Margarita Vinnikov

Mathew Schwartz, Margarita Vinnikov, John Federici

Evaluating the built environment based on visibility has been long used as a tool for human-centric design. The origins of isovists and visibility graphs are within interior spaces, while more recently, these evaluation techniques have been applied in the urban context. One of the key differentiators of an outside environment is the weather, which has largely been ignored in the design computation and space-syntax research areas. While a visibility graph is a straightforward metric for determining connectivity between regions of space through a line of sight calculation, this approach largely ignores the actual visibility of one point to another. This paper introduces a new method for weighting a visibility graph based on weather conditions (i.e. rain, fog, snow). These new factors are integrated into visibility graphs and applied to sample environments to demonstrate the variance between assuming a straight line of sight and reduced visibility.

Jingbo Zhao, Robert S. Allison, Margarita Vinnikov et al.

Recent research has proposed teleoperation of robotic and aerial vehicles using head motion tracked by a head-mounted display (HMD). First-person views of the vehicles are usually captured by onboard cameras and presented to users through the display panels of HMDs. This provides users with a direct, immersive and intuitive interface for viewing and control. However, a typically overlooked factor in such designs is the latency introduced by the vehicle dynamics. As head motion is coupled with visual updates in such applications, visual and control latency always exists between the issue of control commands by head movements and the visual feedback received at the completion of the attitude adjustment. This causes a discrepancy between the intended motion, the vestibular cue and the visual cue and may potentially result in simulator sickness. No research has been conducted on how various levels of visual and control latency introduced by dynamics in robots or aerial vehicles affect users' performance and the degree of simulator sickness elicited. Thus, it is uncertain how much performance is degraded by latency and whether such designs are comfortable from the perspective of users. To address these issues, we studied a prototyped scenario of a head motion controlled quadcopter using an HMD. We present a virtual reality (VR) paradigm to systematically assess the effects of visual and control latency in simulated drone control scenarios.