Theme 7: Visualisation and Virtual Experience

虚拟现实（VR）系统力求在安全和受控的计算机生成环境中提供真实世界的体验。VR系统试图提供两个关键功能：真实感和实时性。特别是，实时元素对于向用户提供交互式体验至关重要。为了实现这一点，当前的VR系统在模拟环境中妥协了现实性。这是因为即使是最先进的计算机硬件也无法完全准确地实时模拟现实世界的复杂性。此外，VR系统很少提供两种以上的感官刺激（通常是视觉和听觉，或视觉和触觉）。另一方面，真实虚拟系统被定义为基于物理模拟的虚拟环境，并以自然的方式刺激多种感官（视觉、听觉、嗅觉、触觉、运动等）。真实虚拟的一个关键特征是多种感官的自然传递，以确保在真实环境中发生的交叉模态（一种感官对另一种感官的影响）出现在虚拟世界中，因为这些可以极大地改变场景的感知方式和用户的行为方式。在这个项目中，我们将考虑包含4种感官的环境：视觉、听觉、嗅觉和感觉（其中感觉包括运动、温度和风速）。真实虚拟系统能够通过选择性地提供真实世界的刺激，实时实现高水平的真实性；利用人类感知系统无法始终以最高精度处理所有刺激这一事实。相反，人类会选择性地关注场景中的物体。这可能导致来自一种感觉的大量细节在另一种感觉的竞争输入中被忽视，或者一种感觉的微妙信号被另一种感觉的一致信息强烈增强。了解场景中任何时间点感官信息的相对重要性，可以使所关注的区域以最高质量进行计算，而其他区域可以以低得多的质量交付（从而大大减少计算工作量），而用户不会意识到这种质量差异。可视化和虚拟体验，致力于研究一种新颖的，经过验证的真实虚拟平台，该平台将提供真实世界场景和模拟虚拟世界等效之间的感知等效体验。结果的真实性是确保在虚拟环境中做出决策时能够确信在等效的真实环境中也会做出相同决策的关键。由此产生的虚拟系统的高保真度将在两个真实的测试用例（Gaydon和Sweden）中进行彻底的测试和充分的验证。该研究的预期成果将是适用于车辆设计各个层面的可视化技术：从单个部件的验证到最终车辆设计的验证，以及设计过程的所有阶段，从最初的概念定义到最终设计批准，从制造到经销商，再到营销。可视化和虚拟体验将消除构建物理原型的需要，从而缩短产品上市时间。如果不能在虚拟环境中有效、真实地体验产品，并因此做出快速、客观的决策，这是不可能实现的。该项目的成果将通过逐步改进虚拟体验来解决英国的国家优先事项。新的算法和方法，虽然是为汽车行业创造的，并得到了充分的验证，但同样适用于从事产品设计和高价值制造的任何部门。

Virtual reality (VR) systems strive to provide real world experiences in safe and controlled computer generated environments. VR systems attempt to deliver two key features: realism and real-time. In particular, the real time element is essential to provide an interactive experience to the user. To achieve this, current VR systems compromise the realism in the environments they are simulating. This is because even the very latest computer hardware is simply not capable of simulating, to a full degree of physical accuracy, in real time, the complexities of the real world. Furthermore, VR systems seldom offer more than two sensory stimuli (typically visuals and audio, or visuals and touch). Real Virtuality systems, on the other hand, are defined as virtual environments that are based on physical simulations and stimulate multiple senses (visuals, audio, smell, touch, motion etc.) in a natural manner. A key feature of Real Virtuality is the natural delivery of multiple senses to ensure cross-modalities (the influence of one sense on another) that would occur in the real environment are present in the virtual world, as these can substantially alter the way in which a scene is perceived and the way the user behaves. In this project we will consider environments that include 4 senses: visuals, audio, smell and feel (where feel includes motion, temperature and wind-speed). Real Virtuality systems are able to achieve a high level of authenticity in real time by selectively delivering real world stimuli; exploiting the fact that the human perceptual system is simply not capable of attending to all stimuli at the highest precision all the time. Rather humans selectively attend to objects within the scene. This can result in large amounts of detail from one sense going unnoticed when in the presence of competing sensory inputs from another modality, or subtle signals in one modality being strongly enhanced by congruent information in another sense. Knowledge of the relative importance of sensory information in a scene at any point in time, enables the areas being attended to, to be computed at the highest quality, while other areas can be delivered at a much lower quality (and thus at a significantly reduced computational effort), without the user being aware of this quality difference.Visualisation and Virtual Experience, undertakes research into a novel, validated Real Virtuality Platform that will provide perceptually equivalent experiences between real world scenarios and their simulated virtual world equivalents. The authenticity of the results is key to enable decisions within the virtual environments to be taken with confidence that the same decision would be made in the equivalent real environment. The high-fidelity of the resultant virtual system will thus be thoroughly tested and fully validated against two real test cases: Gaydon and Sweden. The anticipated outcomes of the research will be techniques of visualisation applicable at all levels of vehicle design:- from verification of individual components through to the verification of the final vehicle design, - and through all stages of the design process, from initial concept definition through to final design approval, through to manufacturing and onto the dealerships, and marketing.Visualisation and Virtual Experience will remove the need to build physical prototypes and thus bring about a reduction in time to market. This would be impossible to achieve without the ability to effectively and authentically experience a product virtually in its intended context, and to make rapid, objective decisions as a result. The results of this project will address national UK priorities by providing step-change improvements in virtual experiences. The new algorithms and methodologies, although created and fully validated for the automotive industry, will be equally applicable to any sector engaged in the design and high value manufacture of products.