Virtual and Augmented Reality

The German Ministry of Education and Science (BMBF) in 2000 established a competition for innovative ideas in Virtual and Augmented Reality. Out of almost 200 competing research proposals, 25 winners were chosen and invited to submit a full proposal. 15 research projects were finnaly reccomended for funding (see press release - in german)

Two of these research projects:

	AR-PDA - a Mobile Digital Assistant for VR/AR Content
	VRIB - Virtual Reality Interaction Toolbox

funded by the BMBF with an overall budget of over € 8 million Euro, involve the computer Graphics Group in Ilmenau.
Industrial and scientific partners besides TU Ilmenau include DaimlerChrysler Research Ulm, Siemens, Unity, Logicad3D, Fraunhofer IPK Berlin, GMD, DLR, Lunatic, and others.
The projects start in March/April 2001. Information on the project will be updated continuously.

Previous work in Virtual and Augmented Reality of the Graphics Gorup include the development of new grasp heuristics for dextrous manipulation with the data glove and desktop applications for VR/AR environments.

One- and two-handed manipulation, dextrous manipulation with data gloves

Publications

Thomas Ullmann, Jörg Sauer: A Heuristic Approach for Virtual Grasping with a Data Glove. in: Volker Paelke, Sabine Volbracht (Eds.): Proceedings of User Guidance in Virtual Environments. Workshop on Guiding Users through Interactive Experiences: Usability Centred Design and Evaluation of Virtual 3D Environments, Paderborn, Germany, 13-14 April 2000. Shaker Verlag, Aachen, Germany, Januar 2001, pp. 155-160.

Thomas Ullmann, Jörg Sauer: Intuitive Virtual Grasping for Non Haptic Environments. in: Proceedings of the Eighth Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications (Pacific Graphics 2000), Hong Kong, China, 3-5 October 2000. IEEE, Oktober 2000, pp. 373-457.