Home arrow Press Room arrow Press Releases 2003 arrow Hardware from Virtalis at Heart of new Research at Napier University
Hardware from Virtalis at Heart of new Research at Napier University
Napier University and the Liberty VR TRacking system from PolhemusVirtalis has supplied VR hardware that will aid a new research programme at Edinburgh’s Napier University. The specialist hardware, a Liberty VR tracking system from Polhemus, is the first of its kind in the UK. The research centres on how artificial systems can recognise changes in people and unlock their emotional cues. Dr. Shaun Lawson, a lecturer in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Group at the School of Computing at Napier University, explained: “Computers are a long way from being able to understand the nuances of human emotion, although there has been a great deal of research carried out in areas such as facial expression and speech pattern analysis. The automated understanding of such cues forms part of a growing research area known as affective computing. However, few researchers to date have looked at the analysis of human gesture and posture in isolation from other emotive prompts. “It has long been known that dogs are able to recognise changes in human gestures and posture. As an example of this, some dogs, once given specialist training, can anticipate the onset of an epileptic seizure in their owners. How they manage this is still not clearly understood. We are putting together a consortium to attempt to unravel how dogs decode changes in gait and posture and to use these findings to inform our affective computing work. The consortium will include leading UK dog behavioural experts from the Canine Behaviour Centre (Queen’s University of Belfast) and Support Dogs in Sheffield, who train Seizure Alert Dogs?. Preliminary work has been done using two orientation sensors to measure the posture of people exhibiting both alert and relaxed behaviours. The next step is to use the Polhemus Liberty tracker to monitor eight body positions in real time.” In time, Dr. Lawson’s team intends to develop artificial intelligence techniques to process the data output from the Liberty tracking system. This newly launched system from Polhemus offers six degree of freedom tracking with 240 Hz at each sensor, giving immense speed. The School of Computing at Napier University is the largest computing department in Scotland with some 700 undergraduate students, 500 taught postgraduates and almost 50 research degree students. The HCI Group, led by Professor David Benyon, has current research programmes investigating a broad range of areas including visual and audio technologies for virtual and augmented realities, wearable and mobile devices, presence in immersive systems, and the use of artificial companions in affective computing.
 
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