OpenSpace3D

A virtual environment interfaced with an e-learning platform

The Virtual School project is a 3D real-time application created for DCNS Group.
This project is part of a learning process which provide e-learning training courses for learners.

Students are immersed in an entertaining and interactive virtual environment, and can use this virtual space to walk their way through their educational paths.

The 3D real time application is linked to a LMS (“Learning Management System”) solution developed by STUDEC company. The LMS is a web application which provides access to training courses, allows the monitoring of pedagogical progress of students, and manages the content of the courses.


Users can interact with the virtual environment in various ways, which are:

- Navigate in the virtual environment
- Visualize the training courses from the gallery
- Visualize DCNS medias
- Display and manipulate DCNS products (models)
- Visualize the planning
- Visualize monitoring content
- Consult messages
- Chat with other students and with professors
- Switch to LMS web application


The application is made available to the end user in two different versions:

- In a classic desktop environment (workstation or laptop). The application is displayed in a web browser, navigation and interactions are done using keyboard and mouse.
- In an immersive environment (Virtual Reality room with video-projection on a Wallscreen). The application is displayed in full screen stereoscopy, the user navigates through the scene using the Wiimote and interacts with content through a Kinect camera.

PISE is a serious game simulating a job interview that immerses a person in a completely virtual environment to train him to control his emotions.

The candidate is equipped with sensors that measure facial expressions, heart rate, breathing, etc.., to infer his emotions. For its part, the recruiter is a virtual character whose behavior can be configured. The scenario of the interview, can be adapted to the reactions observed.

For the purposes of the project, this training tool is dedicated to job interview. But other usage scenarios such as taking public speaking, stress management or medical applications are already planned.

The project opens the way for a whole range of new uses of Affective Computing, a rapidly developing technology which today reached maturity.

PISE was fully developped using Openspace3D.
This project was developed by five partners: I-Maginer, project leader, ENOZONE, ISTIA LISA Angers, PerformanSe.

OpenSpace3D is now released to 1.0! Since the platform now have most of the initial functionalities we wanted to provide to our users, we decided that it was time for the 1.0.

All features of this new version will be presented during the 14th International Conference and Exhibition on Virtual Reality and Converging Technologies : Laval Virtual, from march 28th to 30th 2012
Come to meet us on the booth : A6
More info : www.lavalvirtual.org

Warning the OpenSpace3D projects are now stored in the “My Documents/OpenSpace3D” directory, if you were already an OpenSpace3D user you will have to move your projects from “My Documents/Scol Voyager/Partition_LocalUsr” to the new directory.

A new version of the Kinect Pack is available on the download page

This version is compatible with OpenSpace3D 0.2.6 and permit to adjust the skeleton smoothing and the detection zone of the player.

This new OpenSpace3D update comes with new functionalities and better performances. We improved some plugITs, optimized the editor efficiency and included our users remarks.
We also added a new editor to manage cinematic animations and some new plugITs for video capture, motion detection and more.

The OpenSpace3D installer have been improved and now copies examples and demos in the user directory, for an easier and faster access.

The documentation was also updated.

The cinematic scenes editor allows you to easily manipulate the animations of your scene and combine them to generate a complete cinematic, and then use it via plugITs the same way that a standard animation.

A new version of the Google Sketchup Exporter is available on the download page

This version allows to export all your models into OpenSpace3D, with separate objects, in order to make them interactive.

A quick video tutorial is available on our Youtube channel.
It shows how to make a virtual tour with interactive content in less than five minutes with a Sketchup model.

This version contains the news features that we had showed at the Laval Virtual exhibition, which took place from 6 to 10 april 2011, the most noticeable feature being the kinect integration.

The OpenSpace3D team like to thank all visitors that came to visit us, the K’AndyNect contest players (whose winner, named Laurent ENGELS, won a Kinect!), and the organizers of Laval Virtual 2011.

KINECT INTEGRATION

The Microsoft device is now supported by OpenSpace3D, allowing you to create an application using it in a few clicks!

In order to keep the OpenSpace3D installation setup lightweight, there’s a separate package to manage Kinect, which can be downloaded here.

The installation of all the software that are necessary to make the Kinect run on PC being slightly complicated, our team took care to provide you a friendly user installer for Kinect.

As usual, you will found some examples showing this new feature in action, the first showing how to animate a character that will mimic your movements, the second one allowing you to manipulate a 3D object with the movement of your arms, and last but not least, the K’AndyNect game showed at Laval Virtual (all those demos are in “demos/kinectdemo” directory).

AUGMENTED REALITY

Our vision is to offer more and more features that allow our users to integrate some virtual reality functionalities in their applications, we added two new Augmented Reality oriented plugIts.

The ARCapture plugIt captures a video stream from a webcam, and detects markers on the resulting image. Note that the Kinect can be use as capture device for the AR.

The ARMarker plugIt permits to get the 3D position of a marker, that can be used to blend the captured video with 3D elements.

Another sample is provided, you can find it on the “examples\basics\ar_piano” directory (you will have to print the “ar_piano.pdf” document first).

IMPORTING SKETCHUP MODELS

A new Sketchup plugin is available on the support page, which allows you to import easily any Sketchup 3D model in OpenSpace3D.

A video tutorial hosted on the OpenSpace3D Youtube channel explain how to install it, and how to use it to import your own 3D content.

As Sketchup has a huge 3D models database, we hope that you will find this plugin useful to make your 3D scenes.

NEW FEATURES

Looking at the plugIt editor, you will certainly remark the emergence of colours, that allow to associate visually each plugIt instance to his parent category (input/object/etc.).

Furthemore, the 3D engine now supports pose animations. Two new plugIts, using this functionnality, were added. They are the “animation LipSync” plugIt (to synchronise a character’s lips with a speech for example) and the “pose animation blender” plugIt (poses interpolations). A new sample showing those two plugIts in action can be found in the “examples/basics/lip_sync” directory.

Finally, some bug correction were done, mainly due to the Ogre 1.8 conversion (it is now possible to use the anti-aliasing in directX render mode).

As part of the new release of OpenSpace3D, we provide a new plugin, that manages Microsoft Kinect.

So, now, there’s no need anymore to code to make a kinect application, just a few clicks are necessary.

The “plugIt” supports automatic detection of a biped skeleton (standard bones names from 3DSMax, but it should work with any skeleton from any supported 3D modeler).

Furthermore, you can use the Kinect camera to work with the new augmented reality plugIt!

The game “K’AndyNect”, which we had presented at the Laval Virtual exhibition last month, is also included in the installer. Note that we have done a “all-in-one” package to install easily Kinect redistributables (driver/openNI/Nite), because we found that it was too hard for end-users to install them.