Paper accepted for ASCAAD 2010 conference

Presence in Virtual Cave
Investigating presence in VR-Cave environments for historical sites. By: Ms Nour Sharkasi (BZU), Dr. Ramzi Hassan and Dr. Caroline Hagerhall (UMB).

Presence in VR environments is usually defined as “being there”, with high consideration of the physical ether of the virtual environment, the definition confines attention to the sensation of place. This study calls for expanding the attention to the dimension of time that is made possible by innovative design of VR environment. The study argues that virtual reality technology does not only provide a 3-D experience to subjects, it can also add a fourth dimension by conveying the unconsciousness of man from the meanwhile moment to a different timeframe. Based on the current knowledge on presence in virtual environments, we will use a questionnaire to measure subjective presence for the two VR theatre systems. The study will make use of the following factors in order to determine the degree of presence in the virtual environment: (1) naturalness of interface design and involvement, (2) control and interaction, (3) quality of technical capabilities, and (4) negative effects.

Training sessions on using VR-Lab

EON Reality, the provider for Birzeit VR-LAB system held training sessions at the Faculty of Engineering. The main objective for the training session was explaining best methods for modeling and visualizing object in the VR-Lab an familiarizing employs with the new system. In addition, the training provided instructions on the operation mechanism of equipments and display. Dr. Faisal Awadallah (Dean for the Faculty of Engineering) added that “the training was very good and it was above expectations. All participants were happy and content. EON Reality lecturer gave also a general lecture that was well attended and informative”. The training sessions were held in week 2/2010.

A systematic Approach for the Evaluation of Education Themes adaptability to Virtual Reality Environment

Research work by Jamal Siam

Modern and new teaching /learning method are always investigated to increase the efficiency of the education process; naturally the new methods adopted to achieve the increase of the efficiency tends to be based on highly cognitive approaches with almost learning by doing procedures; this type of learning procedure must guarantee an almost complete interaction between the learner, the teacher and the learned subject. The use of interactive methods directly implies the necessity of using high technology and computer enhanced methods instead of the spoon feeding class teaching followed by a separated laboratory work. Virtual Reality can be a very useful tool in integrating the theoretical knowledge with the practical procedures, but the lack of large experience in the field of Virtual Reality specially in the education stream and the lack of a clear characterization of the themes that can be implemented in VR environment may discourage people even from starting to think of developing courses and themes in the Virtual Reality environment.
A research work in this field that designs a road map for the theme developer in the Virtual Reality environment should be considered essential to encourage the developers to develop their own Virtual Reality themes.
Objectives: The research should
• characterize the pedagogical learning objectives targeted by the VR environment
• characterize the learning methods supported by the VR environment
• characterize the assessment methods that can be used in a formative assessment procedure based on the VR environment
• characterize the basic parameters of the themes adaptable for Virtual Reality environment
• establish a clear procedure for measuring the learning outcomes of the themes developed in the VR environment
• establish a set of performance parameters that measure the performance of VR based themes in comparison with traditional and other technology enhanced learning methods
• establish a road map for the development of a VR based them in education
(Ongoing research work)

Virtual Reality in Cultural Landscape

Research work by Dr. Kamal Abdullfatah

The aim is to explore the possibilities of cultural landscape documentation, in order to enhance and encourage landscape research, cultural landscape and environmental values, and working towards development perspectives for a sustainable future through promoting cultural landscape tourism. This is very important because it comes in an epoch of history, in which the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, their history and their cultural heritage is increasing and getting more brutal. The Palestinian cultural heritage is exposed since many decades to fierce, inhuman campaigns of de-Arabization, designification, destruction and Jadaization. The main objectives of this pioneer research are: Typifying the main elements of the Palestinian cultural landscapes. Exploring the suitable methods of documenting the cultural landscapes. Through virtual reality techniques. Exploring the possibility of using the virtual reality landscapes documentation for practical uses i.e. educational, touristic, and planning purposes. (Ongoing research work)

VR Manufacturing Systems Resource Planning

A Virtual Reality Prototype for Multiagent Based Manufacturing Systems Resource Planning

Research work by Dr. Rashid Jayousi

In today’s ever changing mass customized environment in global market, modern manufacturing systems are required to become more dynamic and adaptive in order to remain competitive[1]. It is found that many industries are changing from mass production to mass customization[5] , therefore manufacturing systems are required to deal with unpredictable demand of different products in small batches. Thus a key factor of success in such environment is the access to a sharable and global view of the enterprise project, product, and services. In recent years researchers have been applying concepts in multi-agent systems to manufacturing systems and have developed new type of manufacturing systems such as Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) [2]. In such manufacturing systems agents cooperate together to manufacture products. We may assume a coordinator agent has a global task (joint task) to create a product with the help of a set of Assembler holons as cohorts, each cohort scheduling its local component of the global task in an environment where some of the scheduling slots (e.g. time-slots) of each cohort will have been already occupied by previously allocated tasks from other coordinators. From the perspective of the coordinators, the ideal situation is when all the required Assemblers are idle, so that the waiting time in between the Assemblers can be reduced to zero, while from the perspective of an Assembler there should not have any idle time at all, so that it does not lose say financially. Thus contentions are inevitable, there is no global optimum, only negotiated compromises. Recognizing this reality, we have developed a model based on user-defined preferences[3], which are expressed on resources used in task scheduling, such as machines, time or labour. It is not possible to meet all the preferences due to contention, and therefore we can define the best solution as a valid solution that meets as many preferences as theoretically possible, a valid solution being a solution that meets all the constraints. Since a this theoretical best is not really practicable, we opt for a good solution that lies within the upper and lower bounds of theoretical predictions. This approach leads to a preference network, where the allocation to a node (i.e. a subtask) affects all other nodes (subtasks) that have preference on that resource. The cascading effect of pre-emption and reallocation leads to branch explosions.

As virtual worlds offer today a new and efficient environment for the multiagent based simulation[4], we propose the use of virtual reality system that can be used to demonstrate our model behavior described. For the simulation study, a manufacturing environment is conjectured, where a set of tasks are resolved into subtasks by coordinator agents, and then these subtasks are allocated to assembler agents through cooperation and negotiation, in which preferred resources are exchanged against payments. In addition this virtual reality simulation can also be used for teaching purposes as it can illustrate the various concepts of multiagent systems. (Ongoing research work)

Virtual Reality use in archaeology

Research work by Dr. Hamed Salem

Virtual reality is one mean to present archaeological remains in an understandable way. Although this field was applied in many areas around the globe, it is still new in Palestine. There is no VR modeling yet in cultural heritage and archaeology, making this pilot project of a very significance in setting the basis for its applications in several fields. The application of VR modeling in Palestinian Archaeology in high demand, where it can support the reconstructing of past cultures at the material and immaterial levels. VR can be used to reach more accurate models close to the real life during the past. It helps human mind to imagine and better understand those distinct cultural aspects and relate them to their modern way of life. Further more, by bringing alive distinct past cultures in VR modeling can be a basis to improve site planning and development. It can be used in any further plans, especially master plans attempting to present and develop cultural heritage sites. Nowadays, VR models are crucial components of presenting sites to tourist. Its application in tourism is highly needed. The following research attempts to reconstruct the archaeological site of Kh. Birzeit as an example of applying the VR modeling in the Palestinian context. The selection of the site is based on several criteria. First it was excavated by Birzeit University, which will make it logical to incorporate the VR models in the ingoing research. Also, there is a tendency to develop the site for tourism in cooperation with Birzeit Municipality. The VR model is a crucial component to assist in this process. The medieval building and architecture are the main components of the archaeological remains, which will make it necessary to create 3D models to improve our understanding of these architectural elements and provide digital models to accurately present object descriptions. (Ongoing research work)

Studying presence in a Virtual Cave:

Factors, Measurement, and Virtual Reality Environment.
Research work by Nour Sharkasi

Virtual reality VR could be defined as the science of illusion. The goal is to create a virtual world where users could be immersed in. To be classified as virtual reality, an application should be interactive in the sense that users can interact with objects or inhabitants of the synthetic world. The presence and especially the sense of presence could be seen as a quality measurement estimator. The problem with presence is that it’s quite difficult to have a fair evaluation of it as it is subjective. The degree of presence can be influenced by divers factors. The objective of my experiment is to analyze interactions of effects of immersion and pictorial realism PR on the sense of presence. The main three questions of this study are: Which kind of ‘presence’ are we talking about, what is the most appropriate way of measuring it, and, finally, how reliable are the measurements of the study? The former two questions are closely interlinked and can be answered with respect to the objective and constraints of the experiments.(Ongoing research work).