Publications related to Challenges in Crowd Simulation

Human Interactive Robotic Surfaces for Physical Immersion

Computers have long been augmenting human capabilities and communication, and with emerging technologies, physical immersion in virtual worlds is now attainable. These advancements push the boundaries of human potential, allowing designers, architects, eng ...

EPFL2023

Reinforcement learning approach to control an inverted pendulum: A general framework for educational purposes

Jesus Sanchez Rodriguez

Machine learning is often cited as a new paradigm in control theory, but is also often viewed as empirical and less intuitive for students than classical model-based methods. This is particularly the case for reinforcement learning, an approach that does n ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2023

Playing Brains: The Ethical Challenges Posed by Silicon Sentience and Hybrid Intelligence in DishBrain

The convergence of human and artificial intelligence is currently receiving considerable scholarly attention. Much debate about the resulting Hybrid Minds focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence into the human brain through intelligent brain- ...

2023

From finger animation to full-body embodiment of avatars with different morphologies and proportions

Mathias Guy Delahaye

VR (Virtual Reality) is a real-time simulation that creates the subjective illusion of being in a virtual world. This thesis explores how integrating the user's body and fingers can be achieved and beneficial for the user to experience VR. At the advent of ...

EPFL2023

Online active and dynamic object shape exploration with a multi-fingered robotic hand

Aude Billard, Kunpeng Yao, Farshad Khadivar, Xiao Gao

The sense of touch can provide a robot with a wealth of information about the contact region when interacting with an unknown environment. Nevertheless, utilizing touch information to plan exploration paths and adjust robot posture to improve task efficien ...

Elsevier2023

A comprehensive review of digital twin - part 1: modeling and twinning enabling technologies

Sayan Ghosh, Chao Hu, Olga Fink

As an emerging technology in the era of Industry 4.0, digital twin is gaining unprecedented attention because of its promise to further optimize process design, quality control, health monitoring, decision and policy making, and more, by comprehensively mo ...

SPRINGER2022

Active origami platforms for human-robot interactions

Frédéric Henri Vaskin Giraud

Robots are employed to assist humans in lengthy, challenging, and repetitive tasks. However, the fields of rehabilitation, haptics, and assistive robotics have shown a significant need to support and interact with people in their everyday life. To facilita ...

EPFL2022

On the Importance of Providing a Tangible Haptic Response for Training Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation in Virtual Reality

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Mathias Guy Delahaye

The current approach to train Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) is to employ a mannequin device replicating the physical properties of a real human head and torso. This aims to ensure a correct transfer of the cardiac massage location, amplitude and freq ...

The Eurographics Association2021

How do users interact with Virtual Geographic Environments? Users' behavior evaluation in urban participatory planning

Jens Ingensand, Thibaud Nicolas Chassin

For the past twenty years, the adoption of Virtual Geographic Environments is thriving. This democratization is due to numerous new opportunities offered by this medium. However, in participatory urban planning these interactive 3D geovisualizations are st ...

COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH2021

Doppelganger-based training: Imitating our virtual self to accelerate interpersonal skills learning

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Marion Sandy Curdy, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues

Interpersonal skills require mastering a wide range of competencies such as communication and adaptation to different situations. Effective training includes the use of videos in which role models perform the desired behaviours such that trainees can learn ...

2021

Does scaling player size skew one’s ability to correctly evaluate object sizes in a virtual environment?

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Mathias Guy Delahaye

This paper presents the results of a study performed in order to evaluate whether a navigation technique, based on scaling the user’s avatar, impacts the user’s ability to correctly assess the size of virtual objects in a virtual environment. This study wa ...

Association for Computing Machinery2020

PointXR: A Toolbox for Visualization and Subjective Evaluation of Point Clouds in Virtual Reality

Touradj Ebrahimi, Evangelos Alexiou, Nanyang Yang

In this study, we explore the use of virtual reality to subjectively evaluate the visual quality of point cloud contents. To this aim, we develop the PointXR toolbox, a set of Unity applications that can host experiments under variants of interactive and p ...

IEEE2020

Body-machine interfaces for non-homologous human-machine interactions

Jenifer Cléa Miehlbradt

Virtual reality (VR), the interactive experience of being immersed in a simulated environment, has seen a tremendous development in the last years. Numerous applications came into being, ranging from flight simulators through a virtual ascent of Mount Ever ...

EPFL2019

Reconciling Being in-Control vs. Being Helped for the Execution of Complex Movements in VR

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Thibault Serge Mario Porssut

Performing motor tasks in virtual environments is best achieved with motion capture and animation of a 3D character that participants control in real time and perceive as being their avatar in the virtual environment. A strong Sense of Embodiment (SoE) for ...

IEEE2019

Real-time 360 Body Scanning System for Virtual Reality Research Applications

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Florian Lance, Louis Philippe Albert

We present a low-cost solution to perform the online and realistic representation of users using an array of depth cameras. The system is composed of a cluster of 10 Microsoft Kinect 2 cameras, each one associated to a compact NUC PC to stream live depth & ...

2019

Adequacy of Immersive Virtual Reality for the Perception of Daylit Spaces: Comparison of Real and Virtual Environments

Marilyne Andersen, Kynthia Chamilothori, Jan Wienold

This article presents a novel experimental method that uses a virtual reality (VR) headset, aiming to provide an alternative environment for the conduction of subjective assessments of daylit spaces. This method can overcome the difficulty of controlling t ...

2018

Methods for using immersive virtual reality for experimental studies in lighting research

Marilyne Andersen, Kynthia Chamilothori, Jan Wienold

Due to the growing popularity of virtual reality (VR) as a tool for conducting subjective experiments, we propose a session addressing methodological concerns and good practices for the use of VR in lighting research, going further than a simple demonstrat ...

2018

The Critical Role of Self-Contact for Embodiment in Virtual Reality

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Eray Molla, Sidney Bovet, Henrique Galvan Debarba

With the broad range of motion capture devices available on the market, it is now commonplace to directly control the limb movement of an avatar during immersion in a virtual environment. Here, we study how the subjective experience of embodying a full-bod ...

2018

Peripersonal Space: An Index of Multisensory Body–Environment Interactions in Real, Virtual, and Mixed Realities

Robin Mange, Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Javier Bello Ruiz, Jean-Paul Noel, Andrea Serino, Elisa Canzoneri, Fosco Bernasconi, Elisa Pellencin

Human–environment interactions normally occur in the physical milieu and thus by medium of the body and within the space immediately adjacent to and surrounding the body, the peripersonal space (PPS). However, human interactions increasingly occur with or ...

2018

Heartbeat-enhanced immersive virtual reality to treat complex regional pain syndrome

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Javier Bello Ruiz, Andrea Serino, Roberta Ronchi, Thomas Schmidlin, Marco Solcà

OBJECTIVES: To develop and test a new immersive digital technology for complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) that combines principles from mirror therapy and immersive virtual reality and the latest research from multisensory body processing. METHODS: In t ...

2018