RoboSHU Virtual Reality Museum prototype demonstrated at VR conference

Cyber-Physical-Social Eco System

An innovative interactive prototype demonstration by the RoboSHU team including Dr Louis Nisiotis recently gained interest from international experts and won an award at the 6th International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics at Santa Maria al Bagno, Italy.

Dr Louis Nisiotis presents poster at 6th International Conference on Augmented Reality

Dr Louis Nisiotis presents poster at 6th International Conference on Augmented Reality

The prototype featured the RoboSHU ‘Virtual Reality Museum’, which includes information about the history of Robotics, the work of Sheffield Robotics and CARR. It is part of a research collaboration between C3RI‘s Department of Computing and MERI’s Centre of Automation and Robotics Research (CARR).

Dr Louis Nisiotis

Dr Louis Nisiotis and team

Dr Louis Nisiotis from the Department of Computing presented a paper – ‘Virtual Museums as a New Type of Cyber-Physical-Social System’ – and demonstrated the prototype. The accompanying poster won “Best Poster Award” and a prize of 150 Euros, sponsored by leading academic publisher Springer.

A number of papers related to this work by Dr Lyuba Alboul (CARR and Department of Maths and Engineering), Dr Louis Nisiotis (Department of Computing and C3RI) and Dr Martin Beer have already been published.

Currently, the team is focussing on technical aspects of developing the VR museum prototype and connecting people and robots to it.

Dr Nisiotis explained, however, that:

[…] the concept of the Virtual Museum can be perceived in a much broader sense, as a type of a Cyber-Physical-Social society that can be applied to a plethora of domains.

The initial pilot prototype was first demonstrated at the “Being Human” festival in November 2016.

Dr Lyuba Alboul, Senior Research Fellow and the Lab Manager of the Robotics Lab, says:

“Please come and see our robot Fetch in action this Thursday 18th July between 15.00 and 17.00. Fetch will navigate in the STEM atrium (Sheaf) and you can see what Fetch will see.”

If you are unable to come on that day, there is still a possibility to arrange an appointment with Fetch later. Since Robot Fetch can see but not yet speak and read, please send contact l [dot] Alboul [at] shu [dot] ac [dot] uk.

In meantime, you can visit our RoboSHU museum via http://www.virtualshu.com/roboshu 

Connecting Fetch robot to the RoboSHU Virtual Reality Museum and controlling through Virtual Reality at the CARR lab

Connecting Fetch robot to the RoboSHU Virtual Reality Museum and controlling through Virtual Reality at the CARR lab

See also:

ALBOUL, LyubaBEER, Martin and NISIOTIS, Louis (2019). Merging realities in space and time. In:DIMITROVA, Maya, (ed.) Cyber-physical systems for social applications. IGI Global, 156-183.

ALBOUL, LyubaBEER, Martin and NISIOTIS, Louis (2019). Robotics and Virtual Reality Gaming for Cultural Heritage Preservation. In: DORBAN, Flavio, (ed.) Resilience and Sustainability of Cities in Hazardous Environments. GVES, 335-345.

NISIOTIS, LouisALBOUL, Lyuba and BEER, Martin (2019). Virtual Museums as a New Type of Cyber-Physical- Social System. In: The 6th International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics (SALENTO AVR 2019), 24 Jun 2019 – 27 Jun 2019.