The end of March saw PAL PhD candidate Alla Vovk present at the Doctoral Consortium of IEEE VR in Osaka, Japan. The IEEE conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (short IEEE VR) is the premier international venue since 1993 for research in the area of immersive media, with more then 1,200 participants attending this year. Various applications of AR and VR technology were presented across a variety of contexts, including health, industrial training, physical well-being, and environmental conservation (amongst several others).

Alla presented her work on “Dimensionality of Augmented Reality Spatial Interfaces for Training” at the Doctoral Consortium (as well as a poster), receiving feedback from Steven Feiner and Edward J. Swan II.

Alla Vovk presenting Doctoral Consortium poster

All these days in Japan at IEEE VR I had a feeling that the next big things don’t just appear out of nowhere. It is clear that 1 in 1,000 ideas will change the world significantly, but the other 999 are helping to create the necessary breeding ground for it. An environment, where people share and learn, to help that one big idea to be born.

The use case is everything. Many of the emerging technologies of today are seen as disappointment or “not where we need them to be” by the non-research community. VR? Consumer adoption of technology has been minimal. Why? Not enough products that excite people are being built because the technology is complex and few developers outside the research community have the skill to build products, that would be designed for people, but not just for the sake of designing something.

I believe these technologies will continue to develop incrementally, maybe becoming what we think they might become — or maybe something else entirely — because of the R&D done in universities, laboratories, and companies across the world.

Alla Vovk

Interesting publications to read

  1. “Towards Brain-Computer Interfaces for Augmented Reality: Feasibility, Design and Evaluation” — Hakim Si-Mohammed, Jimmy Petit, Camille Jeunet, Ferran Argelaguet, Fabien Spindler, Andéol Évain, Nicolas Roussel, Géry Casiez, Anatole Lécuyer
  2. “Perceptual Study of Near-Field Binaural Audio Rendering in Six-Degrees-of-Freedom Virtual Reality” — Olli Rummukainen, Sebastian J. Schlecht, Thomas Robotham, Axel Plinge, Emanuël A. P. Habets
  3. “Studying the Mental Effort in Virtual Versus Real Environments” —
    Tiffany Luong, Nicolas Martin, Ferran Argelaguet Sanz, Anatole Lécuyer

 

Be Bait!: A Unique Fishing Experience with Hammock-based Underwater Locomotion Method by Shotaro Ichikawa et al. from Tohoku Univeristy
VR Ski Coach: Indoor Ski Training System Visualising Difference from Leading Skier by Takayuki Nozawa from Tokyo Institute of Technology
Exhibition booth by Nihon Binary Co., & Haption