Keynotes

Virtual and Augmented Reality in the hands of a manufacturer: From virtual prototyping to innovative services

This presentation will cover previous activities and experiences in the field of virtual and augmented reality at Volvo.  Back in 1995 the focus was very much on prototyping and experiencing product features in the virtual environment.  There have been several obstacles that had to be overcome in order to be productive using VR in manufacturing industries, also for Volvo.  Looking back we can ask ourselves: could we have used the technology better?  Could we have done without VR?  Today the importaance of developing new services connected to our products is very clear, a technology such as AR has a lot of potential and is already in use in certain cases.  But we also look into the future, where we can find even more interesting questions: what are the coming trends and shifts that will make a big change in how we use AR/VR?  Will AR/VR be replaced as concepts by something else? How can we benefit from recent developments in the consumer electronics market in the way we develop products and services as a large manufacturing company?  What are the challenges for the research community? 

Dennis Saluäär studied at the University of Gothenburg in Mathematics and Computer Science before starting as a thesis student at Volvo in 1993 where has been employed ever since. The first task was concentrated on developing the pioneering VR-driving-simulator intended for human-machine-interaction and prototyping. Among the skills used then were programming and 3-D-modelling of vehicles and landscapes to be used in the virtual environment. He has participated in both product development activities as well as research projects such as the EC-funded View-of-the-Future and the Network-of-Excellence INTUITION. He is also a member of the board of EuroVR. He is manager for simulation and testing tools and facilities in the Human-Systems-Structures department at Volvo Technology. He is also a strategic specialist within areas: Visualization, Augmented Reality and Rapid Prototyping.

Body Representation in Immersive Virtual Reality

Computer programs can be written that digitally represent and simulate physical spaces and events. Immersive virtual reality systems provide a medium whereby the digital representation can be transformed into a stream of sense data (visual, auditory, haptic) that is displayed to people, and with which people can interact via body tracking systems.

Typically virtual reality has been thought of as a way to place people inside representations of such simulations, where they have the feeling of being in the virtual place, and can carry out actions, and respond to events there. However, it is becoming clear that virtual reality can be used in a way that has hardly been explored up to now - not only can the sense of place be transformed, but also aspects of the sense of oneself, in particular the appearance of the body. In this talk we will describe several experiments that show that virtual reality is a very powerful technology for body substitution, that is giving people the strong feeling that their body has been replaced by a virtual body. This opens up the door for a powerful new exploitation of this technology for many applications, as well as for the basic science of understanding how the brain represents the body.

Mel Slater is Professor of Virtual Environments at UCL and an ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain. He founded the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics research group in the Department of Computer Science at UCL and obtained two rounds of funding to install the virtual reality Cave system. He was a UK EPSRC Senior Research Fellow from 1999 to 2004. Twenty six of his PhD students have obtained their PhDs since 1989. In 2005 he was awarded the Virtual Reality Career Award by IEEE Virtual Reality ‘In Recognition of Seminal Achievements in Engineering Virtual Reality.’

He leads the eventLab at UB. He holds a European Research Council grant TRAVERSE on the specific topic virtual embodiment, and the general topic of a new area of application of virtual reality based on this theme.