Post-Doctoral position in Augmented Reality (INRIA, Brest-Rennes)

Research Field: Computer Science: Digital systems, Technology: medical technology

Key words: augmented reality, spatial navigation, Alzheimer

Context

About Inria Rennes:

The centre has 28 joint project teams in Rennes (including 24 with the IRISA mixed research unit) and 1 in Lannion. Its activities occupy over 600 people, scientists and research and innovation support staff, including 50 different nationalities. The Centre also operates 2 joint project teams in Nantes with LS22N (Nantes Digital Sciences Laboratory).

Job environment:

The position is offered in the Hybrid team of Inria, Rennes. The research activity of Hybrid team belongs to the field of Mixed Reality and 3D interactions with Virtual and Augmented Environments. We also focus on novel user inputs in virtual reality such as coming from full-body tracking or brain-computer interfaces. Applications of our research program are for industry (virtual prototyping), medicine (surgical simulation, rehabilitation and reeducation), design (architectural mock-up), art or videogames and entertainment. Hybrid was created in January 2013.

The project will be held in cooperation with the Rennes Hospital (CHU Rennes), Centrale Nantes and IMT-Atlantique, Brest. The ARIADE project is dedicated to developing and assessing Augmented Reality tools for helping spatial navigation for elderly people suffering from mild dementia such as Alzheimer disease. The rationale for this is that spatial disorientation is an important consequence of such dementia and accounts for a loss of autonomy and anxiety, thus being an important cause for precocious hospitalization of patients. Traditional visual helps such as geolocalized maps on smartphones are not efficient. Augmented Reality is a rapidly expanding field, but is not yet applied to the field of Neurodegenerative Diseases. Our objective is to adapt an innovative Augmented Reality tool in an outdoor environment in order to reduce activities’ limitations in this population, and to verify its safety and its tolerability. Adaptation of an Augmented Reality system in an outdoor environment will be the core of the postdoctoral work in this project.

Job description

Last year, we have designed and realized a first set of visual aids in Augmented Reality which has been evaluated in a first clinical trial with Alzheimer patients in an indoor semi-ecological environment. Switching to a more ecological environment requires to go outdoors and to solve the challenge of accurate and precise AR tracking in outdoor environments. A number of partial solutions have been built but no off-the-shelf integrated solution exists. The work will consist of reviewing existing solutions and designing and improving a combination of such solution which is relevant with regard to the needs of outdoor tracking for pedestrian navigation. This solution will be evaluated and the consequences of its limitation on visual help display mitigated.

Training and skills

Training

Applicants should hold a PhD in Computer Science (augmented reality, computer vision…)

Skills

Required skills, knowledge and experience

Past experience in computer vision or AR tracking or any relevant field regard localizing a camera in real time is required.

Desirable skills, knowledge and experience

Programming experience with the languages used in Augmented Reality (mostly C++) is desirable. Knowledge of tools such as Unity would be plus.

Additional information :

• Application deadline : (1 month minimum, 2 months maximum) March 30, 2022

• Start date : As soon as possible

• Contract : Fixed-term contract

• Contract duration: 12 months

• Location : Brest IMT Atlantique campus with fields trips to Rennes

• The positions offered for recruitment are open to all with, upon request, accommodations for candidates with disabilities

Hierarchical category: Category II trade P of IMT Atlantique management cadre

Contact :

Prof. Guillaume MOREAU (guillaume.moreau@imt-atlantique.fr)

Dr. Mélanie COGNE (melanie.cogne@chu-rennes.fr)