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Conferences
Dreaming of Lebanon
Laval Virtual also features a rich program of conferences and round tables. We attended a conference focused on Dreaming of Lebanon, an interactive documentary available for free on Meta Quest. This documentary was commissioned by the United Nations to accompany factual data on Lebanon’s dire economic situation with an immersive experience.
Adrian Meyer (director of photography on this project) introduced us to the genesis of the documentary, which mixes volumetric video, 3D video, and 3D animation.
The experience allows you to interactively interview three Lebanese individuals, thanks to a branching dialogue system. For example, you can explore their daily lives, their views on local politics, the Lebanese economy, or their hopes for the future.
We particularly appreciated the technical explanations from Adrian Meyer, who extensively discussed the hardware choices and the use of Quill and 3D animation to depict dreams and hopes.
Omniverse conference
Another interesting conference was titled “How can Industrial Metaverse help to transform industry? The experience of SNCF RESEAU – DGII – Signalisation.”
NVIDIA, SNCF Réseau, and Sopra Steria Next discussed the concept of the industrial metaverse. Specifically, we discovered a project aimed at exploring the benefits of Omniverse and digital twins for the railway industry, with various use cases: visualization of the 3D scan of a track section in VR, simulation of critical points like level crossings, the impact of the environment on visibility, etc.
The entire project was set up in just a few months, with the idea of exploring the benefits of this approach without heavy investments. The experience seems to have been very positive.
Research – VirtUs: INRIA Explores Populated Virtual Worlds
At the Destination Rennes booth (Destination Rennes is responsible for the economic promotion of the city of Rennes, France, and its surroundings), we met with the VirtUs team. This research project from INRIA and the Universities of Rennes 1 and 2 focuses on populated virtual worlds. Their goal is to “create and simulate immersive populated virtual spaces where both virtual and real humans coexist.”
Use cases include the prevention of crowd-related incidents during big events.
We watched several demos. The first was an indoor space with a crowd whose density can be controlled. This can help train security personnel. The person wearing the headset can adjust their height in the experience: very useful for checking the visibility of emergency exit signs for short people in a large crowd.
The second demo was quite impressive: the idea is to create a realistic crowd through multiple iterations. A person equipped with a motion capture system moves around a virtual location: a concert hall in the demo, but it could also be, for example, an emergency exit.
These captured movements are then used to animate a virtual character, and the subject will be captured again, but must avoid colliding with the virtual character. And so on. The result is a fairly realistic crowd despite this iterative workflow.
A variant starts with a crowd simulation. The user replaces one of the agentsand is free to move around, then replaces another one, and so on. Again, the system leads to a more realistic result than a simple simulation.
This type of approach allows the creation of data sets for trajectory prediction, AI, or robotics. The team plans to make some of this data available to help other research teams. We also imagine that this workflow could inspire animation studios and visual effects companies looking to improve their crowds or create a mix of simulated crowds and motion-captured characters.
The VirtUs team is also working on big events such as Hellfest or the Olympics. VirtUs is involved in these events to study crowds, including for security purposes. French law allows the team to analyze and process crowd videos, but of course, no data can be shared unless it is anonymized beforehand.
Revolution: a must-see
Let’s admit it: the Revolution section of Laval Virtual is probably our favorite part of the event. It features a wide range of experiences, many coming from Japanese universities.
Here are the ones that impressed us the most at Laval Virtual 2024.
- Swallowing a sweetfish as a cormorant (Department of Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering, Gifu University) allows you to become a cormorant, a bird that feeds by fishing. You will need to dip your head underwater to capture prey. A beak in your mouth and a device around your neck simulate the sensation of the fish struggling in your beak, and then you swallowing it (including the fact that the fish is cold).
- Glass Harmonica (Tama University) is focused on a music instrument called a glass harmonica consisting of rotating glass hemispheres. This instrument, invented in the 18th century, has seen a resurgence in recent years.
The version presented during Laval Virtual is an electronic equivalent: metal bowls, electronics, and VR.
- Embrace (National Tsing Hua University) is haptic device experience centered around anorexia nervosa. The team explains having been inspired by personal experiences or those of close ones.
Embrace places you in the shoes of a person suffering from anorexia nervosa, with triggering situations. The haptic system, placed around the belly, tightens to evoke the oppression felt. As the team explains, the goal of this of this thought-provoking project is to “raise awareness about mental health and body image.”
