Virtual Reality Technology in Future Telecommunication Products and Services (VIRGIN)

Professor Petri Pulli and Professor Jouni Similä (1999) / Professor Harri Oinas-Kukkonen (2000-)
Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu
petri.pullioulu.fi, jouni.similaoulu.fi, harri.oinas-kukkonenoulu.fi
http://www.infotech.oulu.fi/virgin 

Background and Mission

The research group consists of researchers from the Departments of Information Processing Science, Electrical Engineering (Computer Engineering Laboratory), Economics and Business Administration, Process Engineering, and VTT Electronics Wireless Internet Laboratory.

Our research agenda addresses particular enabling technologies, Virtual Reality and Hypermedia Systems, in the context of future telecommunication society, services and industries. We are determined to carry out research in utilising these technologies, both as enabling technologies to help in the process of future product and service development, and as technologies to be embedded in future telecommunication products and services.

1. Personal mobile virtual reality services. In the future, moving mass and people around will become more and more expensive to society due to shortage of energy and overpopulation. Sustainable development can be gained by virtualisation of society and different services. We conduct research on personal virtual environments that can provide an essential set of virtual reality service capabilities. The main target for research is on augmented reality services that utilise broadband digital telecommunication which will become available with 3rd and 4th generation digital media phones. A major challenge is new user-interface metaphors, bringing together multimodality and efficient utilisation of human sense bandwidth. Precision tracking with the aid of computer vision and image and gesture recognition represents another major challenge.

2. Virtual Reality Prototyping in new telecommunication product development is the application of advanced modeling and simulation techniques, user interface techniques and virtual reality techniques to support product design. The aim of our research is to utilize a virtual reality based development environment for consumer electronics and telecommunication products in order to develop all-digital prototypes resembling the physical products as closely as possible in terms of visual 3-D image, haptic characteristics and auditory characteristics. The main target for our research is to support new product development for future generation (3rd and 4th generation) mobile digital media phones. Also heavy emphasis is on geographically distributed, team-based new product development.

3. Electronic commerce. Virtual product models hold potential to represent goods and services in the future virtual enterprise concept and Internet based marketing and commerce. Combined with Internet/WWW- mobile media phones, and hypermedia technologies, totally new concepts for electronic commerce can be studied, modeled, constructed and measured. An important aspect is measuring the user interaction, i.e. web flow experience with a virtual product model. By measuring the web flow, better understanding can be gained on how to design better e-commerce sites and which portfolio of products to present and how.
   
   The research strategy followed may be characterized as constructive and explorative. The main end result will be a virtual prototyping environment embodying methods and tools whose usefulness will be demonstrated in practical case applications, taking into account and analysing their role in possible future business value chains.

Scientific Progress

During 1999, the main scientific results were

1. A prototype of a future mobile media phone utilizing augmented reality services has been completed with trial application for outdoors navigation, based on GPS position tracking and a digital compass (the Cyphone project)

2. A novel metaphor and sign language framework (Marisil) for personal mobile broadband user interfaces has been developed. An implementation study of the Marisil language has been studied in personal navigation (the Paula project)
3. Study of using web-based virtual prototypes for usability testing has been completed (the Virpi project)
4. A WAP-demonstration of mobile e-commerce has been developed (the Vrflow project)
5. The development of a taxonomy and web data-base of value-added mobile services (the Monica project)

Exploitation of Results

1. Virtual prototyping technology transfer to a tool provider company (Cybelius Software) have been carried out. Cybelius Software received two internationally recognized awards (Spring Internet World USA, and European IST Award 1999) for innovativeness in their product
2. Virtual prototyping technology transfer to a user organisation (Nokia Mobile Phones) has contiunued in the form of developing an in-house toolset.
3. A patent has been filed for the sign language framework (Marisil) for personal mobile broadband user interfaces.
4. A virtual product model of a computer equipment set has been created and integrated with the computer vendor company Y-Daatta's web site

Future Goals

For the year 2000, the main goals are

1. The definition of a new feature set for a distributed virtual prototyping support environment experiment (the Virve project)
2. The definition of a virtual team communication experiment in the context of a mobile adventure game (the Monica project)
3. Defining architecture and service scenarios for a broadband mobile virtual communication space for a future virtual enterprise (the Holodeck project)
4. Develop methodology, techniques, tools and principles for designing wireless aware Web information systems (the Owla project)
5. An implementation study of Marisil sign language for wearable media phone deviceless user interface.

Personnel 

External Funding