The slides (pdf)

The Jury:

Géry Casiez, Professeur à l'Université de Lille 1 (Rapporteur)
Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, Professeur à l'Université d'Ottawa (Rapporteur)
Sriram Subramanian, Professeur à l'Université de Bristol
Alain Berthoz, Professeur au Collège de France
Philippe Guillotel, Chercheur senior à TechnicolorJulien Fleureau, Chercheur senior à Technicolor
Marc Christie, Maître de Conférences à l'Université de Rennes 1
Anatole Lécuyer, Directeur de Recherche Inria (Directeur de thèse)

Abstract :

Haptic technology, stimulating the sense of touch, is used for years in virtual reality and teleoperation applications for enhancing the user immersion. Yet it is still underused in audiovisual systems such as movie theaters.
The objective of this thesis is thus to exploit the potential of haptics for audiovisual content. In the first part of this Ph.D. thesis, we address the haptic rendering in video viewing context. We first present a new device providing 6 degrees of freedom motion effects. Instead of moving the whole user's body, as it is traditionally done with motion platform, only the head and hands are stimulated. This device allows thus to enrich the audiovisual experience. Then we focus on the haptic rendering of haptic-audiovisuals. The combination of haptic effects and video sequences yields new challenges for the haptic rendering. We introduce a new haptic rendering algorithm to tackle these issues.

The second part of this Ph.D. is dedicated to the production of haptic effects. We first present of novel authoring tool. Three editing methods are proposed to create motion effects and to synchronize them to a video. Besides, the tool allows to preview motion effects thanks to a force-feedback device. Then we study combinations of haptic feedback and audiovisual content. In a new approach, the Haptic Cinematography, we explore the potential of haptic effects to create new effects dedicated to movie makers.