VR Technology

WISHING TO MAKE SOCIAL LIFE MORE REALISTIC BY BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN THE REAL WORLD AND THE VIRTUAL WORLD BY USING VR TECHNOLOGY

-Blog By Saurabh Tumane (Final Year Student, Dept. of ETC, ACET, Nagpur)

Virtual reality is an artificial environment created with computer hardware and software and presented to the user in such a way that it appears and feels like a real environment. This technology has been applied in all walks of life especially in education where it is used to simulate learning environments. So many universities and military establishments had adopted this technology and this had improved the learning capability of users. This paper presented lack of laboratory experience as the major problem and the way to overcome the problem through the use of virtual reality technology to simulate virtual reality laboratories.

OUTLINE: Imagine you are inside a car driving without actually being inside that car; you as a pilot is undergoing training, flying, landing and crashing a plane without actually being inside that plane; you as a computer engineer, diagnoses faults and assembles computer systems without actually working with the real physical components. Imagine yourself as a surgeon, walks into an operating theatre, cut open the heart of a patient to change a defective valve. The scenarios described have been made possible through a technology known as virtual reality (VR).

Virtual Reality Laboratories:

 In recent times, VR technology has been hyped. It is steadily finding its way in all areas of human endeavours most especially in education.

1. One application and use of VR in education is in the development of Second Life. Second Life is a Web-based multi-user 3D virtual world developed by Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based company. Second Life is one of the most popular virtual reality tools, attracting educators from all over the world by offering a variety of opportunities for interaction, sense of community, and users’ self-building capabilities.

 Recent statistics showed that there are over 100 educational institutes (Harvard University taking the lead) that had established their virtual campus in Second Life and are actively working in the virtual world.  There are a lot of success stories as regards the application and use of simulated environment using VR technology. VR has extremely wide applications across a whole range of disciplines.

2. Vicher (Virtual Chemical Reactors) was developed at the University of Michigan in the department of Chemical Engineering to teach students catalyst decay, non-isothermal effects in kinetics, reactor design and chemical plant safety.

3. At the Kongju National University in Korea, a computer-based virtual reality simulation that helps students to learn physics concepts was developed. This virtual laboratory has helped students gain laboratory experience and thus improved their performance.  In training and simulation, battlefield simulations have been developed using real data from Desert Storm. The US Navy uses flight simulators to help train pilots for general navigation as well as special assignments. 

I.On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment (OLIVE) This is a product of Forterra Systems Inc. Forterra Systems Inc. builds distributed virtual world technology and turnkey applications for defense, homeland security, medical, corporate training, and entertainment industries. Using the On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment (OLIVE) technology platform, Forterra’s technology and services enable organizations to train, plan, rehearse, and collaborate in ways previously considered impossible or impractical. 

II.Open Simulator (OpenSim) Open Simulator is a 3D application server. Open Simulator allows you to develop your environment using technologies you feel work best. Open Simulator has numerous advantages which among other things are

1.  It has many tools for developers to build various applications (chat application, buildings, and avatars among others

2. It is a world building tools for creating content real time in the environment. 

Ogoglio is very different from the other virtual reality world development platforms because it uses Windows, Linux, Solaris operating system platforms and runs on web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari

THE NEED FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF VIRTUAL REALITY LABORATORY: 

The development and use of VR laboratories will increase student engagement, add realism to instructions. Thus, VR offers to bring exciting possibilities, which were once considered science fiction.it has shown that we only remember 10% of what we read, and 20% of what we hear, but that we retain up to 90% of what we learn through active participation.

At NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas a virtual physics laboratory was developed which enables students to explore such concepts as gravity, friction, and drag in an interactive, virtual environment. Students have several balls and a pendulum with which to work. Since, one of the major restrictions for learning in science and engineering education is the absence of equipped laboratories, VR laboratories will overcome this problem and other problems associated with laboratory management most especially in developing countries.   

Hollow Flashlight

HOLLOW FLASHLIGHT

-Blog By Aafiya Hanafi (Final Year Student, Dept. of ETC, ACET, Nagpur)

Ann Makosinski is a 16-year-old student who competed against thousands of other young inventors from around the world to win first prize and a $25,000 scholarship at Google's International Science Fair. She invented a battery-free flashlight. A free energy device that is powered by the heat in your hand. While visiting the Philippines, Ann found that many students couldn't study at home because they didn't have electricity for lighting. Unfortunately, this is a common problem for developing regions where people don't have access to power grids or can't afford the cost of electricity.

Ann recalled reading how the human body had enough energy to power a 100-watt light bulb. This inspired her to think of how she could convert body heat directly into electricity to power a flashlight. She knew that heated conductive material causes electrons to spread outwards and that cold conductive material causes electrons to condense inwards. So, if a ceramic tile is heated, and it's pressed against a ceramic tile that is cool, then electrons will move from the hot tile towards the cool tile producing a current. This phenomenon is known as the thermoelectric effect.

Ann started using ceramic tiles placed on top of each other with a conductive circuit between them (known as Peltier tiles) to create the amount of electricity she needed for her flashlight. Her idea was to design her flashlight so that when it was gripped in your hand, your palm would come in contact with the topside of the tiles and start heating them.

To ensure the underside of the tiles would be cooler, she had the tiles mounted into a cut-out area of a hollow aluminium tube. This meant that air in the tube would keep the underside of her tiles cooler than the heated topside of the tiles. This would then generate a current from the hot side to the cold side so that light emitting diodes (LEDS) connected to the tiles would light-up. But although the tiles generated the necessary wattage (5.7 milliwatts), Ann discovered that the voltage wasn't enough. So she added a transformer to boost the voltage to 5V, which was more than enough to make her flashlight work.

Ann successfully created the first flashlight that didn't use batteries, toxic chemicals, kinetic or solar energy, and that always works when you picked it up. She credits her family for encouraging her interest in electronics and derives her inspiration from reading about inventors such as Nikola Tesla and Marie Curie. She told judges at the Google competition that her first toy was a box of transistors. Time Magazine listed Ann as one of the 30 people under 30 who are changing the world. She is working on bringing her flashlight to market and is also developing a headlamp based on the same technology.

3 DOODLER

3 DOODLER

-Blog By Dipali Madavi (Final Year Student, Dept. of ETC, ACET, Nagpur)

The 3Doodler is a 3D pen developed by Peter Dilworth, Maxwell Bogue and Daniel Cowen of Wobble Works, Inc. (formerly WobbleWorks LLC). The 3Doodler works by extruding heated plastic that cools almost instantly into a solid, stable structure, allowing for the free-hand creation of three-dimensional objects. It utilizes plastic thread made of either acrylonitrile butadiene styrene ("ABS"), polylactic acid ("PLA"), or “FLEXY”, thermal polyurethane (“TPU”) that is melted and then cooled through a patented process while moving through the pen, which can then be used to make 3D objects by hand. The 3Doodler has been described as a glue gun for 3D printing because of how the plastic is extruded from the tip, with one foot of the plastic thread equaling "about 11 feet of extruded material" The inventors of the 3Doodler (Maxwell Bogue and Peter Dilworth) built the first 3Doodler prototype in early 2012 at the Artisans’ Asylum in Somerville, Massachusetts.

In January 2015, an improved version of the 3Doodler was introduced, and a second fundraising campaign on Kickstarter yielded more than $1.5 million. Updates include an option for changing the size and shape of the tip, a smaller design, and a quieter fan.

Project Soli

PROJECT SOLI

-Blog By Mohammad Saquib (Final Year Student, ETC, ACET, Nagpur)

Wave hello to Soli touch-less interactions:

Soli is a new sensing technology that uses miniature radar to detect touch-less gesture interactions. We envision a future in which the human hand becomes a universal input device for interacting with technology.

The Soli chip incorporates the entire sensor and antenna array into an ultra compact 8mm x 10mm package.

The concept of Virtual Tools is key to Soli interactions: Virtual Tools are gestures that mimic familiar interactions with physical tools. This metaphor makes it easier to communicate, learn, and remember Soli interactions.

Virtual Tool Gestures

Imagine an invisible button between your thumb and index fingers – you can press it by tapping your fingers together.

Or a Virtual Dial that you turn by rubbing thumb against index finger. Imagine grabbing and pulling a Virtual Slider in thin air.

These are the kinds of interactions we are developing and imagining. Even though these controls are virtual, the interactions feel physical and responsive.

Feedback is generated by the haptic sensation of fingers touching each other. Without the constraints of physical controls, these virtual tools can take on the fluidity and precision of our natural human hand motion.

How does it work?

Soli sensor technology works by emitting electromagnetic waves in a broad beam. Objects within the beam scatter this energy, reflecting some portion back towards the radar antenna. Properties of the reflected signal, such as energy, time delay, and frequency shift capture rich information about the object’s characteristics and dynamics, including size, shape, orientation, material, distance, and velocity.

Soli tracks and recognizes dynamic gestures expressed by fine motions of the fingers and hand. In order to accomplish this with a single chip sensor, we developed a novel radar sensing paradigm with tailored hardware, software, and algorithms. Unlike traditional radar sensors, Soli does not require large bandwidth and high spatial resolution; in fact, Soli’s spatial resolution is coarser than the scale of most fine finger gestures. Instead, our fundamental sensing principles rely on motion resolution by extracting subtle changes in the received signal over time. By processing these temporal signal variations, Soli can distinguish complex finger movements and deforming hand shapes within its field.

Soli gesture recognition

The Soli software architecture consists of a generalized gesture recognition pipeline which is hardware agnostic and can work with different types of radar. The pipeline implements several stages of signal abstraction: from the raw radar data to signal transformations, core and abstract machine learning features, detection and tracking, gesture probabilities, and finally UI tools to interpret gesture controls.

The Soli SDK enables developers to easily access and build upon our gesture recognition pipeline. The Soli libraries extract real-time signals from radar hardware, outputting signal transformations, high precision position and motion data, and gesture labels and parameters at frame rates from 100 to 10,000 frames per second.

The Soli sensor is a fully integrated, low-power radar operating in the 60-GHz ISM band. In our journey toward this form factor, we rapidly iterated through several hardware prototypes, beginning with a large bench-top unit built from off-the-shelf components -- including multiple cooling fans. Over the course of 10 months, we redesigned and rebuilt the entire radar system into a single solid state component that can be easily integrated into small, mobile consumer devices and produced at scale.

The custom-built Soli chip greatly reduces radar system design complexity and power consumption compared to our initial prototypes. We developed two modulation architectures: a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar and a Direct-Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) radar. Both chips integrate the entire radar system into the package, including multiple beam forming antennas that enable 3D tracking and imaging with no moving parts.

What are the potential applications of Soli?

1. The Soli chip can be embedded in wearable, phones, computers, cars and IOT devices in our environment.

2. Soli has no moving parts, it fits onto a chip and consumes little energy. It is not affected by light conditions and it works through most materials. Just imagine the possibilities...