Francesco De Pace

Polytechnic University of Turin | polito · DAUIN - Department of Control and Computer Engineering

Since the origins of Augmented Reality (AR), industry has always been one of its prominent application domains. The recent advances in both portable and wearable AR devices and the new challenges introduced by the fourth industrial revolution (renowned as industry 4.0) further enlarge the applicability of AR to improve the productiveness and to enh...

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies are increasingly becoming more pervasive and important in the information technology area. Thanks to the technological improvements, desktop interfaces are being replaced by immersive VR devices that offer a more compelling game experience. AR games have started to draw attention of resea...

Technology advancement is changing the way industrial factories have to face an increasingly complex and competitive market. The fourth industrial revolution (known as industry 4.0) is also changing how human workers have to carry out tasks and actions. In fact, it is no longer impossible to think of a scenario in which human operators and industri...

Nowadays the market is becoming increasingly competitive, factories are required not only to enhance the product quality but also to reduce manufacturing and maintenance times. In an industrial context, modern factories are composed by many automated systems, such as industrial robots, which can perform different tasks. Although industrial robots a...

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have been usually addressed as two separated worlds and recent studies try to address the problem of merging the AR and VR applications into a single “environment”, providing a system that relies on both paradigms. The constant release of new hardware interfaces for both wearable AR and Immersive VR o...

Understanding how people effectively perform actions together is fundamental when designing Collaborative Mixed Reality (CMR) applications. While most of the studies on CMR mostly considered either how users are immersed in the CMR (e.g., in virtual or augmented reality) or how the physical workspace is shared by users (i.e., distributed or colloca...

Robotic arms demonstrate superior speed and precision when performing tasks in challenging environments. However, creating fully autonomous robots remains challenging, particularly for tasks that demand the kind of subtle perception and complex decision-making that humans use naturally. This paper investigates the integration of Virtual Reality (VR...

Storyboards are one of the most effective methods to pre-visualize a story: a sequence of illustrations or pictures portraying settings, characters, actions, and events. This graphical representation is a sort of roadmap that guides users throughout the story. The storyboarding process is a key step for both movie and videogame productions, allowin...

This article presents a brain–computer interface (BCI) coupled with an augmented reality (AR) system to support human–robot interaction in controlling a robotic arm for pick-and-place tasks. BCIs can process steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), which are signals generated through visual stimuli. The visual stimuli may be conveyed to the...

Creatives in the animation and film industries constantly explore new and innovative tools and methods to enhance their creative process, especially in pre-production. As realistic, real-time rendering techniques have emerged in recent years, 3D game engines, modeling, and animation tools have been exploited to support storyboarding and movie proto...

Creatives in the animation and film industries constantly explore new and innovative tools and methods to enhance their creative process, especially in pre-production. As realistic, real-time rendering techniques have emerged in recent years, 3D game engines, modeling, and animation tools have been exploited to support storyboarding and movie proto...

Creatives from the animation and film industries have always been experimenting with innovative tools and methodologies to improve the creation of prototypes of their visual sequences before bringing them to life. In recent years, as realistic real-time rendering techniques have emerged, the increasing popularity of virtual reality (VR) can lead to...

Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) systems sample points on the Earth’s surface with meter accuracy. Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) devices improve GPS performances by providing real-time correction data from ground stations, achieving centimeter accuracy. Reliable tracking approaches are essential for Augmented Reality (AR) applications, especially for...

Design and computer graphics curricula for tertiary education include 3-D modeling skills. Students have to learn to represent (complex) 3-D objects by means of parametric surfaces or polygonal meshes. Three-dimensional modeling may be a complex task and students have to be able to accrue a certain deal of experience in the field before passing the...

Human–robot collaboration (HRC) is a new and challenging discipline that plays a key role in Industry 4.0. Digital transformation of industrial plants aims to introduce flexible production lines able to adapt to different products quickly. In this scenario, HRC can be a booster to support flexible manufacturing, thus introducing new interaction par...

Teaching is an activity that requires understanding the class’s reaction to evaluate the teaching methodology effectiveness. This operation can be easy to achieve in small classrooms, while it may be challenging to do in classes of 50 or more students. This paper proposes a novel Internet of Things (IoT) system to aid teachers in their work based o...

The Industry 4.0 is changing the very nature of the factories. If, in the past, the industrial facilities were composed by a plethora of devices disconnected from each other, nowadays, the digitalization of the industrial processes allows the devices to continuously exchange data with each other, thus improving the levels of production. Autonomous...

Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) proved to overcome some limitations of other input modes (e.g., gestures, voice, haptic, etc.). BCIs are able to detect the brain activity, thus identifying searched patterns. When a specific brain activity is detected, a well-defined action can be triggered, thus implementing a human-machine interaction paradigm. B...

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications are very diffuse nowadays. Moreover, recent technology innovations led to the diffusion of commercial head-mounted displays for immersive VR: users can enjoy entertainment activities that fill their visual fields, experiencing the sensation of physical presence in these virtual immersive...

Easy and fast digitalization of real objects is especially useful when considering augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), as reconstructed objects allow a better interaction between the real and virtual worlds than using pre-made 3D CAD models. Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and to the spread of immersive VR devices, the AR and VR...

Indoor environment reconstruction is a challenging task in Computer Vision and Computer Graphics, especially when Extended Reality (XR) technologies are considered. Current solutions that employ dedicated depth sensors require scanning of the environment and tend to suffer from low resolution and noise, whereas solutions that rely on a single photo...

The Industry 4.0 is changing the very nature of the factories. If, in the past, the industrial facilities were composed by a plethora of devices disconnected from each other, nowadays, the digitalization of the industrial processes allows the devices to continuously exchange data with each other, thus improving the levels of production. Autonomous...

Many studies have focused on Virtual Reality (VR) frameworks for remotely controlling robotic systems. Although VR systems have been used to teleoperate robots in simple scenarios, their effectiveness in terms of accuracy, speed, and usability has not been rigorously evaluated for complex tasks that require accurate trajectories. In this work, an E...

In this work, a Mixed Reality (MR) system is evaluated to assess whether it can be efficiently used in teleoperation tasks that require an accurate control of the robot end-effector. The robot and its local environment are captured using multiple RGB-D cameras, and a remote user controls the robot arm motion through Virtual Reality (VR) controllers...

Industry 4.0 is moving factories towards a high level of collaboration between human workers and industrial robots, with the aim of improving efficiency and productivity. Among other technologies, Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the most researched in recent years to provide novel user interfaces that could easily blend the real world with additio...

The introduction of interactive assets in public exhibitions is capable to significantly enhance the visitors’ user experience. However, the creation of interactive applications could represent a challenging task, especially for users lacking computer skills. Visual programming languages (VPLs) – one of the instruments belonging to the broad catego...

Until some years ago, there was a lack of affordable devices that allowed for research in order to design and implement augmented and mixed reality applications. Thanks to technology improvements, it is now possible to find several wearable devices on the market that greatly improve the synergy between the real and virtual world, thus allowing user...

The digitalization is transforming the very nature of factories, from automated systems to intelligent ones. In this process, industrial robots play a key role. Even if repeatability, precision and velocity of the industrial manipulators enable reaching considerable production levels, factories are required to face an increasingly competitive marke...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/frobt.2019.00018.].

The preparation of a set for a television production is a complex work; usually, several objects have to be manually placed in the environment and the configuration might be changed many times before finding the final set up. This configuration phase can be expensive and time consuming when large and heavy objects have to be moved. In order to tack...