Virtual Reconstruction and Presentation of the Entrance of the Ripoll Monastery Pere Brunet 2007 - 2008 The Benedictinian monastery of Ripoll was founded by count Guifre el Pilos in 879. The main work of art from the monastery, being also the main Romanic sculpture from Catalonia, is the entrance, which dates back to the 12th century. This entrance has been defined as the "Stone Bible". It is a masterpiece of cultural, historical, social and scientific interest. This project started in 2007 and has resulted on a fruitful cooperation among the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), the Polytechnical University of Catalonia (UPC) and the Visual Computing Laboratory of ISTI-CNR in Pisa. The result is open to the public in the MNAC exhibition named "The Romanic Art and the Mediterraneum. Catalonia, Toulouse and Pisa" from February to May 2008. Visitors to the exhibition interact with the virtual reproduction in two different immersive setups (VR kiosks). Using a touch-screen and a back-projection display screen with passive stereo, visitors can simply navigate and zoomin in different parts of the entrance, or they can get further information just by touching different "hotspots" that make 3D information boards appear in front of important components of the façade. Virtual Reality in Chronic Pain Alleviation Mel Slater 2006 - 2010 Virtual Reality in Chronic Pain Alleviation will undertake the development and application of technologically advanced methods based on virtual reality for distraction of attention, visualisation and modification of the body image, as combined analgesic techniques against chronic pain IMMERSENCE Immersive Multi-Modal Interactive Presence Mel Slater 2006 - 2010 Towards a Touching Presence: High-Definition Haptic Systems. This is a EU FET Funded Integrated Project with 9 partners. It's over goal is to enhance multi-modal interaction within virtual and mixed reality, particularly concentrating on haptics. At UPC our goal is a characterisation of interaction from the point of view of presence - for example, between people interacting together in a haptic mode, or haptic manipulation of objects. MIMICS Multimodal Immersive Motion rehabilitation with Interactive Cognitive Systems Mel Slater 2006 - 2010 The main hypothesis of this project is that movement training for neurorehabilitation can be substantially improved through immersive and multimodal sensory feedback. The approach is real-time acquisition of behavioural and physiological data from patients and the use of this to adaptively and dynamically change the displays of an immersive virtual reality system, with the goal of maximising patient motivation. This will result in complex systems that are natural, user-friendly and easy to use. Weel-Tracked VR Pere Brunet 2006 - 2007 Construction of a Virtual Reality system designed to be small enough in order to be portable in a conventional car. It is a semi-immersive interaction system based on a stereoscopic projection screen with an accurate tracking system which captures the movement of the system over the ground and translates it into a movement into the virtual environment in a window-to-virtual-world metaphor. The system can be specially useful in applications of reconstructions of ancient cities or archaeological environments. BAIP 2020 Alvar Vinacua 2007 - 2010 BAIP 2020 is the first Cenit Project approved by the CDTI in the naval and maritime sector. It' is considered innovative in a strategic way. The main research topics will cover: - Ship design and construction technologies - Energy efficiency and uses of alternative energies in ship operations - "Intelligent" Ship - Fishing technologies and systems (Sustainable Fishing) - Oceanographic technologies for characterization and protection of the maritime environment - Technologies in Security, Comfort and Health in the maritime life ViHAP3D Virtual Heritage: High-Quality 3D Acquisition and Presentation Pere Brunet 2005 The ViHAP3D Project aims at preserving, presenting, accessing, and promoting cultural heritage by means of interactive, high-quality 3D graphics. The project aims at the development of new tools in the problem areas of (a) 3D scanning for the acquisition of accurate and visually rich 3D models, (b) post-processing, data representation, and efficient rendering for the detailed interactive display and inspection of such models even on low cost platforms, and (c)virtual heritage tools for the presentation and navigation in high-quality digital model collection. PRESENCCIA Presence: Research Encompassing Sensory Enhancement, Neuroscience, Cerebral-Computer Interfaces and Applications Mel Slater 2006 - 2010 This Integrated Project will undertake a Research Programme that has as its major goal the delivery of presence in wide area distributed mixed reality environments. The environment will include a physical installation that people can visit both physically and virtually. The installation will be the embodiment of an artificial intelligent entity that understands and learns from its interaction with people. People who inhabit the installation will at any one time be physically there, virtually there but remote, or entirely virtual beings with their own goals and capabilities for interacting with one another and with embodiments of real people. Specific subclasses of the installation will be used for the construction of a number of application scenarios, such as a persistent virtual community that embodies the project itself. The core methodology will be to achieve this through the identification, understanding and exploitation of cerebral mechanisms for presence in conjunction with advances in the underlying technology for mixed reality display and interaction, with special attention to the interaction between people, and also between people and virtual people. Such cerebral mechanisms will be the basis for a core aspect of the IP which is the exploitation of brain-computer interfaces. Processes within the environments adapt and correlate with the behaviour and state of people, and in addition people are able to effect changes within the environment through thought as well as through motor actions. VR-Based Simulation of Progressive Lenses Pere Brunet Progressive lenses are lenses that allow focusing objects at any distance. The main problem of these lenses is the arise of marginal zones that present aberrations in which vision is defective. The interest of our research is to study the perceptual effect of these distortions using Virtual Reality techniques. To achieve this goal we are developing a lens simulator that permits having a correct perception of the lens aberrations. We will also perform an usability test that will let us find out if users have the same perception with real lenses and with the simulation. WorkBench Construction of a stereoscopic table prototype Carlos Andujar 2001 - 2006 Development of an affordable visualisation system featuring: -. Simple but efficient interaction mechanisms for 3D model inspection and manipulation. -. Providing direct interaction mechanisms, so that users can handle virtual objects using the same actions as when working with real-world objects. -. Multi-user support, suitable for collaborative work. -. Cost-effective system: affordable for medium-size companies, research institutes and hospitals. Mini-VR A portable Virtual Reality system Marta Fairen 2002 - 2006 Construction of a portable VR system based on a movable stereoscopic projection screen for large virtual environments, which supports collaborative work in both, local and remote mode. This is a new semi-immersive virtual reality system designed to be small enough to be totally portable. The system incorporates a tracking system to capture the movement of the screen with respect to the virtual model. Alice Navigation software for VR systems Carlos Andujar 1993 - 2006 Alice is a navigation software which allows the user to navigate around 3D environments. It provides different navigation modes which the user can select. In addition, the application provides different visualization modes, monoscopic and stereo. Other characteristic of this viewer are: - Collision detection with the objects in the scene, floor and walls, for realistic navigation. - Navigation control by mouse or joystick. - Immersion in 3D models with stereo.(In stereo viewers) - Graphic acceleration techniques like occlusion culling, model simplification, etc…for real time navigation in complex 3D models. - Textures and Lighting, texture coordinates and colour per vertex allows realistic visualisation - Audio, video and images reproduction. Virtual Heart Alvar Vinacua 2003 This project aims at developing tools for the automatic construction of three dimensional functional models of a patient’s beating heart from SPECT data, with the ultimate goal of facilitating the evaluation of the patient’s condition, or the simulation of surgical procedures for training or planning. PVPC- CERTAP Virtual prototyping system for construction projects Pere Brunet 2005 Software development for architecture CAD, which allows the generation of a 2D plan from sketches, and the generation of the 3D model corresponding to that plan. The layouts for utilities (like electricity, heating, etc.) will be automatically added to the 2D plan. Technicians and architects can navigate through the 3D model in Virtual Reality environments with lighting simulation and to make modifications on the original design, both at the 2D level and the 3D level. Visible Human Isabel Navazo 2002 - 2006 Creation of a virtual atlas of the human body, and visualisation of the atlas on low-cost Virtual reality architectures. The project is based on the exploitation of data supplied by the project «Visible Human», National Library of Medicine, USA. Liver Transplant Planning Isabel Navazo 2003 Development of software to aid in predicting the best segments of the liver that could be transplanted. Cooperative, immersive interaction system for Virtual Reality environments Marta Fairen 2004 The main objective of this project is the design and implementation of an architecture for the immersive interaction system for virtual reality environments . This architecture will use only conventional hardware and low-cost peripherals. The more concrete objectives are: – The development of low-cost specific techniques for the implicit interaction. – The development of a prototype over a low-cost virtual reality stereoscopic table. – The analysis of cooperative techniques in immersive environments. Augmented Reality Inspection 2003 The main goal of this project was the development of an augmented-reality stereo system based on optical see-through glasses. More specifically, the project involved the development of different techniques for allowing stereoscopic vision on Sony Glasstron devices along with tracking and visualisation software for superposing virtual models with the real environment.