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1. INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION FOR COASTAL HAZARDS

   https://doi.org/10.9753/icce.v37.management.190  

   Zhou, Zili; Lynett, Patrick; Ebrahimi, Behzad (September 2023, Coastal Engineering Proceedings)

   Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that integrates 3D virtual objects into the physical world in real-time, while virtual reality (VR) is a technology that immerses users in an interactive 3D virtual environment. The fast development of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies has reshaped how people interact with the physical world. This presentation will outline the results from two unique AR and one Web-based VR coastal engineering projects, motivating the next stage in the development of the augmented reality package for coastal students, engineers, and planners. 

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2. GesturAR: An Authoring System for Creating Freehand Interactive Augmented Reality Applications

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3472749.3474769  

   Wang, Tianyi; Qian, Xun; He, Fengming; Hu, Xiyun; Cao, Yuanzhi; Ramani, Karthik (October 2021, The 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology)

   Freehand gesture is an essential input modality for modern Augmented Reality (AR) user experiences. However, developing AR applications with customized hand interactions remains a challenge for end-users. Therefore, we propose GesturAR, an end-to-end authoring tool that supports users to create in-situ freehand AR applications through embodied demonstration and visual programming. During authoring, users can intuitively demonstrate the customized gesture inputs while referring to the spatial and temporal context. Based on the taxonomy of gestures in AR, we proposed a hand interaction model which maps the gesture inputs to the reactions of the AR contents. Thus, users can author comprehensive freehand applications using trigger-action visual programming and instantly experience the results in AR. Further, we demonstrate multiple application scenarios enabled by GesturAR, such as interactive virtual objects, robots, and avatars, room-level interactive AR spaces, embodied AR presentations, etc. Finally, we evaluate the performance and usability of GesturAR through a user study. 

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3. Exploring Virtual Environments by Visually Impaired Using a Mixed Reality Cane Without Visual Feedback

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR-Adjunct51615.2020.00028  

   Zhang, Lei; Wu, Klevin; Yang, Bin; Tang, Hao; Zhu, Zhigang (November 2020, ISMAR 2020 - International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality)

   null (Ed.)

   Though virtual reality (VR) has been advanced to certain levels of maturity in recent years, the general public, especially the population of the blind and visually impaired (BVI), still cannot enjoy the benefit provided by VR. Current VR accessibility applications have been developed either on expensive head-mounted displays or with extra accessories and mechanisms, which are either not accessible or inconvenient for BVI individuals. In this paper, we present a mobile VR app that enables BVI users to access a virtual environment on an iPhone in order to build their skills of perception and recognition of the virtual environment and the virtual objects in the environment. The app uses the iPhone on a selfie stick to simulate a long cane in VR, and applies Augmented Reality (AR) techniques to track the iPhone’s real-time poses in an empty space of the real world, which is then synchronized to the long cane in the VR environment. Due to the use of mixed reality (the integration of VR & AR), we call it the Mixed Reality cane (MR Cane), which provides BVI users auditory and vibrotactile feedback whenever the virtual cane comes in contact with objects in VR. Thus, the MR Cane allows BVI individuals to interact with the virtual objects and identify approximate sizes and locations of the objects in the virtual environment. We performed preliminary user studies with blind-folded participants to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed mobile approach and the results indicate that the proposed MR Cane could be effective to help BVI individuals in understanding the interaction with virtual objects and exploring 3D virtual environments. The MR Cane concept can be extended to new applications of navigation, training and entertainment for BVI individuals without more significant efforts. 

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4. ProcessAR: An augmented reality-based tool to create in-situ procedural 2D/3D AR Instructions

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462126  

   Chidambaram, Subramanian; Huang, Hank; He, Fengming; Qian, Xun; Villanueva, Ana M; Redick, Thomas S; Stuerzlinger, Wolfgang; Ramani, Karthik (June 2021, Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021 (DIS ’21))

   null (Ed.)

   Augmented reality (AR) is an efficient form of delivering spatial information and has great potential for training workers. However, AR is still not widely used for such scenarios due to the technical skills and expertise required to create interactive AR content. We developed ProcessAR, an AR-based system to develop 2D/3D content that captures subject matter expert’s (SMEs) environment-object interactions in situ. The design space for ProcessAR was identified from formative interviews with AR programming experts and SMEs, alongside a comparative design study with SMEs and novice users. To enable smooth workflows, ProcessAR locates and identifies different tools/objects through computer vision within the workspace when the author looks at them. We explored additional features such as embedding 2D videos with detected objects and user-adaptive triggers. A final user evaluation comparing ProcessAR and a baseline AR authoring environment showed that, according to our qualitative questionnaire, users preferred ProcessAR. 

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5. Force-Aware Interface via Electromyography for Natural VR/AR Interaction

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3550454.3555461  

   Zhang, Yunxiang; Liang, Benjamin; Chen, Boyuan; Torrens, Paul M.; Atashzar, S. Farokh; Lin, Dahua; Sun, Qi (December 2022, ACM Transactions on Graphics)

   While tremendous advances in visual and auditory realism have been made for virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), introducing a plausible sense of physicality into the virtual world remains challenging. Closing the gap between real-world physicality and immersive virtual experience requires a closed interaction loop: applying user-exerted physical forces to the virtual environment and generating haptic sensations back to the users. However, existing VR/AR solutions either completely ignore the force inputs from the users or rely on obtrusive sensing devices that compromise user experience. By identifying users' muscle activation patterns while engaging in VR/AR, we design a learning-based neural interface for natural and intuitive force inputs. Specifically, we show that lightweight electromyography sensors, resting non-invasively on users' forearm skin, inform and establish a robust understanding of their complex hand activities. Fuelled by a neural-network-based model, our interface can decode finger-wise forces in real-time with 3.3% mean error, and generalize to new users with little calibration. Through an interactive psychophysical study, we show that human perception of virtual objects' physical properties, such as stiffness, can be significantly enhanced by our interface. We further demonstrate that our interface enables ubiquitous control via finger tapping. Ultimately, we envision our findings to push forward research towards more realistic physicality in future VR/AR. 

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