The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Immersive Virtual Environments (VEs) were conceived 40 years ago. Despite this, there are still more VE systems used in research about VEs than are used as tools to solve real users’ problems. Our goal is to make VE systems more effective for doing real work by:

Developing new technologies and techniques for interaction,
Evaluating the effects of these techniques on user comfort and performance and on the quality of the virtual experience, and
Exploiting the adaptability of the perceptual system to improve system performance.

Some highlights of our research are shown below.

The Pit

Locomotion


Virtual Reality Training Environments	Redirected Walking

Interaction


The Haptic Hand	I-DRIVE

Perception


Visual Dominance over Proprioception	Spatial Localization using Audio Cues

Presence


Lighting and Attention Maps	Passive Haptics	Physiological Measures