Research Colloquium at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, SFU Surrey presents:

Victoria Interrante

February 18, 2009 at 2:30 pm

SFU Surrey Campus, Room 5380 (5th Floor Galleria)

Enabling Accurate Spatial Perception in Immersive Virtual Environments slides

Immersive virtual environments technology offers the potential to enable a viewer to receive visual input that is similar to what he would see if he were actually experiencing a modeled world at true scale, from a first-person perspective. As such, it has great promise as an enabling technology for diverse applications in many fields, including training and design. However, a long-standing concern in the field of virtual environments research has been the repeated finding from numerous studies that under many common conditions people tend to mis-judge both egocentric and exocentric distances in virtual environments.

In this talk, after briefly reviewing historical evidence of distance under-estimation in immersive virtual environments, I will describe the research that we have been undertaking at the University of Minnesota to attempt to elucidate the factors involved in this phenomenon and thereby discover robust means to enable accurate spatial perception in these environments. In this discussion I will focus in particular on our most recent research, in which we investigate the extent to which, and conditions under which, it might be possible to facilitate people's ability to accurately judge egocentric distances within a head-mounted-display-based immersive virtual environment by providing them with a real time, first person avatar self-embodiment within that environment.

Victoria Interrante is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and an associate member of the Center for Cognitive Sciences at the University of Minnesota. She received her PhD in 1996 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and worked from 1996-1998 as a staff scientist at ICASE, NASA Langley. Her research broadly focuses on the application of insights from visual perception to the design of more effective techniques for conveying information through computer-generated images. Among other things, she is currently involved in a collaboration with faculty from the Department of Architecture at the U of M on a project seeking to harness the potential of immersive virtual environments technology to support the process of conceptual design in architecture. She is a PECASE recipient (1999), an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, and was general chair of the first ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (2004).

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