As you know, in the beginning of april was the 11th Laval Virtual, and this year was my sixth time in a row. So here are my thoughts and feedbacks on this years edition.

On Laval Virtual itself

On a general scale, I found this year's edition bigger, and richer than previous ones. There was more space inside for animations and exhibitions, and the award ceremony was very... inspiring. Anyway it was also very good to meet many enthusiast researchers, students and experts.

Open Space 3D

Every one who hes been to at least one Laval Virtual knows that half of the booth are Powered by Virtools, and it's rare to see a new software in the place. That's one of the reason why I've been glad to discover Open Space 3D, which is a Virtools like editing software.

As its name suggests, Open Space 3D is an open source realtime 3D engine, using a system similar to Virtools' Building Blocks. Created by french engineers, it's still in alpha state, and does not have the maturity of Virtools, but being open source, it may gather some of Virtools fans and become the Blender of relatime interactions?

The "new" Virtools ?

Mommy Tummy

The nearest feeling to being pregnant

Here's an interesting work from a Kanazawa Institute of Technology, in which man can experience (some of) the feelings of bearing a child. Using a harness with pockets filled with sensors and water, the man can understand how tiresome life can be to a pregnant woman. Using some motors, men can also feel the "virtual baby" moving and growing.

The experience is very strange, cause you really feel something moving, almost inside your belly. And women who had child already, said that the feeling was much the sam to a real pregnancy.

Mommy Tummy [Youtube]

Immersive Music Painter

A poetic use of Immersive VR

This project is both very simple yet very poetic. Based on a classic IR head tracking and a wand, you move in front of a screen, or ideally in a CAVE, and paint in space in front of view. With the head tracking, the view is adapted to your position, letting you move around your painting.

Along with the particles, symbolise the virtual paint, you have sounds and music being played according to the strokes being made. The resulting experience is very strange, yet I found myself staying in the cave for 10 minutes without getting tired. A small example is available in video on Dailymotion

Camera-less Smart Laser Projector

Laser Projector used to highlight veins

This project use a detection system without a camera, using an infrared laser which can detect either ink on a paper, or veins through the skin, or just black/white contrasts, and then control a tiny mirror which let a visible red laser to lighten the exact same point. Then both lasers are moved on the targeted surface fastly to give the impression that there is a standard video projector.

It can also be used for more artistic projects, like in the video below, to create sounds and ride on the hands of someone. This project has won the Emerging Technology award, and will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2010.

Camera-less Smart Laser Projector [Youtube]

Haptic Canvas

Using a mix of water and starch, the team from Osaka University made a canvas which can change between solid and liquid state, locally. With a glove enhanced with local tubes, they can pump or inject water to make these changes around your finger and make you experience different feelings : stickyness, hardness and roughness.

A state changing substance under your hand

Organic Motion

The Open Stage platform is a quite stable system enabling real time markerless motion tracking of a person, using 12 infrared cameras. Each camera gets a depth map of a human body moving inside a cubic space, then all the images are combined to get an accurate 3D representation of the body.

Then an analysis is performed to find all the bones and bind them to a 3D avatar, moving on a screen accordingly. The latency is very small, and the tracking is accurate even to the motion of the head.

Testing Organic Motion's tracking system

Lexip

3D mouses have been available for quite some time now, yet each year we see a new mouse trying to find a place on the market. This year, Lexip, a french company, presents its mouse. Using a tilt/roll control directly on the base of the mouse, plus a joystick on the thumb, enabling 6 DOF liberty.

The use of the joystick together with the tilt/roll is quite strange, and somewhat less instinctive than other mouses where all the 6 DOF are using the same control (like Logitech's space mouse). But you're not bound to use it for moving in 6 axes, and use the Joystick or tilt/roll independantly for your application, as the pro version comes with a SDK to make your own bindings. The basic version coming only with profile for severall games and DCC softwares (3DS Max, Trackmania among others).

Lexip's 3D Mouse

AR Pool

I already talked about this project earlier here, but here's a feedback after really trying the thing. One of the main drawback of this project is that the human hand is not as precise as needed to be able to use the help of the system. Besides, one need to setup by hand the force applied to the cue, and the angle between the cue and the horizontal plane.

Trying the AR Pool

CRISTAL

The living room of tomorrow

Grand Prix of this year's Laval Virtual, CRISTAL, or Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces, is an example of working domotic. Using a touch screen on a cofee table, one can control the lights in the room, browse a library and send either videos, photo albums or music to the television, or even control a vacuum cleaner.

CRISTAL [Youtube]

There are two types of immersions : cognitive and perceptive

Seb "Cb" Kuntz