Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

Nexter: Generic Virtual Training

Participants : Bruno Arnaldi [ contact ] , Stéphanie Gerbaud, Valérie Gouranton.

The GVT (Generic Virtual Training) project (INRIA, Nexter-group and ENIB) is a very challenging one. Indeed, in this project, we introduce advanced VR technology in order to produce customizable VR applications dedicated to industrial training. All our developments are totally re-usable in industrial training, and are not dedicated to a particular industrial equipment and procedure. While our partner ENIB is concerned by the pedagogic part of the training, we focus our activity into the following points. First the design of true reactive 3D objects (including complex objects such as virtual humans) with embedded behaviors thanks to the STORM model. Then the design of high level specification language, LORA, in order to describe complex and potentially collaborative human activity (virtual activity in relationship with the real activity). And last the design of tools to support collaborative aspects of the training and especially a mechanism able to suggest in a given context, the best candidate for an action. More information on this last point are given in section 6.5.1 . The main goal of this overall project is to produce a real application in order to validate all the new concepts we introduce.

The scientific contributions of this application have been presented this year in the international conference Edutainment [32] and the application has also been shown at different meetings: Laval-Virtual and a forum organised by The Ecole Supérieure et d'Application du Matériel (ESAM) and Nexter Training Company at Bourges titled "the technical learning by simulation: a real solution". The GVT project led to the deposit of 5 french patents and 1 European patent, and 2 PhD have been defended. More information on the product can be found in section 5.6 .