Web3D Symposium 2005 - School of Informatics, University of Wales, Bangor, UK

Tutorial Session: Engineering Virtual Environments with X3D

Date: tbc
Time: 2 x 90 minutes

There are a number of important challenges facing developers of networked virtual environment applications, not just knowledge of various authoring tools, formats, and runtime engines. This session examines the approaches and supporting technologies for the delivery of interactive 3D content over the network. We will consider the issues and tradeoffs in publishing content with X3D using common XML and server tools. The rational design and composition of scene resources is crucial to a successful project deployment and attendees will gain an understanding of applied IT architectures using standard scenegraphs, data, and webservice paradigms.

Topics in this tutorial include:

Usability Engineering: requirements to design
Content Engineering: design and management
Application Architectures: server, client-server, publish-subscribe
Delivery / Quality of Service: accessibility, framerate, real-time interaction

Techniques covered in this tutorial:

Design of custom scene graph objects
Composing content, behaviors, and interfaces
Publishing interactive 3D content
Connecting and integrating supplemental information with 3D worlds

Case studies will be used to illustrate architectural choices for delivering interactive 3D content in a number of application areas including:

Model and interface component repositories
Military training and situational awareness
Cheminformatics and biomedical simulation
Architecture
Traffic visualization

For the tutorial, a basic acquaintance with the VRML and X3D nodeset and common web publishing technologies is required.

Authors:

Nicholas F. Polys has worked in the creation and management of digital assets for virtual environments for more than 6 years. From 1999-2002, Mr. Polys served on the Web3D Consortium Board of Directors and produced the Consortium's semi-annual Software Development Kit. As a key contributor to the X3D specification, Nicholas has conducted courses including: Introducing X3D (SIGGRAPH 2002 and local chapters: Boston, San Francisco), and Graphics Publishing with X3D (Web3D 2002). Mr. Polys has published on cutting-edge techniques for design and publication of real-time networked 3D in the ACM, IEEE, SPIE venues and a recent book chapter. His current research at Virginia Tech and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute concerns Human-Computer Interaction and 3D user interfaces for Information-Rich Virtual Environments.

Don Brutzman is a computer scientist and Associate Professor working in the Modeling Virtual Environments & Simulation (MOVES) Institute and Undersea Warfare Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. His research interests include underwater robotics, real-time 3D computer graphics, artificial intelligence and high-performance networking. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Graphics (SIGGRAPH) and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He is a board member of non-profit Sea Lab Monterey Bay, which is designing and building a youth-oriented year-round residential science camp. He is a founding member of the non-profit Web3D Consortium Board of Directors. He organized and led the SIGGRAPH Online 2001 team, designing and developing a huge audio/video/Web/XML information architecture. Currently he cochairs the Extensible 3D (X3D) Working Group for the ISO X3D/VRML Specification, and directs development of the Virtual Reality Transfer Protocol (vrtp) and the Extensible Modeling and Simulation Framework (XMSF).

Denis Gračanin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He has a B.S. and M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Zagreb, Croatia in 1985 and 1988, respectively. He has a M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1992 and 1994, respectively, His research interests include virtual reality and distributed simulation. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of AAAI, ACM, APS, SCS, and SIAM.

Robina Hetherington is a Senior Lecturer in Computing at Liverpool Hope University College. Her research interests build upon her initial education in architecture and combine them with the use of computer technology for the display of buildings over the World Wide Web.

Tutorial Session: Techniques for Perception in Virtual Environments

Date: tbc
Time: 90 minutes

When we perceive our reality, or a virtual reality, there are common mechanisms at work in our sensory and cognitive systems that help us structure and interpret our various sensory streams. This tutorial will introduce and review important research from the fields of Psychophysics and Perceptual Psychology in order to provide participants with a working appreciation of the human senses and how their mechanisms can enable and constrain good design.

The tutorial will cover the following topics:

Perception for Design
- Visual cues and markers
- Aural cues
- Attention
- Sensory Buffers, Working memory: change blindness and causality
Approaches and examples for mapping data to perception
- Information Visualization, Scientific Visualization
- Sonification
Techniques for enhancing the Virtual Environment with abstract information
- information-Rich Virtual Environments

The power of media is to provide the participant visual, audio, and existential cues that evoke an impression, an emotion, or a narrative understanding. Newspaper, phone, radio, movies all have their own scope as far as what perceptual cues they can provide at any given time. While Stephenson, Lanier, and McKenna envisioned cyberspace over 15 years ago, realtime virtual reality is just emerging as a viable platform for diverse rich-media production. This presentation explores the methods of creating user perceptions in X3D worlds and provides some examples of the principles in practice.

There are no prerequisites for this tutorial.

Authors:

Luciano Pereira Soares is a Phd. candidate at the University of S縊 Paulo, Brazil. He received his degree in Computer Engineering in 1999 from the UFSCar. From 1998 to 2000 he worked at SGI Brazil. In 2001 he joined USP with a research focus on Virtual Reality and cluster computing and managing the VR Center, having been responsible for the integration and configuration of the graphics PC cluster and the developing the software that is currently powering the 5-sided CAVE installed at USP.

Tutorial Session: Introduction to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

Date: tbc
Time: tbc

Graphics on the Web until recently was raster graphics images (GIF, PNG, JPEG etc) which suffer from a number of limitations (large size, inability to zoom without losing detail, binary format, no inherent hyperlinking etc). Non-proprietary vector graphics is now possible using W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a standard with many implementations available.

Tutorial attendees will receive a thorough introduction to SVG and will be able to construct reasonably complex diagrams by the end of the tutorial. They will also gain an appreciation of where SVG stands in relationship to other W3C standards. The tutorial will be illustrated by numerous SVG examples developed by the authors.

The tutorial will:

Introduce the coordinates and rendering model of SVG
Explain the Graphics Primitives, their Attributes and properties
Discuss the Grouping,Transformation and Composition facilities including Clipping and Masking
Show how SVG can be used in Practice
Review Implementations and Tools
SVG Mobile: SVG Tiny and SVG Basic
The future: status of SVG 1.2

Relationships between SVG and X3D will be drawn out where appropriate.

Participants at the tutorial will have received the appropriate background needed to attend the follow-on tutorial: Filtering, Scripting and Animation in SVG

For the tutorial, an aquaintance with basic concepts of markup languages and styling is probably all that is required.

Authors:

The material in this tutorial has been developed by all three authors. Two of the three (Hopgood and most probably Duce) will present the tutorial.

David Duce is Professor in Computing at Oxford Brookes University. He has been involved in the development of standards for computer graphics for 20 years, starting with the Graphical Kernel System (GKS). Together with Bob Hopgood and Vincent Quint, he submitted a proposal to W3C entitled Web Schematics, which launched the SVG activity. He has participated in the development of SVG in the early stages and represents Oxford Brookes University on the Advisory Committee of W3C. His research interests include web graphics and mulitiservice systems.

Ivan Herman is Head of Offices for the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, whilst maintaining a staff position at the Dutch national research institute, CWI. Before joining W3C Ivan worked in quite different areas (distributed and dataflow programming, language design, system programming), but he spend most of his research years in computer graphics and visualization. He also participated in various graphics related ISO standardization activities and software developments. He was member of the Executive Committee of the Eurographics Association for 15 years, and vice-chair of Association between 2000 and 2002. He was the co-chair of the 9th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam, May 2000. He is also member of IW3C2, the committee responsible for the World Wide Web Conference series. He has lectured extensively on W3C standards.

Bob Hopgood is a visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University. Prior to that he worked at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and W3C. He was active in establishing a Web Profile for the Computer Graphics Metafile. He also established W3C's Offices in Europe, Morocco, Australia and Israel. He has nearly 40 years of experience in computer graphics, especially in standardisation activities and has lectured internationally on emerging web standards. He was Programme Chair for WWW5 in Paris.

Bob Hopgood gave an SVG tutorial at the AusWeb 2003 conferencd in Australia. David Duce and Bob Hopgood gave a half-day tutorial on SVG at WWW2002 in Hawaii, a full day tutorial at WWWW2003 in Budapest and have given SVG Tutorials at Eurographics 2001 and CGI2002. They both lecture on the Web Technologies MSc at Oxford Brookes University. With Ivan Herman and Don Brutzman they gave a State of the Art Report on file formats for 2D and 3D graphics at Eurographics 2001.

Tutorial Session: Filtering, Scripting and Animation in SVG

Date: tbc
Time: tbc

This tutorial is either a follow-on tutorial to the tutorial: Introduction to SVG or aimed at attendees who have a basic understanding of SVG and want more knowledge of the advanced features

Scalable Vector Graphics is both a straightforward 2D vector graphics system for the Web and a powerful interactive and animation facility with sophisticated rendering effects.

Tutorial attendees will receive a thorough grounding in the more challenging features of SVG. The tutorial will be illustrated by numerous SVG examples developed by the authors.

Describe the filter effects that can be applied to the vector graphics image created by SVG
Describe the animation facilities available in SVG
Discuss the Grouping,Transformation and Composition facilities including Clipping and Masking
Show how scripting can be used to provide a rich interaction environment. This will include coverage of some of the functionality proposed for SVG 1.2
Explain how SVG can be used with other W3C standards such as XHTML, XML, SMIL etc

For the tutorial, an aquaintance with the basic primitives and attributes of SVG and the composition facilities will be assumed. Attendance at the tutorial: Introduction to SVG will provide an appropriate background.

Authors:

The material in this tutorial has been developed by all three authors. Two of the three (Hopgood and most probably Duce) will present the tutorial.