Abstract: Degrees of Freedom for Hypermedia and Virtual Reality

Michael Cohen. Degrees of Freedom for Hypermedia and Virtual Reality, MMC Video on Demand System, The University of Aizu Multimedia Center, July, 2000.

The Spatial Media Group at the University is exploring ways of representing and exploring spatial dimensionality through advanced user interfaces. The three spatial dimensions experienced in the "real world" correspond to translational degrees-of-freedom (sway, heave, surge) and rotational degrees-of-freedom (roll, pitch, and yaw). These movements are illustrated by tumbles (pirouettes, somersaults, and cartwheels), juggles (rolling balls, pitching jump-rope, yawing tray), and camera gestures (pan, tilt, and zoom), and explored by student-developed multimedia projects: Kenta Sasa developed a Java-based spiral spring interface to display the orientation of a swivel chair and directionalize sound. Manabu Sato deployed a binaural dummy head in the Multimedia Center connected to a streaming server, so that distant users on the internet may experience a sense of "mixed reality" and telepresence. Gou Saitou programmed dynamic audio gestures using the Multimedia Center's 3DTheater PSFC, so that music can dance around listeners. Masataka Shimizu developed a Java-based dynamic map which can control the position of spatial audio objects in realtime. Alam Bolhassan developed a QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality) scene with panoramic photographic imagery linked to directionalized music. We are working on integrating all these applications into a general system for multimodal telepresence and virtual reality.

Keywords:

Sound Spatialization


[Japanese MPG] (80 MB) [English MPG] (80 MB) [PSFC QtVR] [PSFC+Sound QtVR] [Anechoic Chamber QtVR] [Details + Acknowledgement]