Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative

Nowadays, when there are more students in teaching groups than before, new problems may appear in learning processes. One of these is how to teach automation programming to 40 students if there is only one machine available for testing the programs. As a solution for this challenge we use simulation and virtualization, depending of the definition. The main idea in our solution is to build up a ...

We present a method for automatic navigation inside a complex virtual scene, demonstrated on a large virtual model of the Department of Modern Art of the National Gallery in Prague. The basic navigation graph structure is constructed semi-automatically and it is subsequently locally changed by the exhibition editor which places new exhibition panels into the building interior and thus locally c...

Virtual environments have shown considerable promise as a natural (and thus it is hoped more effective) form of human-computer interaction. In a virtual world you can use your eyes, ears, and hands much as you do in the real world: move your head to set your viewpoint, listen to sounds that have direction, reach out your hands to grab and manipulate virtual objects. Virtual worlds technologies ...

Research on networked applications that utilize multimodal information about their users' current emotional state are presently at the forefront of interest of the computer vision and artificial intelligence communities. Human faces may act as visual interfaces that help users feel at home when interacting with a computer because they are accepted as the most expressive means for communicating ...

A network of supercomputers and high-performance workstations appears to be the only reasonable way to provide adequate computing resources for the Grand Challenge problems of the next century. Such a collection of computers and supporting software environments is called a virtual computing environment (VCE). This paper describes the motivation and goals of the VCE project, followed by a descri...

A common problem faced by institutions concerns the limited availability of expensive robotics and control equipment, with which students in the educational program can work, in order to acquire valuable 'hands on' experience. The Multiple Manipulators for Training and Education (MuMaTe) virtual control and robotics laboratory was launched on the World Wide Web (WWW). Its aim was to evaluate th...

A ̄ BSTRACT: Unicron is a platform for rapidly developing virtual environments that combine two popular forms of collaboration: a 3D collaborative virtual environment fostering meetings, appointments, whiteboard sessions and lectures, along with a 2D development environment including collaborative software design, text editing, and debugging tools. This paper presents novel aspects of the Unicro...