Section: Other Grants and Activities

European Projects

STREP: NIW

Participants : Gabriel Cirio, Anatole Lécuyer [ contact ] , Maud Marchal, Tony Regia Corte, Léo Terziman.

The Natural Interactive Walking Project (NIW) is a 3-year project funded by the European Commission under the FET Open STREP call. NIW involves 5 partners: INRIA/BUNRAKU, University of Verona (leader), University of Aalborg, University of Paris 6, and McGill University. The Natural Interactive Walking (NIW) project aims at taking advantage of multisensory information about the ground to develop knowledge for designing walking experiences. This will be accomplished through the engineering and perceptual validation of human-computer interfaces conveying virtual cues of everyday ground attributes and events. Such cues may be conveyed by auditory, haptic, pseudo-haptic, and visual augmentation of otherwise neutral grounds. The project is focused on creating efficient and scalable display methods across these modalities that can be easily and cost-effectively reproduced, via augmented floors and footwear.

It is expected that the NIW project will contribute to scientific knowledge in two key areas. First, it will reinforce the understanding of how our feet interact with surfaces on which we walk. Second, it will inform the design of such interactions, by forging links with recent advances in the haptics of direct manipulation and in locomotion in real-world environments. The methods that will be created could impact a wide range of future applications that have become prominent in recently funded research within Europe and North America. Examples include floor-based navigational aids for airports or railway stations, guidance systems for the visually impaired, augmented reality training systems for search and rescue, interactive entertainment, and physical rehabilitation.

More information can be found on Natural Interactive Walking project website : http://www.niwproject.eu/

NoE: Integrating Research In Interactive Storytelling

Participants : Stéphane Donikian [ contact ] , Marc Christie [ contact ] , Nicolas Pépin.

The IRIS project (Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling) is a 3-year Network of Excellence project funded by the European Commission (FP-7 Grant Agreement 231824) gathering 10 academic partners: University of Teeside (project coordinator UK), INRIA (FR), Fachhochschule Erfurt (DE), TECFA Geneve (CH), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL), Universitat Augsburg (DE), Université La Rochelle (FR), OFAI Vienne (AT) and Newcastle University (UK).

IRIS (Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling) aims at creating a virtual centre of excellence that will be able to achieve breakthroughs in the understanding of interactive storytelling and the development of corresponding technologies. It is organised around four major objectives:

• To extend interactive storytelling technologies in terms of performance and scalability, so that they can support the production of actual interactive narratives

• To make the next generation of interactive storytelling technologies more accessible to authors and content creators of different media backgrounds (scriptwriters, storyboarders, game designers)

• To develop a more integrated approach to interactive storytelling technologies, achieving a proper integration with cinematography

• To develop methodologies to evaluate interactive storytelling systems as well as the media experience of interactive narrative