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Main Menu Section 1526

CRCD: Low-Power Wireless Communications for Virtual Environments

Julie A. Dickerson, Diane T. Rover, Carolina Cruz-Neira, Robert J. Weber, Benjamin Graubard, Feng Chen, and Zheng Min

Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011

Project Overview

This CRCD project combines research from the areas of wireless communications, low-power embedded systems, virtual environments, and human factors in an interdisciplinary program. Education in the hardware and software of virtual reality (VR) systems serves as a testbed for training engineers in a truly interdisciplinary environment. The ultimate goal of this project is to create new courses that cover real-time software and embedded systems, design of virtual environments, and design of practical wireless devices.

The research part of the proposal uses the C6, a three-dimensional, full-immersion, synthetic environment in the Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC) at Iowa State University (ISU). The goal is to design and implement low power wireless communications systems for wearable sensor networks in virtual environments. Figure 1 shows the C6 and a few of the wireless devices in the system. Wireless systems introduce latency issues into the design problem due to slower data rates and retransmissions. Latency is the total delay time between a user’s action and the system response. Latency must be below human perceptual thresholds to create a comfortable virtual environment. Other considerations for wireless design in virtual environments are: complete coverage of the interaction space, no interference with other wireless devices, the data rates between the user and the system, and low-power requirements. The current project team includes four faculty members, three graduate students and two undergraduate students.

First Year Accomplishments In the first year of this project, new laboratory experiments were added to existing courses in communications to enforce the concepts of hardware/software co-design and human factors issues. One example of these first experiments is a laboratory for the communications course that characterizes the complex electromagnetic environment inside a building that contains multiple types of wireless devices such as LANs and cordless phones. A second example is implementation of different methods for interference mitigation such as direct-sequence spread spectrum and adaptive antennas. Our group has studied the latency of the C6 virtual environment and the existing communications protocols for the 802.11 and Bluetooth specifications. These studies are being presented in the communications systems II class in Spring 2002.

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Min, Z., & Weber, R., & Chen, F., & Graubard, B., & Dickerson, J., & Cruz-neira, C., & Rover, D. (2002, June), 1526 Crcd: Low Power Wireless Communications For Virtual Environments Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10221