cars and buildings.

View the video below: