Template on Data, Protocols & Standards

WP 1 COMMUNITY

Document type:Template

Contact Responsible:Petros Daras, ITI, Greece

Contact e-mail:

The peach Core Team would like to thank you for actively participating to this initiative!

Before filling in this form we would like to inform you that the information provided in this document will be only used as input to provide recommendations on technologies, protocols, and data standards for experimental work towards efficient data sharing analysis of international existing resources for compatibilityin Presence Research.

Filled in by:

Contact e-mail(s):

Working definition of Presence:

As a field, Presence focuses on understanding the cognitive experience of being somewhere and developing technologies to generate and augment it (being someone or something, somewhere, sometime, without physically being there). Presence spans a wide range of subjects: from neuroscience and cognition to artificial intelligence, sensors and systems. Aided by new technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, AI, wearable displays and high-end cinemas, Presence research aims at empowering us to achieve realistic feelings and experiences when immersed in a virtual environment. The feeling of being there is the result of a complex interaction of many technological, non-technological and personal factors. A fundamental understanding of these factors will allow for construction of virtual and augmented environments with greater effectiveness.

As a measurable phenomenon (Definition from EU FP6 Presenccia Integrated Project, coordinated by Mel Slater), Presence can be defined as "the successful replacement/augmentation of sensory data with virtual generated data'', success being defined by analyzing the response of the subject in physiological, behavioural and subjective terms and comparing them with those associated to a ``real'' situation (this is the concept of "ground truth'').

Goal of the template:

Presence research relies heavily on empirical experiments involving subjects in mediated environments.Because presence is a complex, multi-dimensional concept, experiments on presence can be extremely resourceintensive and produce large amounts of data of different types. As the presence community matures, data collected in experiments need to be made publicly available to the community. This will allow theverification of experimental results, the comparison of results of experiments carried out in different laboratories, and the evaluation of new data analysis methods.

The following template was created so as to support and foster the definition of Standards for experimental protocols, data taking and archiving. Based on a review of existing standards or standard initiatives (as in IPs), our goal is to provide recommendations on technologies, protocols and data standards for experimental work towards efficient data sharing. By doing so the following goals will be achieved:

  • Researchers can test new methods without carrying out time-consuming experiments.
  • Researchers who have experiments with huge amounts of data can rely on the community toassist in the analysis.
  • Ensure high quality of experiments and publications and promote progress in presence methodology, by allowing a comparison ofmethodologies and research techniques.
  • Make possible to compare results among different experiments and even amongexperiments carried out in different labs.

Template:

Experiment Name / Please give the name of the experiment (if any) e.g. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
Experiment Objectives and Overview / Please give the description and the goal(s) of the experiment
e.g. Description fMRI is the use of MRI to measure the haemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging.
Goals The experiment will produce a neuroimaging paradigm that addresses each investigator’s hypothesis and specifies the behavioral performance and cortical activation tasks and related procedures that ensure the needed subject cooperation, response acquisition, motion control, etc.
Experiment Protocol / Give a description of the protocol
Experiment Hardware / What hardware did you use?
Experiment Software / Software? If proprietary, is it open source, or for sale?
Relevant project (IP, STREP, National, other) / Please give the name of the relevant project where the experiment takes place
e.g. IP Immersence /SPx/WPy
Application area(s) / Please indicate the application area(s) related to the experiment
e.g.
  • Measurement of Presence
  • Brain Machine interfacing
  • Body, Space and Motion
  • Avatars
  • Individual/Cultural Effects
  • Social collaboration
  • Therapy
  • Social interaction and Gaming

Disciplines involved / Physics VR psychololgy neuroscience…etc.
Data format(s) used for archiving / Please give the data formats which are going to be used in this experiment. If the formats are not well known try to give a short description
e.g.
  • DICOM
  • SMIS MRI
  • NIfTI-1

Standards used / extended (if any) / Please mention the standards which are going to be used in this experiment and how are you going to extend them
Experimental Protocol Description / Please describe the experimental protocol (procedure to be used). Also, please indicate what H/W and/or S/W packages were used during the experiment or include it as an Appendix.
e.g. If the results from fMRI experiments are to be reliable, comparable and efficiently obtained, it is necessary to standardise the way that such experiments are carried out. To this end, a standard fMRI protocol was written. The aim of this was to provide an experimental outline that contained the basic procedures that should be carried out, but could be adapted to fit the study in question.
Associated publications (if any) / - information about the published (or to be published) paper - title,authors, institution, web addresses etc
- abstract
- PDF if possible/available - or pointer to online publication
Can you provide your protocol and/or data to the Peach repository?
Links to on-line documentation and data
Comments & suggestions / Include further details if considered appropriate
Attached documents
(if applicable)
Do you want to be a member of the Working Group on Presence Data, Protocols and Standards? / If you want to be an active member of the Working Groupplease visit:

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