This article was discussed in our <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wevolver.com/profile/the.next.byte&source=gmail&ust=1652834752670000&usg=AOvVaw0nokl6Vw0qFseoqBb6ekTp" href="https://www.wevolver.com/profile/the.next.byte" id="isPasted" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Next Byte podcast</a>.&nbsp;<iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/86de3e57-5b39-45b4-aac4-c0a5d3bb3456?dark=false" class="fr-draggable" data-lf-yt-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true"></iframe>The full article will continue below.<hr>Cornell Tech researchers have developed a mixed-reality (XR) driving simulator system that could lower the cost of testing vehicle systems and interfaces, such as the turn signal and dashboard.Through the use of a publicly available headset, virtual objects and events are superimposed into the view of participants driving unmodified vehicles in low-speed test areas, to produce accurate and repeatable data collection about behavioral responses in real-world driving tasks.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNjUxMTkzMDU0NDA0LTA0MjhfY2FyMV8wLmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTUwLCJmaXQiOiJjb3ZlciJ9fX0=" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Doctoral students Frank Bu, left, and David Goedicke, co-authors of the research on the XR-OOM mixed-reality driving simulation system, are pictured outside the Fiat virtual simulation vehicle, inside the Tata Center at Cornell Tech. Lindsay France/Cornell University&nbsp;Doctoral student David Goedicke is lead author of &ldquo;<a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473682.3480266" target="_blank">XR-OOM: MiXed Reality Driving Simulation With Real Cars For Research and Design</a>,&rdquo; which he will present at the Association for Computing Machinery&rsquo;s <a href="https://chi2022.acm.org/" target="_blank">CHI 2022 conference</a>, April 30-May 5 in New Orleans.The senior author is <a href="https://tech.cornell.edu/people/wendy-ju/" target="_blank">Wendy Ju</a>, associate professor of information science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion, and a member of the information science field at Cornell.&nbsp;Hiroshi Yasuda, human-machine interaction researcher at Toyota Research Institute, also contributed to the study.This work is an offshoot of research Ju&rsquo;s lab conducted in 2018, <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3173574.3173739" target="_blank">which resulted in VR-OOM</a>, a virtual-reality on-road driving simulation program. This current work takes that a step farther, Goedicke said, by combining video of the real world &ndash; known as &ldquo;video pass-through&rdquo; &ndash; in real time, with virtual objects.&ldquo;What you&rsquo;re trying to do is create scenarios,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You want to feel like you&rsquo;re driving in a car, and the developer wants full control over the scenarios you want to show to a participant. Ultimately, you want to use as much from the real world as you can.&rdquo;This system was built using the Varjo XR-1 Mixed Reality headset, along with the Unity simulation environment, which previous researchers demonstrated could be usable for driving simulation in a moving vehicle. XR-OOM integrates and validates these into a usable driving simulation system that incorporates real-world variables, in real time.&ldquo;One of the issues with traditional simulation testing is that they really only consider the scenarios and situations that the designers thought of,&rdquo; Ju said, &ldquo;so a lot of the important things that happen in the real world don&rsquo;t get captured as part of those experiments. (XR-OOM) increases the ecological validity of our studies, to be able to understand how people are going to behave under really specific circumstances.&rdquo;One challenge with XR versus VR is the faithful rendering of the outside world, Goedicke said. In mixed reality, what&rsquo;s on the video screen needs to precisely match the outside world.&ldquo;In VR, you can trick the brain really easily,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If the horizon doesn&rsquo;t quite match up, for instance, it&rsquo;s not a big problem. Or if you&rsquo;re making a 90-degree turn but it was actually more like 80 degrees, your brain doesn&rsquo;t care all that much. But if you try to do this with mixed reality, where you&rsquo;re incorporating actual elements of the real world, it doesn&rsquo;t work at all.&rdquo;To test the validity of their method, the researchers designed an experiment with three conditions: No headset (Condition A); headset with video pass-through only (Condition B); and headset with video pass-through and virtual objects (Condition C).The participants were asked to perform several stationary tasks, including starting the vehicle, adjusting seat and mirrors, fastening safety belt, and verbally describing which dashboard lights are visible. Participants were also asked to perform several low-speed driving tasks, including left and right turns, slalom navigation and stopping at a line. The drivers in conditions A and B had to navigate around actual physical cones, placed 8 feet apart; those in Condition C saw superimposed cones in their headsets.Most participants successfully completed all cockpit tasks, with most of the failed attempts attributable to unfamiliarity with the vehicle. Most also were successful in the driving tasks, with slalom navigation being most difficult for all, regardless of condition.This success validates the potential, Ju said, of this technology as a low-cost alternative to elaborate facilities for the testing of certain onboard vehicle technologies.&ldquo;This kind of high-resolution, mixed-reality headset is becoming a lot more widely available, so now we&rsquo;re thinking about how to use it for driving experiments,&rdquo; Ju said. &ldquo;More people will be able to take advantage of these things that will be commercially available and inexpensive really soon.&rdquo;Other co-authors included Sam Lee, M.S. &rsquo;21; and doctoral students Alexandra Bremers and Fanjun Bu.

Doctoral student David Goedicke sits behind the wheel of the Fiat virtual simulation vehicle, inside the Tata Center at Cornell Tech. Lindsay France/Cornell University

Cornell Tech researchers have developed a mixed-reality (XR) driving simulator system that could lower the cost of testing vehicle systems and interfaces, such as the turn signal and dashboard.

Mixed-reality driving simulator a low-cost alternative

This article was discussed in our <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wevolver.com/profile/the.next.byte&source=gmail&ust=1652834752670000&usg=AOvVaw0nokl6Vw0qFseoqBb6ekTp" href="https://www.wevolver.com/profile/the.next.byte" id="isPasted" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Next Byte podcast</a>.&nbsp;<iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/86de3e57-5b39-45b4-aac4-c0a5d3bb3456?dark=false" class="fr-draggable" data-lf-yt-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true"></iframe>The full article will continue below.<hr>While it&rsquo;s far from the first time the technology has tried to break into the mainstream, virtual reality is currently enjoying a renaissance for everything from training and telerobotics to entertainment &mdash; aided, in no small way, by the steady march of technology improving both the hardware and the underlying software.Today&rsquo;s virtual reality systems, however, concentrate almost exclusively on sight and sound, with a much smaller number attempting to leverage the user&rsquo;s sense of touch. Even there, a big sense is left unused: Smell.A team of scientists at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, aim to address that with proof that programmable scents, combined with off-the-shelf virtual reality hardware and software, can enhance a user&rsquo;s sense of presence in the virtual world.<h1>Smell-o-vision</h1>The team set about building an experimental system designed to determine whether being able to smell, rather than just see, a virtual environment would engage users more deeply. The environment in question: Capcom&rsquo;s survival horror Resident Evil 7, running on a PlayStation 4 games console with a PlayStation VR virtual reality headset.For the smells, the olfactometer portion of a custom-built simultaneous gustometer olfactometer (SGO), created for an earlier study, was employed. Featuring six computer-controlled mass-flow controls linked to the air flow through six glass saturators, the olfactometer can pump varying concentrations and mixtures of scents through a tube to the user&rsquo;s nose.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNjUwNDg2OTY0MDMzLXZyc21lbGwyLmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTUwLCJmaXQiOiJjb3ZlciJ9fX0=" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib" alt="A photograph of the CSIRO lab where experiments into adding smells to virtual reality environments took place, Four areas are numbered: 1, a questionnaire table; 2, a user gameplay area; 3, an olfactometer; 4, a monitoring and supervision station. A player is seen in the gameplay area; a researcher is seen at the monitoring station.">The experimental setup for adding smell feedback to virtual reality comprised of a vented gameplay area (2), a link to an olfactometer (3) which could pump programmed smells to the user, a monitoring station (4) with a researcher triggering the smells, and a final questionnaire station (1) for post-game feedback.Not all of the odors were ones you&rsquo;d volunteer to smell under normal conditions. While the first odor, a green leafy scent dubbed &ldquo;forest,&rdquo; would be pleasant enough, and the &ldquo;smoke&rdquo; odor &mdash; produced by an off-the-shelf liquid mesquite smoke designed for barbecues &mdash; at least tolerable, the &ldquo;dank&rdquo; odor would be less palatable, while the &ldquo;rotten&rdquo; odor delivers exactly what it promises.There&rsquo;s a reason behind the selection of smells, though, and it ties in to the reason for using a zombie-themed survival horror game as the virtual environment. Previous studies, the team notes, had found that unpleasant odors had a measurably higher effect on the user&rsquo;s sense of presence &mdash; and that odors matched to the virtual environment were more readily perceived. In other words: A surprise decapitated head which smells rotten should have a stronger impact than one which smells of flowers, or replacing the head with a bouquet of perfumed roses.<h1>Smells like you&rsquo;re really there</h1>The experiment saw 22 participants placed in a walk-through game section which didn&rsquo;t involve immediate peril, the use of weapons, or the appearance of enemies. First, they started next to a vehicle before walking through a forest; soon, the forest gave way to swamp. A disturbing sculpture gave off a rotten smell, while a fire offered the aroma of smoke. A kitchen revealed rotten food, which prepared the participants for a journey through dank water to find a surprise head floating next to them.Of the 22 participants, 11 were also fitted with a wearable designed to track their physiological responses. Regardless of which group a participant was in, they were asked to complete questionnaires to determine their responses to the standard and smell-enhanced versions of the game.The results show promise. Participants generally reported an increased sense of spatial presence &mdash; the feeling of actually being present in the game world &mdash; when playing with the smells available. Interestingly, participants also appeared to exhibit heightened anxiety &mdash; though other emotional states did not appear to be affected. These reports were backed by data from the wearable sensors, finding increased heart rate and body temperature in the presence of odor and a significant decrease in electrodermal activity (EDA).<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNjUwNDg2OTc2MTI5LXZyc21lbGw0LmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTUwLCJmaXQiOiJjb3ZlciJ9fX0=" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib" alt="A graph showing the player environment ratings across five measures for the experience both with and without odors: Match shows a very large difference, presence a significant difference, engagement and naturalness smaller differences, while the measure marked &quot;negative&quot; has only a very small difference. In all cases, however, the with-odor scores are higher.">The researchers noted a significant improvement in user presence when scents were used alongside the visual and audio elements of the virtual reality experience. &ldquo;While the game was a useful test bed for more &lsquo;extreme&rsquo; smells,&rdquo; the team notes, &ldquo;we believe the findings from this study demonstrate that the use of smells in virtual environments should be serious considered for situations where presence and realism are critical [such as] virtual training environments for emergency services (fire fighting for example), military personnel, hazardous chemical response teams,&rdquo; as well as virtual reality exposure therapy.The team further suggests that the results are strong enough to support the development of commercial odor-delivery devices for integration into virtual reality hardware in the future, though a number of difficulties are noted &mdash; including the size of the hardware required and the cost of development, both of which suggest the technology would find a home in &ldquo;larger-scale training simulations, gallery, and theme-park installations&rdquo; long before anyone will be connected a programmable olfactometer to their PlayStations.The team&rsquo;s work has been published in the journal <cite><a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0265039" target="_blank">PLoS ONE</a></cite> under open-access terms.<h1>Reference</h1>Nicholas S. Archer, Andrew Bluff, Andrew Eddy, Chreshall K. Nikhil, Nick Hazell, Damian Frank, and Andrew Johnston: <cite>Odour enhances the sense of presence in a virtual reality environment, PLoS ONE 17(3)</cite>. DOI <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265039" target="_blank">10.1371/journal.pone.0265039</a>.

While Capcom's Resident Evil 7 may already be terrifying in virtual reality, adding smells — ranging from a leafy forest to rotting flesh — really pushes things to a new level, researchers have found.

Putting volunteers into the virtual reality world of Capcom's zombie-filled Resident Evil 7, researchers have found that smells — particularly unpleasant ones — have a measurable effect on user presence, in a study which could prove important for future VR training systems.

Researchers pump programmed scents to make virtual reality users feel more present

Well probably not literally. But close!Virtual reality (VR) is no longer the sci-fi dream promised to many for decades, but never quite delivered. In fact, 2016 could even be the year of VR. CNN Money, among others, named it one of its only two biggest tech trends this year<a href="https://www.creaform3d.com/blog/virtual-reality-is-at-our-doorstep/#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" target="_blank">[1]</a>. &nbsp;VR a slow start, but a really fast pickup!<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1592469622183-girl-testing-occulus-rift-virtual-reality-headset.jpg" style="width: 788px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">VirtualReality is nothing new, of course, but let’s just say it has seen its shares of… false starts. In the early 1990s, the technology was already touted as “the next technology revolution,” as this (now quite funny in hindsight) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVn3H93Ysag" target="_blank" title="Virtual Reality 1991">1991 American prime time TV report</a> attests. But it just never happened. Why? Prohibitive costs (the 1990 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACeoMNux_AU" target="_blank" title="Virtual Reality from 1990, Jaron Lanier, Eye phones">EyePhone</a> VR headset device could cost up to $500K), clunky technology, idea way ahead of its time? Probably a mix of all that.What changed everything in Virtual reality, obviously, was Oculus. The company, founded in 2012, launched a Kickstarter campaign shortly after to fund its Oculus Rift VR headset. It garnered about $2.5 million in financing, as well as a lot of attention. Enough for Facebook to acquire the company in 2014, for $2 billion. After much speculation, Oculus VR development kits and prototypes, the “consumer version” of the virtual reality headset <a href="https://www.oculus.com/en-us/" target="_blank">Oculus Rift</a> is finally launching this spring.Explains Linda Jacobson, founding editor at Wired Magazine and virtual reality expert: “What’s new is this particular set of products at a new price point, as well as the availability of new people and new talent who are looking at it<a href="https://www.creaform3d.com/blog/virtual-reality-is-at-our-doorstep/#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" target="_blank">[2]</a>.” In short, the current VR revival could be attributed to both its more “democratic” (relatively speaking) price, as well as to the presence of a whole new generation looking at it with fresh eyes. What the new buzz hints, is that maybe this time, VR could become a genuine mainstream thing.<h3>A multiplayer game…</h3><img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1592469745491-virtual-reality-headset.jpg" class="fr-fic fr-dib" style="width: 788px;">Oculus is far from the only player in this VR arena; other major companies are currently bringing their own devices forward. HTC just released its more upscale <a href="https://www.htcvive.com/ca/" target="_blank">HTC Vive</a>, while Sony plans to launch its <a href="https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstation-vr/" target="_blank" title="PlayStation®VR">Play Station VR</a> later this year. A Canadian company is also vying for market share: startup VRvana, from Montreal, is expected to ship its <a href="https://www.vrvana.com/license-totem-technology/" target="_blank" title="Totem technology">Totem</a> sometime this summer. Competition is heating up and users are likely to benefit from that in the mid-term.<h3>…And a perfectly suited 3D scanning application</h3>Sure, first and foremost, Virtual Reality seems to be destined to go hand in hand with the gaming industry. Gaming of all kinds will be its most expected application. But it doesn’t stop there! Far from it. According to Tech Republic<a href="https://www.creaform3d.com/blog/virtual-reality-is-at-our-doorstep/#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" target="_blank">[3]</a>, it’s easy “to see VR establishing itself more firmly in industries like healthcare, education, tourism, real estate, and marketing, where the uses are more practical than fantastical. Marketing in particular could end up having a big impact on the way many people might first encounter virtual reality through experiences like traveling installations or branded apps. And for agencies, Virtual Reality is already becoming a point of interest”. All of these applications potentially broaden the reach of VR in the next few years, while opening up many opportunities.What this exciting new trend means, of course, is that the need for quality 3D content has never been this high. To feed this explosion of VR devices and experiences, 3D scanning, along with a “3D vision”, is going to be key. And we at Creaform, along with our&nbsp;<a href="https://www.goscan3d.com/en" target="_blank">Go!SCAN 3D scanner</a>, are&nbsp;<a href="https://www.goscan3d.com/en/applications/serious-gaming-virtual-reality" target="_blank" title="Serious Gaming & Virtual Reality">perfectly ready for the ride</a>.We can’t wait to see how this unfolds.

Virtual reality (VR) is no longer the sci-fi dream promised to many for decades, but never quite delivered. In fact, 2016 could even be the year of VR. CNN Money, among others, named it one of its only two biggest tech trends this year

Augmented Reality (AR)

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Mixed-reality driving simulator a low-cost alternative

Researchers pump programmed scents to make virtual reality users feel more present

Virtual Reality Is At Our Doorstep!

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