Please join ISE grad students Atin Angrish and Tyler Rose as they talk blockchain and virtual reality. Angrish will discuss how he is using blockchain technology to allow manufacturing machines to share information safely. Rose will discuss how he is using virtual reality to improve occupational training.
As always refreshments are available in 428 Daniels Hall 30 minutes before the seminar begins.
With product customization an emerging business opportunity, organizations must find ways to collaborate and enable
sharing of information in an inherently trustless network. We propose – “FabRec”: a decentralized approach to handle manufacturing information generated by various organizations using blockchain technology. We propose a system in which a decentralized network of manufacturing machines and computing nodes can enable automated transparency of an organization’s capability, third party verification of such capability through a trail of past historic events and automated mechanisms to drive paperless contracts between participants using ‘smart contracts’. Our system decentralizes critical information about the manufacturer and makes it available on a peer-to-peer network composed of fiduciary nodes to ensure transparency and data provenance through a verifiable audit trail. We present a testbed platform through a combination of manufacturing machines, system-onchip platforms and computing nodes to demonstrate mechanisms through which a consortium of disparate organizations can communicate through a decentralized network. Our prototype testbed demonstrates the value of computer code residing on a decentralized network for verification of information on the blockchain and ways in which actions can be autonomously initiated in the physical world. This study intends to expose system elements in preparation for much larger field tests through the working prototype and discusses the future potential of blockchain for manufacturing IT.
Virtual reality (VR) use in occupational training scenarios has seen research attention across many applications. Few studies, however, have examined these VR-based training programs in terms of the implications that immersion and presence can have. Further, as research in these VR-based studies continue to expand, the subjective and objective methods we use to determine presence in a virtual environment (VE) need to be continuously examined and improved upon. The primary goal of this study is to investigate the effect of immersion on human task performance in an occupational setting in a VE. The first objective was to investigate the effect of immersion on task performance accuracy in the VE. The second objective was to examine the effect of immersion on subjective responses and objective physiological measures of humans in the VE. Thirty participants completed an occupational training task using a head-mounted display. Heart rate was recorded during each trial and a subjective presence questionnaire (SUS) and workload survey (NASA-TLX) were filled after each. Subjective presence was significantly affected by both factors of immersion while task accuracy and cardiac response were not. These findings show that subjective presence responses proved the designed differences in immersion between trials. Although not included in the hypotheses, a statistically significant effect of trial number was found on normalized heart rate. In scenarios similar to our training sessions where cardiac response is not expected to see significant trends with immersion, subjective presence questionnaires would be recommended over normalized heart rate unless extensive measures can be taken to ensure cardiac activity will not be more affected by time than experience.
