Design of Participatory Virtual Reality System for visualizing an intelligent adaptive cyberspace

Abstract

The concept of 'Virtual Intelligence' is proposed as an intelligent adaptive interaction between the simulated 3-D dynamic environment and the 3-D dynamic virtual image of the participant in the cyberspace created by a virtual reality system. A system design for such interaction is realised utilising only a stereoscopic optical head-mounted LCD display with an ultrasonic head tracker, a pair of gesture-controlled fibre optic gloves and, a speech recogni(ion and synthesiser device, which are all connected to a Pentium computer. A 3-D dynamic environment is created by physically-based modelling and rendering in real-time and modification of existing object description files by afractals-based Morph software. It is supported by an extensive library of audio and video functions, and functions characterising the dynamics of various objects. The multimedia database files so created are retrieved or manipulated by intelligent hypermedia navigation and intelligent integration with existing information. Speech commands control the dynamics of the environment and the corresponding multimedia databases. The concept of a virtual camera developed by ZeIter as well as Thalmann and Thalmann, as automated by Noma and Okada, can be applied for dynamically relating the orientation and actions of the virtual image of the participant with respect to the simulated environment. Utilising the fibre optic gloves, gesture-based commands are given by the participant for controlling his 3-D virtual image using a gesture language. Optimal estimation methods and dataflow techniques enable synchronisation between the commands of the participant expressed through the gesture language and his 3-D dynamic virtual image. Utilising a framework, developed earlier by the author, for adaptive computational control of distribute multimedia systems, the data access required for the environment as well as the virtual image of the participant can be endowed with adaptive capability.