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

Professor Petri Pulli and Professor Harri Oinas-Kukkonen
Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu
petri.pullioulu.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 the 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 for society due to a 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 augmented reality services that utilise broadband digital telecommunication becoming available with 3rd and 4th generation digital media phones. A major challenge is new user-interface metaphors bringing together multimodality and efficient utilisation of the human sense bandwidth. A major challenge is precision tracking with the aid of computer vision and image and gesture recognition.

(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 a heavy emphasis is on geographically distributed, team-based new product development.

(3) Electronic commerce. Virtual product models hold a potential to represent goods and services in a 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 2000 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 outdoor navigation based on GPS position tracking, a digital compass and WAP-enabled phone (TEKES/TLX/Cyphone project).

2. A laboratory prototype of the deviceless media-phone user interface Marisil based on sign and gesture language has been implemented in cooperation with the Nara Institute of Science and Technhology (Japan). (Academy/Telectronics/Paula project).

3. The concept of a wireless micropayment system for mobile commerce and streaming type media-phone services has been proposed and communicated to the European Union Mobile Research (EU/WSI ThinkTank)

4. A media-phone based gaming terminal concept and location-based mobile adventure game concept have been developed and published (TEKES/TLX/Monica)

Exploitation of Results

1. Virtual prototyping technology transfer to a tool provider company (Cybelius Software) has taken place. Virtual prototyping technology transfer to an user organisation (Nokia Mobile Phones) has been completed in the form of developing an in-house toolset.

2. A patent has been applied for the sign language framework (Marisil) for personal mobile broadband user interfaces. The approach has been communicated to industry.

Future Goals

For the year 2001, the main goals are:

1. Completion of a new feature set for a distributed virtual prototyping support environment experiment (TEKES/Virve project)

2. Completion of a virtual team communication experiment in the context of a mobile adventure game (Monica project)

3. To develop methodology, techniques, tools and principles for designing wireless aware Web information systems (Owla project)

4. Extension of Marisil sign language for a wearable media phone deviceless user interface.

The Augmented reality based mobile multimedia game is a potential service for future 3G/4G Mobile Phones.

Personnel

External Funding