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The cellular phone has become a popular portable information device. In this study, the i-mode of the cellular phone was applied to the interface with the immersive virtual world. By using the cellular phone interface, the user can experience the immersive virtual world easily using his own device. The interaction using the i-mode was experimentall...
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... mobile media such as the cellular phone and the PDA (Personal Digital Assistance) have become very popular, and they are used as personal devices being carried everyday. By using these devices, the user can easily access information everywhere and at any time in the daily life. However, in these devices, the displayed information is restricted because only the small LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) is equipped. On the other hand, immersive projection display such as the CAVE or the CABIN can generate a high presence information space around the user [1][2]. However, in order to use this kind of display system, the user must operate the graphics workstation to run the application program and interact with the virtual world using a special device such as the wand or the wanda [3]. Therefore, it is difficult that the ordinary people experience the high presence virtual world in the immersive projection display. In this study, an interface technology with the immersive virtual world using the personal device of the cellular phone was developed in order to experience the high presence virtual world easily. In this system, the user can also experience the immersive environment in the real world, by integrating the transparent display system with the cellular phone interface. This paper describes the system construction, the features and several applications of the immersive environment using the cellular phone interface. In order to experience the high presence virtual world using the immersive projection display, the user must operate the graphics workstation to run the application program and interact with the virtual world using the special interface devices. For example, in the CAVE developed at the University of Illinois, the wand and the wanda are used for the interface devices. In the case of the CABIN developed at the University of Tokyo, the Nintendo64 Controller, the VibroPointer, and the Twiddler are used for the joystick, the haptic pointer and the character input devices respectively [4][5]. In particular, it is difficult to input characters in the three-dimensional immersive virtual environment. Although the practiced user is able to input characters rapidly using the Twiddler by one hand, it is hard for the unfamiliar user to use this kind of device efficiently. Therefore, it is desired that the everyday device that is carried in the daily life should be used for the interaction so that a large number of people can experience the immersive information space easily. On the other hand, the recent cellular phone has been used to access Internet, and the cellular phone device itself has several functions. For example, the dial button can be used to input characters as well as to dial telephone numbers, and the LCD is used to display information. The pager motor is often installed to inform the phone call using the vibration sensation, and it can be used to display haptic information. In addition, the cellular phone device that is equipped with the Internet access function such as the i- mode or the WAP (Wireless Application) can be used to transmit data to the computer as a kind of computer terminal. Therefore, we can consider that the cellular phone that is used in the daily life can be used as an interface device with the virtual world effectively. In this study, an interface technology using the i-mode was developed to interact with the immersive virtual world. The i-mode is an Internet access service for the cellular phone provided by the NTT DoCoMo Inc., and the user can access web information using the dial button and the LCD [6]. Currently, in Japan, about twenty-three million people are using this service, and it has become a popular portable information device. The i-mode was applied to realize the interactions such as the walk-through and character input in the virtual world. In these interactions, the dial button of the cellular phone is used for the button and the keyboard functions. Since the LCD is also equipped on it, the user can perform the input operation in the local feedback, without displaying the three-dimensional input window or the menu in the virtual world. In addition, the cellular phone device can also be used as a pointing device by attaching the position tracker to it. In this system, a Polhemus electromagnetic sensor was used to track the position of the cellular phone. In this case, when the cellular phone communicates with the Internet, it generates an electromagnetic wave that causes a tracking error. Therefore, the position tracker was attached about 8 cm away from the body of the cellular phone to reduce the influence of the electromagnetic wave as shown in figure 1. The i-mode interface is used both as a computer terminal to start the virtual reality application and as an interface device to interact with the virtual world in the application program. Figure 2 shows the software construction of the i-mode interface. In order to start the virtual reality application program, the user first accesses the graphics workstation through the DoCoMo i-mode Center. The application program runs when the user selects the menu item or inputs the name of the application in the i- mode web page. This i-mode page is written in CGI (Common Gateway Interface), and it runs the shell script to start the application program. By using this method, the user can start the virtual reality application without using a computer terminal. After starting the application program, the CGI program moves to the interaction i- mode page. When the user inputs characters or selects menu item in the interaction i- mode page, the CGI program generates a communication process that transmits the interaction command to the application program. This communication process is generated every time the user interacts with the virtual world, and this interaction command is transmitted to the application through the shared memory. For example, figure 3 shows the interaction i-mode page to walk through the virtual world. In this example, the dial buttons are assigned to several moving functions such as “go ahead”, “stop”, “turn right”, “turn left”, “go up” and “go down”, and the user can walk through the virtual world freely by operating these dial buttons. Figure 4 shows the user walking thorough the virtual town by using the i-mode interface in the immersive projection display CABIN. Figure 5 shows the other example of the interaction i-mode page to retrieve data and manipulate it in the virtual world. When the user selects the “search” button and input keywords, the data is retrieved from the database system and is visualized in the virtual world. And when the user reaches his hand for the visualized data and pushes the ...
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Citations
... De Pavia et al.[4]tried to generalize this approach, by providing a UI generation toolkit for PDAs, but with limited functionality, because only taps on designated regions of the display area of the PDA were supported. Ogi et al.[10]developed a system which controls a VR application through the i-Mode interface of a cell phone. Lee et al.[9]used an iPhone 4 for touch-gesture input in order to control a menu system, which was displayed by an augmented reality (AR) system. ...
System control is a crucial task for many virtual reality applications and can be realized in a broad variety of ways, whereat the most common way is the use of graphical menus. These are often implemented as part of the virtual environment, but can also be displayed on mobile devices. Until now, many systems and studies have been published on using mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) to realize such menu systems. However, most of these systems have been proposed way before smartphones existed and evolved to everyday companions for many people. Thus, it is worthwhile to evaluate the applicability of modern smartphones as carrier of menu systems for immersive virtual environments. To do so, we implemented a platform-independent menu system for smartphones and evaluated it in two different ways. First, we performed an expert review in order to identify potential design flaws and to test the applicability of the approach for demonstrations of VR applications from a demonstrator's point of view. Second, we conducted a user study with 21 participants to test user acceptance of the menu system. The results of the two studies were contradictory: while experts appreciated the system very much, user acceptance was lower than expected. From these results we could draw conclusions on how smartphones should be used to realize system control in virtual environments and we could identify connecting factors for future research on the topic.
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... Finally, in order to realize an effective collaborative visualization in the shared virtual world, it is necessary that the researchers can operate the visualized data freely at both sites. In this system, i-mode of the cellular phone was used for the interaction device [11]. i-mode is an Internet access service provided by NTT DoCoMo, Inc., and it can be used to interact with a computer system through a web written in compact HTML and CGI. ...
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