week 9 summaries [Aurelien Bonnafont]

DART: A Toolkit for Rapid Design Exploration of Augmented Reality Experiences

The AR designers are facing 3 main problems:

There is no flexible programming environment, a too low level is needed for AR design but it is not a common skill for the designers, and

3D content are difficult to create.

The technologies are difficult, often unrelated and lack of abstraction.

Finally the designers have to world in the real work and real time. This is very difficult when you have to move and develop in the space where the application will be used.

The authors have created DART as a tool to overcome these difficulties and enable designers to work on the medium of AR.

To ease the use of DART, the authoring styles of DIRECTOR ( a common tool use for AR design) is integrated in it.

DART provides some new features:

-As Director, a DART experience consist of a series of sprites on the score populated with behavior scripts that define the properties and interactions of the sprites.

-DART Xtra is a Director plugin written in C and C++, that provides an interface to the technologies needed to work with AR when testing it.

-The ObjectActor is used to add a 3D object to the world. The VideoActor texture-maps video onto a polygon in the 3D world, while The SketchActor implements animatic characters.

-The DART-DataStore allow designers to capture and playback video and tracker data.

-The marker tracker reports the marker positions in world coordinates.

-DART allows designers to specify application- specific transformations.

DART provides the features needed by designers to efficiently build AR systems. Thanks to a rapid prototyping and an environment which allows designers to work in physical site.

 

Alice : lessons learned for building a 3D system for novices

The authors want to make 3D objects programming accessible to a large range of people. Indeed with no programming skills and mathematical background it’s always difficult to create 3D interactive simulation.

Alice is a tool to ease the creation of 3D simulation. The user can easily take 3D object an assemble them to form other objects and change the view or make the object move in a simple way.

The script can be generated easily, the language used is python. The animation engine is single threaded a scheduler allow to move parallel objects.

An important innovation of Alice is the removing of the XYZ which is replaced by the direction, it considerably facilitate the design. All of the function are made to avoid mathematical thinking, they are more intuitive.

The objects are segmented to clearly distinguish them and Implicit threads make it possible for novices to control surprisingly complex animations.

Alice is clearly an easy tool for building 3D object simulation and can be use by people with no experienced in programming and no mathematical background.

 

The Effect of Latency and Network Limitations on MMORPGs

(A Field Study of Everquest2)

Nowadays one major part of the game industry is the MMOG games. Those game types open a completely new set of problem fields due to their massive amount of players. Indeed latency and a not enough good architecture could lead to a bad experience for players.

The authors give us an analysis of the game performance depending on the network architecture. The game teste dis everquest 2. 3 situation are tested with skillful players : movement & combat, group combat and movement/environment.

Th effect of latency on the movements is less important than in the combat phase. The group combats are more difficult to handle when the latency increase, and the teams have to try a new strategy of combat to win.

The movement/environment test show us that everquest has a dumb client approach the computation is made on the client side and then the position is send to the server, and this lead to some consistency problems. More over some players could miss some important environment information when the architecure is too distributed.

Test on the packet size show that Everquest2 does not use a bigger packet size in burst situations and provides a low overall data transfer rate.

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