Tabitha Peck defends dissertation
Tabitha Peck successfully defended her dissertation titled Redirected Free Exploration with Distractors: A Large-Scale, Real-Walking Locomotion Interface on July 7.
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.
Recent News
Jeremy Wendt defends dissertation
Jeremy Wendt defended his dissertation titled Real-Walking Models Improve Walking-In-Place Systems on April 8. His work includes GUD WIP — a model for creating real-walking-like speeds from Walking-In-Place inputs — and the Forward Walking Model — a model for deriving real-walking parameters from head track data alone. The final dissertation should be available soon from the Computer Science department website.
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. receives the 2010 IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award!
Congratulations to Prof. Brooks!
The text accompanying the award states, “The 2010 Virtual Reality Career Award goes to Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for his lifetime contributions to virtual reality research and practice.
For over three decades Fred Brooks has led a laboratory that fosters scientific inquiry and technical advances in virtual reality to provide effective solutions to real user problems. The demands of molecular modeling and docking applications led to many innovations in 3D interaction, especially in developing and using haptic feedback. His recent work has contributed to our understanding of design tradeoffs in immersive virtual reality systems that effect the quality of the user’s experience.”
Luv Kohli awarded best poster award at 3DUI 2010
Congratulations to Luv Kohli, who was awarded the best poster award at the 2010 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces! His poster, Redirected Touching: Warping Space to Remap Passive Haptics, presents his system for using a single rigid passive haptic object to represent a range of different virtual objects.
Another paper accepted in IEEE VR 2010
Tabitha Peck, Mary Whitton, and Henry Fuchs had their paper Improved Redirection with Distractors: A Large-Scale-Real-Walking Locomotion Interface and its Effect on Navigation in Virtual Environments accepted for publication at the 2010 IEEE Virtual Reality conference. The paper was presented in Waltham, MA on March 22.
Paper Accepted in VR 2010
Jeremy Wendt, Mary Whitton, and Fred Brooks had their paper GUD WIP: Gait-Understanding-Driven Walking-In-Place accepted for publication at the 2010 IEEE Virtual Reality conference. They will present the paper in Boston, Mass in March of 2010.
Congratulations to Tabitha, Mary, and Henry
We congratulate Tabitha C. Peck, Mary C. Whitton, and Henry Fuchs for receiving Honorable Mention for their paper “Evaluation of Reorientation Techniques for Walking in Large Virtual Environments,” presented last week at the 2008 IEEE Virtual Reality conference.
Visiting IEEE VR Conference
Several of us will be at the IEEE Virtual Reality conference and its colocated symposia this week in Reno, Nevada. Feel free to say hello!
Paper Accepted in 3DUI 2008
Jeff Feasel, Jeremy Wendt, and Mary Whitton had their paper LLCM-WIP: Low-Latency, Continuous-Motion Walking-In-Place accepted in IEEE 3D User Interfaces 2008. They will present the paper in March of 2008.
Paper Accepted in VR 2008
Tabitha Peck, Mary Whitton, and Henry Fuchs had their paper Evaluation of Reorientation Techniques for Walking in Large Virtual Environments accepted for publication at the 2008 IEEE Virtual Reality conference. They will present the paper in Reno, Nevada in March of 2008.