Modern manufacturing systems are often composed of a variety of highly customized units and specifically designed manufacturing cells. Optimization of assembly and training of staff requires a series of demo installations and excessive use of costly operational resources. In some cases, components are located at different sites, making the orchestration of the whole system even more difficult. Virtual Reality (VR) collaboration environments offer a solution by enabling high fidelity testing and training of complex manufacturing systems. On the other hand, such platforms are difficult to implement in an engineering perspective, as they are required to provide reliable, standard interfaces towards both robotic components and human operators. The VirCA (Virtual Collaboration Arena) platform is a software framework that supports various means of collaboration through the use of 3D augmented/virtual reality as a communication medium. VirCA offers functions for the high-level interoperability of heterogeneous components in a wide range of domains, spanning from research & development, through remote education to orchestration and management of industrial processes in manufacturing applications. This paper provides an overview of the industrial requirements behind high-fidelity virtual collaboration and demonstrates how the VirCA platform meets these requirements. Use cases are provided to illustrate the usability of the platform.

The semantic synthesis of intelligent space, emotional-behavioral modeling and cognitive infocommunications is a promising approach in the multidisciplinary field applied for ambient assisted living. The ambient assisted living application can be regarded as a complex cooperation and communication of different kinds of intelligent entities in a well-limited, semi-structured environment. The intelligent space aspect deals with the possible cooperation of intelligent entities as matching between needs and capabilities. The emotional-behavioral modeling handles the internal states and attitudes of the entities. The cognitive info-communications aspect deals with communication situations and processes between the entities. The semantic information framework is intended to provide a synthesis of the different fields in order to unite the represented knowledge in the form of information transfer between the field scopes. © 2013 IEEE.