W2GIS article accepted!

Yet another publication is accepted!
Nurminen, A., Kruijff, E., Veas, E. HYDROSYS - A mixed reality platform for on-site visualization of environmental data. To appear in Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Web and Wireless Geographical Information Systems, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011.
Check out the conference at: http://www.w2gis.org/

Paper accepted at ACM MUM2010

After some hectic weeks, here a new post: we are proud to announce that our paper on handheld platforms got selected for ACM MUM2010. Check out the presentation if you attend!

More info at www.mum2010.org

Andermatt

While preparing for the upcoming review, a quick update on the deployments - on the picture you can see the wall inclination sensor sockets in Andermatt getting installed and connected to the handheld. With the system we can provide extremely accurate inclination measurements of walls, to check for structural changes over time.

Wifi hotspot provided in La Fouly

The La Fouly catchment lies on the border between Switzerland and Italy and has no mobile phone network coverage from either country. To enable the Hydrosys network to work, it was necessary to provide internet access in the valley.

This week, we have proven a wireless hotspot which is capable of accessing the mobile phone network on the mountain top and providing a wireless internet hotspot covering the entire 3km length of the valley. This hotspot can be set up in a matter of minutes from reaching the peak and will eventually be solar powered and completely autonomous.

Publication accepted!

Our publication on perceptual issues in augmented reality got accepted for IEEE ISMAR this year! We are very glad about it, considering the high competitiveness and quality of the conference: this year, the conference had an acceptance rate of 22.4%. The paper deals with a classification of perceptual issues that are prevalent in augmented reality, and possible ways of solving the issues.

Final publication will be made available soon:
Kruijff, E., Swan II, E., Feiner, S. Perceptual Issues in Augmented Reality Revisited. In Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, 2010.

Field experiments in Andermatt and La Fouly (Switzerland)

We are very excited to announce that new deployments will be taken next week in Andermatt (on wall inclination sensing and effects of permafrost on building structures) and La Fouly (on flooding related issues). Furthermore, the blimp will be taken for a second test and data recording session. More information on results will follow soon!

(on the picture: a Sensorscope station in La Fouly).

Blimp test

Going through the archives, we noticed this nice video - it shows the first operation of the blimp with full equipment (normal and thermal cams) during an operation in Davos, March 2010.

Isophotes to enhance perception

Here you can see some new developments we are working on: using isophotes to enhance perception of the display content. Enjoy.

Presenting at SMARTGRAPHICS

Erick Mendez will present the latest results on the saliency techniques (visual techniques to draw the attention of a user) at the ACM/EG SMARTGRAPHICS conference this week. Check it out if you are around, or check the publication here.

Expert interviews

As part of the user-centered design, we will be gathering end-user feedback from experts. If you believe you have a good input that may help us further, please contact the partners at EFLUM.

Graz quarterly meeting

Well, it's time for a quarterly meeting again! Graz will be hosting the two-day meeting at June 23 and 24. Focus: planning for the final year, updating and finalizing the design and integration of the system, and giving out our latest research prototypes for on-site usage. Exciting....

Range of publications submitted

The HYDROSYS consortium has just submitted several publications on the latest research outcomes of the project to a major conference. We can't tell you more, but hey, let's keep our fingers crossed!

Presenting at GI

Alessandro Mulloni will present our great paper on multi-camera navigation today at GI2010. Go check it out if you are attending the conference!

Sneak preview handheld device

See here a sneak preview of the "freshly baked" STL model used for the latest version of the modular handheld device... more coming soon.

Running GEOtop using MeteoIO

As part of the HYDROSYS consortium efforts, GEOtop can now run using the MeteoIO library! The open source software GEOtop is a complete physically based model that exhaustively treats both the runout and the energy balance of the snow and the soil. It allows to describe the interaction and the feedbacks between soil and atmosphere in the mountain environment, where the complex topography and the heterogeneity of the territory require an accurate spatial distribution of the driving variables and of the parameters. The MeteoIO library embedded in GEOtop enables the model to easily access a variety of input data formats (meteo time series and gridded data) and work with them at two different levels: handling meteorological data and performing hydrological simulations. More info can be found here.

Cover of GI2010 proceedings

The conference committee from Graphics Interface 2010 liked the pictures in our paper on multi-cameras so much, that they are putting us on the cover! Picture shows the categorization of camera types in a multi-camera setup... Check out the paper!

Article accepted!

Erick Mendez' paper on saliency modulation in augmented reality got accepted at ACM Smartgraphics, a high quality conference covering Computer Graphics, Visualization, Art & Graphics Design, Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. You can find the paper here!

Blimp capturing footage

Last week, the blimp got operational near the Dorfberg at Davos. The blimp successfully captured normal and thermal footage with its camera platform mounted below. More info following soon...

HYDROSYS presents at IEEE Virtual Reality

The HYDROSYS consortium will present tomorrow a paper on saliency modification in the PIVE workshop at the renown IEEE conference in Boston, USA....

Mobile tracking setup operational

Today, we tested our mobile tracking setup! As you can see in the picture, we can mount four long arms on the back of a four wheel drive, each holding a Ubisense receiver box, to generate a high-resolution tracking range around the vehicle. And yes, mounting the setup goes actually rather quickly, to keep the setup mobile! More following soon...

new HYDROSYS blog online !

Welcome to the HYDROSYS blog! You will find here the latest news and info on the HYDROSYS project..

Today we announce the first deployments of our blimp system at the Davos deployment site close to our partner SLF. Here you see a first image of the inflated blimp... More imaging coming soon!