Pisa, 26/28 May 2009

 

4th XVR Workshop & Joint PRESENCCIA and SKILLS PhD Symposium

XVR is a development framework for complex VR application. It was used at PERCRO in the past 10 years for a variety of projects dealing with real-time graphics and interaction, and it is continuously updated to accommodate always-evolving programming needs. Thanks to its ease of use and flexibility XVR is today used by several research institution around the world offering a wide range of useful and practical functionality to control the many aspects linked to VR programming, including real-time graphics, sound, interaction, cluster rendering (CAVE), and support to the most common VR devices (trackers, displays, haptics and interaction devices).
The XVR Workshop is a yearly event organized by PERCRO to discuss and disseminate technical aspects of VR developments. This year the technical tutorials and presentations will be preceded by a scientific Symposium jointly organized by the two EU Projects that make the most use of XVR technology.

XVR

 

Tuesday 26, Wednesday 27 May

Joint PRESENCCIA and SKILLS PhD Symposium

PRESENCCIA and SKILLS are two integrated projects that both aim to advance Virtual Reality technology. These projects are highly interdisciplinary encompassing, among others, computer science, robotics, engineering, interaction design, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy. All these fields, however diverse their interests, come together in the goal of integrating human interaction in mixed and virtual reality environments in order to enhance the user’s experience and enabling him to act and interact in a natural and familiar way by means of enactive paradigms.
The most interesting, challenging and useful digital environments are social, focussing on supporting (group) interaction between real people and other remote people or real people and virtual people. The aim is to understand, track and give appropriate feedback in verbal, non-verbal and implicit interactions while also making digital content more believable and intelligent.
Likewise, a number of methods need to be developed allowing users of virtual environments to not only perform actions effectively in a variety of different scenarios but also be able to choose from a repertoire of suitable actions. This requires adequate digital representations of human skills and also techniques to capture, interpret and deliver them by means of multimodal interfaces, robotics and virtual environments within enactive interaction paradigms.
At the low-level end of the spectrum we also aim to understand the neural basis of presence and its response. Its enhancement and its application is the fundamental object of study from many different points of view, and including visual, haptic and auditory modalities.

Programme 

Tuesday, 26th May

09.30- 10:00 Introduction to SKILLS and PRESENCCIA
Massimo Bergamasco, PERCRO, Mel Slater, Universitat de Barcelona
10.00 - 11:30 First Keynote: Flesh made Soul: Bodies in the Brain
Salvatore Maria Aglioti
11:30 - 11:50 Coffee break
11:50 - 13:00 1st Session: Haptic applications
13:00 - 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 - 15:50 2nd Session: Rehabilitation and VR
15:50 - 16:15 Coffee break
16:15 - 17:30 3rd Session: Algorithms and human motion analysis

Wednesday, 27th May

09:30 - 11:00 Second Keynote: Towards Motor Skill Learning in Robotics
Jan Peters
11:00 - 11:20 Coffee break
11:20 - 13:00 4th Session: Human Computer Interaction
13:00 - 14:00 Lunch break
14:00 - 15:40 5th Session: Human response in interactive systems
15:40 - 16:00 Coffee break
16:00 - 17:30 Panel: Building a Career in Virtual Reality

Click here to download the detailed programme (pdf)

To participate to the Workshop, please register on line:
http://www.percro.org/registrationXVR2009/

 

Keynote Speakers

Salvatore Maria Aglioti, Psychology Department , Università di Roma "La Sapienza” and IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Roma (http://w3.uniroma1.it/aglioti/)
Flesh made Soul: Bodies in the Brain. Talking about the body implies talking about the very “special object” that allows a deep interconnection between the ability to have self-consciousness and the ability to experience a world of objects. My talk will be based on the studies in healthy and brain damaged subjects we performed in the past fifteen years on the neural representation of the body. I will put forward the idea that, although trivially made of flesh, blood and bones, the body can be considered the “psychic object” par excellence, which mediates and implements a variety of complex functions, ranging from the notion of self to social interactions and negotiations.

 

Jan Peters, Dept. Empirical Inference, Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany (http://www-clmc.usc.edu/~jrpeters/)
Towards Motor Skill Learning in Robotics. Autonomous robots that can assist humans in situations of daily life have been a long standing vision of robotics, artificial intelligence,
and cognitive sciences. A first step towards this goal is to create robots that can learn tasks triggered by environmental context or higher level instruction. However, learning techniques have yet to live up to  this promise as only few methods manage to scale to high-dimensional manipulator or humanoid robots. In this talk, we investigate a general framework suitable for learning motor skills in robotics which is based on the principles behind many analytical robotics approaches. We propose new, task-appropriate architectures, such as the Natural Actor-Critic and the PoWER algorithm.

 

Thursday 28 May 

The 4th XVR Workshop 

The XVR Workshop is a free and informal meeting that takes place every year at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. It is an event dedicated to the technical aspects of Virtual Reality programming and related issues. XVR (Extreme VR) is a development framework for complex VR application. It was used at PERCRO in the past 10 years for a variety of projects dealing with real-time graphics and interaction, and it is continuously updated to accommodate always-evolving programming needs. The XVR workshop has a strong technological content, and it is for anyone involved or interested in VR application development. The workshop will also include a BCI demo.

Programme

09.00 - 10:00 Introduction to VR Programming, Franco Tecchia, PERCRO
10.00 - 11:00 The XVR Development Environment, Marcello Carrozzino, IMT
11.00 - 12:00 Advanced Rendering Tecniques, Davide Vercelli, PERCRO
12.00 - 13:00 Real Time Physics with XVR Rosario Leonardi, PERCRO
13.00 - 14:15 Lunch break
14.15 - 16:45 Brain-Computer Interfaces, Applications in VR and Control*, Günter Edlinger, g.tec
16.45 - 18:00 Exemplary XVR Projects: Concrete examples of applications developed and devices interfaced

* The Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research area is a fast expanding field in the world of biomedical engineering. BCIs allow direct connection between the human brain and computers. BCIs have been developed during the last years for people with severe disabilities to improve their quality of life. Applications of BCI systems comprise the restoration of movements, communication and environmental control. However, recently BCI applications have been also used in different research areas e.g. in the field of virtual reality. This tutorial gives you the chance to create your own BCI experiments and to
learn more about BCI.

 

    BCI1 BCI2

    g.tec - Guger Technologies OEG, based in Graz, Austria, leader in cutting-edge research on BCI will participate to the Workshop. g.tec received the European Information and Communication Technology Award 2007 for BCI technology (http://www.ict-prize.org)

       

       

      Practical Information

      How to get to Pisa: Pisa has a very practical international airport, with plenty of low-fare connection from/to many places in Europe. Both Ryanair and EasyJet fly to Pisa, and there are plenty more low-cost airlines too. There are also direct train connections to Milan (about 4 hours), Turin (5hours), Florence (1 hour) and Rome (3.5 hours). Trains are not very expensive but some of the connections are not very frequent.

      How to reach Scuola Superiore S.Anna: Both events will take place in Pisa, at the main campus of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. The campus entrance is located in Piazza Martiri della Libertà, a central square in Pisa. From within the city center the cheapest and fastest way to reach the location is by walk. You can use the following map as a reference, remembering that walking from the main train station to the campus takes about 20 min. A taxi is the best option for people staying outside the city centre.

      Click here to see the map

      Hotels: Pisa offers a range of hotels, most of them located at a walking distance from the main train station. Here is a short selection:

      A very practical hotel (just meters away from the main train station):
      http://en.venere.com/hotels_pisa/san_martino/hotel_jolly_hotel_cavalieri.html

      Another hotel not far from the station (5 mins):
      http://en.venere.com/hotels_pisa/sant_antonio/hotel_bologna.html

      If you prefer a central location (riverside Arno and 15 min walking to the train station):
      http://www.royalvictoria.it

      25 min walk from the train station but just few meters away from the famous Pisa Tower:
      http://www.hotelariston.pisa.it/default_en.asp
       http://www.hotelvillakinzica.it/en/Home_eng.htm

      Other hotels can be found here:
      http://www.venere.com/search/?lg=en&geoid=676&ref=