iSpace Research Lab

Who Can Participate?
We’re seek­ing indi­vid­u­als with 2+ years of VR expe­ri­ence in gaming, con­tent cre­ation, or research to help us under­stand and pre­vent VR-induced motion sick­ness (aka cybersickness).

What’s Involved?
Complete a 10–20 minute online survey to share your insights on cyber­sick­ness. All responses are anony­mous and confidential.

Incentives
Participants have a chance to win cash prizes ($10-$100 CAD via PayPal).

Ready to Help?
Take the Survey Now (survey dead­line is extended to Aug 27^th)

For the Survey web­site for more information

Bernhard Riecke and his iSpace­Lab are look­ing for sev­eral grad­u­ate stu­dents (PhD or Masters) to join our inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team, specif­i­cally in the fol­low­ing areas:

• Designing and inves­ti­gat­ing intu­itive inter­faces for embod­ied flying in VR & tele­op­er­a­tion (drones)
• Reducing motion sick­ness in VR & teleoperation
• Designing and inves­ti­gat­ing VR expe­ri­ences towards enhanc­ing health and well­be­ing, and more generally
• Designing and inves­ti­gat­ing VR expe­ri­ences for pos­i­tive impact on indi­vid­u­als and society

We’re part of the School of Interactive Arts & Technology (SIAT), a vibrant trans-disciplinary depart­ment at Simon Fraser University. We’re located in the greater Vancouver region on the West Coast of Canada, where the Pacific Ocean meets the Coastal Mountain range.

Applicants should be highly moti­vated and have a strong inter­est in inter­dis­ci­pli­nary col­lab­o­ra­tive research aligned with the over­all goals and vision of the iSpace lab: http://ispace.iat.sfu.ca/vision/. Please see http://ispace.iat.sfu.ca/contact/  for details on our key research areas, the appli­ca­tion requirements/process, and how you might fit in.

Our project “HyperJumping in Virtual Vancouver: Combating Motion Sickness by Merging Teleporting and Continuous VR Locomotion in an Embodied Hands-Free VR Flying Paradigm” will be show­cased at the 2022 Siggraph in Vancouver, see the project web­site for more infos, and join us at Siggraph 2022 in Vancouver to try it out!

On Wed April 6^th, from 5-7pm, my Graduation Project stu­dents (IAT 499) will show­case their VR projects, fea­tur­ing video trail­ers, fol­lowed by a chance to expe­ri­ence projects in VR and talk to the cre­ators: see http://ispace.iat.sfu.ca/riecke/teaching/iat499/

We are going to present our paper “Virtual Transcendent Dream: Empowering People through Embodied Flying in Virtual Reality” at CHI 2022 in person. The recorded pre­sen­ta­tion talk is now avail­able on YouTube below

learn more about this project to empower people through embod­ied flying in VR.

My team just had the oppor­tu­nity to present three talks at the 8^th International Conference on Spatial Cognition (that ended up being online, not in Rome unfor­tu­nately). Below are videos of the talks:

Riecke, B. E., Hashemian, A. M., Adhikari, A., Aguilar, I., Kruijff, E., & Heyde, M. von der. (2021). Simultaneous Locomotion and Interaction in VR: Walking > Leaning > Controller.

Adhikari, A., Riecke, B. E., Hashemian, A. M., Nguyen-Vo, T., Kruijff, E., & Heyde, M. von der. (2021). Embod­ied VR Flying Improves Spatial Orientation while Reducing Cybersickness.

Note: We recently got a full paper about this research accepted as

Adhikari, A., Hashemian, A. M., Nguyen-Vo, T., Kruijff, E., Heyde, M. von der, & Riecke, B. E. (2021). Lean to Fly: Leaning-based Embodied Flying can Improve Spatial Orientation and User Experience in 3D Navigation.  Frontiers in Virtual Reality (accepted). doi: 10.3389/frvir.2021.730334

Riecke, B. E., Adhikari, A., Zielasko, D., Bretin, A., Heyde, M. von der, & Kruijff, E. (2021). HyperJump: Merging Teleporting and Continuous VR Locomotion into one Paradigm.

My lab recently had the oppor­tu­nity to present first results from our recent stud­ies at the IEEE VR 2021 Workshop on Finding a Way Forward in VR Locomotion: 

How to best move through Virtual Reality if you also have to interact at the same time?

7 min talk:

2 min summary

Integrating Continuous and Teleporting VR Locomotion into a Seamless “HyperJump” Paradigm

5 min talk:

2 min summary:

A short reflec­tion on how properties/attributes of loco­mo­tion tech­niques in Virtual Reality can turn out to be ben­e­fits or dis­ad­van­tages depend­ing on ones goal, con­text etc.

To be pre­sented at this upcom­ing IEEE VR 2021 Workshop. cita­tion: Riecke, B. E., & Zielasko, D. (2021). Continuous vs. Discontinuous (Teleport) Locomotion in VR: How Implications can Provide both web­site Benefits and Disadvantages. IEEE VR Workshop on Finding a Way Forward in VR Locomotion, 2 pages.

Links to Paper and  Slides

7min talk:

2min sum­mary:

We pre­sented our art paper “Body RemiXer: : Extending Bodies to Stimulate Social Connection in an Immersive Installation” online at SIGGRAPH 2020. The pre­sen­ta­tion is avail­able on YouTube below and the full paper is pub­lished in Leonardo 53(4).

You can learn more about this project to con­nect people through abstract bodies and touch here or down­load the full paper below.

Daniel Zielasko and Bernhard Riecke will be orga­niz­ing the 1^st Workshop on Seated VR on Sunday morn­ing March 22, just before the IEEE VR 2020 con­fer­ence. We call for 1–2 page extended abstracts for authors inter­ested in pre­sent­ing a light­ning talk at the work­shop. See our Seated VR work­shop web­site for details.

Here’s my own pre­sen­ta­tion from the work­shop , “Towards an Affordance of Embodied Locomotion Interfaces in VR: How to Know How to Move?” we’ll post links to all the talks soon

Emerging Media BC Community of Practice Event on Friday April 12th 2019: Presentations & VR demos

The April 2019 meet­ing (details and RSVP here) will be hosted at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at the SFU Surrey campus. The theme of this meet­ing is “VR 4Good”, based on the 4Good projects of the stu­dents at SIAT, with a focus on the ben­e­fits of facil­i­tat­ing such VR projects. Several of the VR4Good projects that were made during the Semester in Alternate Realities inten­sive (15 credit) course on the SFU Surrey campus will be presented.

These works were cre­ated by stu­dents from dif­fer­ent SFU depart­ments who joined our Semester in Alternate Realities. The works are part of an emerg­ing field of devel­op­ment and research that use VR and other emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies to increase aware­ness and be a cat­a­lyst for improv­ing our world. These projects are the cul­mi­na­tion of 14 weeks of an intense, iter­a­tive, agile, reflec­tive and adap­tive teach­ing and learn­ing process. Four dis­tinct yet inter­con­nected “for good” Virtual Reality expe­ri­ences focused on themes related to improv­ing the social and envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tion, by not only draw­ing aware­ness to issues in the world that require our atten­tion, but also pro­vid­ing unique first-person expe­ri­ences that we could not have with­out immer­sive technology.

The Semester in Alternate Realities team is proud to present our stu­dents’ 1^st show­case on their Virtual Reality for Good projects (“VR4Good”) in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, on February 1^st from 1:00 — 4:30 pm. These works were cre­ated by stu­dents from dif­fer­ent SFU depart­ments who joined our Semester in Alternate Realities. They are part of an emerg­ing field of devel­op­ment and research that use VR and other emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies to increase aware­ness and be a cat­a­lyst for improv­ing our world. Join us and be our first public user-testers for four short and unique VR projects. 

See our Semester in Alternate Realities web­site for more infos about the course, and our face­book event page for first pic­tures of the show­case, more will follow soon.

Additional show­cases with dif­fer­ent projects will follow later this semes­ter, likely on March 8^th (2^nd show­case) & April 4^th (final showcase)

Rising Waters: Is this your future?

Rising Waters is an exploratory con­text driven game that sets you in the future, in which pol­lu­tion has dev­as­tated the planet. Through nar­ra­tive and con­text clues, the player is set to nav­i­gate the world and auto­mat­i­cally obtain­ing sam­ples within their robotic suite to see how a low-lying coastal city has been dam­aged through care­less envi­ron­men­tal damage. Once the mis­sion is com­plete, the player exits the expe­ri­ence and reflects on their own envi­ron­men­tal impact.

Goal: The goal of this project is to prompt par­tic­i­pants to con­sider the long-term impact of their actions on the envi­ron­ment through visual, audi­tory and expe­ri­en­tial learn­ing. By sit­u­at­ing the par­tic­i­pant in a famil­iar loca­tion, city ban­ners are used to help local­ize the expe­ri­ence, par­tic­i­pants will learn about how a local­ized city can be impacted through a lack of imme­di­ate change towards com­bat­ing global and local pol­lu­tants, affect how the bios­phere behaves, which can con­tribute to rising sea levels, and degra­da­tion in the over­all qual­ity of the environment.

Core User Experience: The core user expe­ri­ence cen­ters around nar­ra­tive and expe­ri­en­tial learn­ing through inter­ac­tion with the built envi­ron­ment. In Rising Waters, the focus of atten­tion first and fore­most should be on how the user inter­acts with the built envi­ron­ment, dri­ving the core expe­ri­ence to be exploratory in nature. By having par­tic­i­pants inter­act with the envi­ron­ment, Rising Waters wants to con­front the user’s  ini­tial sense of awe, with one of dread and shock. Ideally, the user expe­ri­ence presents itself as some­thing nou­veau, dri­ving for­ward a sense of urgency that imbues the user with a desire to com­plete the experience.

Restless Sleep - A Waking Coma Experience: To find the forest through the eyes of others

“Restless Sleep” is an inno­v­a­tive VR expe­ri­ence of a fab­u­lated nar­ra­tive in which users’ mind is con­nect­ing with the con­scious­ness of coma patient in order to see and feel through a comatose per­cep­tion. The expe­ri­ence is com­posed by both per­for­ma­tive and vir­tual ele­ments, incor­po­rat­ing inter­ac­tive responses between hap­tics and visu­als, to guide users into the full embod­i­ment of a coma patient, who is con­stantly feel­ing and inter­act­ing with their phys­i­cal environment.

Goal: Our goal of the project is to let the user foster empa­thy towards coma patients. Many people ques­tion how con­scious of their sur­round­ings Coma patients are and how much out­side stim­u­la­tion they can actu­ally inter­pret. By being in a VR coma expe­ri­ence (per, during and post), the users are put into the shoes of a coma patient where they can learn how coma patients are treated and also to show that they have a mind of their own which are not fully unconscious.

Core User Experience: The core user expe­ri­ence we want to accom­plish is to foster empa­thy for coma patients and develop an under­stand­ing of what they can feel and how bystander actions can influ­ence the mental state along with the mental inter­pre­ta­tions of the patient. We want users to walk away from the expe­ri­ence with a sense of intro­spec­tive con­tem­pla­tion, and hope­fully knowl­edge on how best to handle them­selves around people in comas (or even those in other states of altered con­scious­ness). This is because we iden­ti­fied a sur­pris­ing amount of mis­in­for­ma­tion and igno­rance sur­round­ing comatose states, as well

as many first-hand expe­ri­ences of comatose patients. The most impact­ful was the story of a girl who was in a two week med­ically induced coma and her recounts of the hal­lu­ci­na­tory dreams she had while in the coma.. While we delib­er­ately didn’t want to sub­ject the users to this, we did want to bring atten­tion to the feel­ing of help­less­ness one feels, and how it is anal­o­gous to being in VR — espe­cially in a public setting.

https://vimeo.com/315911417

Barriers: The TRIP of a lifetime

BARRIERS is a vir­tual expe­ri­ence that allows the user to view inter­ac­tions through the eyes and ears of a Non-Native English speaker. After biting into a “mag­i­cal” cookie, the par­tic­i­pant is trans­ported to a fan­tasy world. In order to achieve their goal of find­ing a wash­room, the imm­er­sant must inter­act with nearby talk­ing animals.

Goal:  The main emo­tion we are trying to evoke in our expe­ri­ence is the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of rely­ing on other people to be will­ing to help you when they don’t under­stand what they are saying. What makes our project unique is its abil­ity to make anyone feel as though they do not under­stand the lan­guage since it is made up. This ties in with the course theme because it invokes empa­thy in the user and give them an expe­ri­ence they would not oth­er­wise have access to.

Core user experience:

Through BARRIERS, we hope to place users in the vul­ner­a­ble posi­tion of rely­ing on other people for help. This expe­ri­ence aims to recre­ate the frus­tra­tion that comes with not being able to speak English and the grat­i­tude that arises when an indi­vid­ual takes the time to explain and use dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­niques to foster understanding.

The Pitch of Red: Every colour has a voice

The Pitch of Red is an immer­sive VR expe­ri­ence that allows the user to expe­ri­ence synes­the­sia — a con­di­tion that blends two or more senses together. In our expe­ri­ence, users are able to hear the sounds of the colours they see as they wander through the mind of Wassily Kandinsky — an artist who had such a condition.

Goal: The project tries to bring the user closer to the notion of mixing human senses. The psy­cho­log­i­cal devi­a­tion can be expe­ri­enced by anyone to any extent. It is mostly based on what the person asso­ci­ated with a cer­tain sound, colour, taste or any other humanly under­stood medium. The amount of people who expe­ri­ence that feel­ing is rel­a­tively small, how­ever, the impact they have made in his­tory or their way of per­ceiv­ing the world is worth study­ing. The project is focused on com­mu­ni­cat­ing the idea of mixing human senses, also known as — synes­the­sia to those who have never heard some­thing sim­i­lar to that or never expe­ri­enced that sense.

Core user expe­ri­ence:  For The Pitch of Red we aim to pro­vide imm­er­sants with a greater under­stand­ing of what it is like to have synes­the­sia of asso­ci­at­ing colors to sounds, or at the very least, be able to describe what such synes­the­sia is to some­one who may not know what it means. During the expe­ri­ence they will be granted a “super­power”: being able to hear every colour that they look at and we would expect users to feel curi­ous, excited and inten­tion­ally a bit over­whelmed. After fin­ish­ing our VR expe­ri­ence, we would like users will come out with a better under­stand­ing of what this par­tic­u­lar type of synes­the­sia might feel like in real life.

Aesthetically, we want the expe­ri­ence to allow the imm­er­sant to see an alter­nate real­ity through the eyes of Wassily Kandinsky. With that said, one of the dif­fi­cul­ties of VR is the lack of haptic touch so our focus with The Pitch of Red is to try to sim­u­late the windhampharmacy.com rela­tion­ship between sight and sound.

Together with my col­league Patrick Pennefather we’re cur­rently design­ing and get­ting ready to co-teach a brand-new 15-credit course enti­tled “Semester in Alternate Realities”

In this project-based course, par­tic­i­pants will be chal­lenged to develop solu­tions using tech­nolo­gies such as VR (e.g., Oculus Rift, HTC Vive) and immer­sive multi-modal media instal­la­tions. In addi­tion to focus­ing on the co-construction of dig­i­tal pro­to­types afford­ing mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences in “alter­nate real­i­ties”, our objec­tive is to stim­u­late doc­u­mented reflec­tion and dis­cus­sion through­out the process. Participants can expect to work col­lab­o­ra­tively, be matched accord­ing to the skills they bring, and be pro­vided time and resources to learn new tech­niques and approaches, soft– and hard skills, and processes to con­duct user research. Participants will get the oppor­tu­nity to reflect on future tech­nolo­gies and their poten­tial impact on the world, and improve their pre­sen­ta­tion skills and pub­licly show­case their projects. To incor­po­rate diverse per­spec­tives, stu­dents from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines are invited to apply and, in their appli­ca­tion, argue how they could con­tribute to the course and the co-construction of team projects(application dead­line: end of October 2018).

This semester’s design chal­lenge is “cre­at­ing for good”: Use alter­nate real­i­ties tech­niques and tech­nolo­gies, guid­ing the­o­ret­i­cal frame­works, and appro­pri­ate processes, project man­age­ment and col­lab­o­ra­tion approaches to iter­a­tively ideate, design, pro­to­type, and eval­u­ate an inter­ac­tive www.slaterpharmacy.com alter­nate real­i­ties expe­ri­ence that affords mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences for the bet­ter­ment of human­ity and/or our planet.

To give you an idea what projects might look like, view the VR project videos or this AWE video from pre­vi­ous stu­dent teams in courses that Bernhard and Patrick have taught. There is increas­ing evi­dence that the immer­sive nature of VR makes it a pow­er­ful medium for “doing good,” and it is par­tic­u­larly well-suited for help­ing people develop com­pas­sion and empa­thy. In this course, we will explore the poten­tial of doing good using alter­nate real­i­ties (that are boom­ing around the world and par­tic­u­larly in Vancouver)

Details: http://ispace.iat.sfu.ca/riecke/teaching/siar/

We’ll have our first Student Virtual Reality Showcase on Friday February 1^st, ca 12:30 — 4:30pm, on the SFU Surrey Campus Mezzanine, where the  18 stu­dents from dif­fer­ent SFU depart­ments show their first immer­sive project.

My TEDxEastVan talk from September 16^th is now finally online! It was enti­tled “Could Virtual Reality Make us More Human” and includes some of our recent research and future direc­tions and exam­ples from my teach­ing on immer­sive envi­ron­ments. Enjoy!

It was such an honour and amaz­ing expe­ri­ence to present at TEDxEastVan on September 16^th! Below are some first pic­tures, the video will be released later in October and will be posted here.

My TEDx talk was titled “Could Virtual Reality Make us More Human” and included some of our recent research and exam­ples from my teach­ing on immer­sive envi­ron­ments. Here’s some of the ideas in a nutshell:

Virtual real­ity is becom­ing increas­ingly acces­si­ble and afford­able, and offers the unique oppor­tu­nity to pro­vide first-hand and embod­ied expe­ri­ences. How could we use this poten­tial to go beyond enter­tain­ment and gaming, for cre­at­ing pos­i­tive or even trans­for­ma­tional http://theshoalspharmacy.com expe­ri­ences we might oth­er­wise not be able to have? And how could we democ­ra­tize the medium and put this pow­er­ful tech­nol­ogy into the cre­ative hands of more people?

See http://tedxeastvan.com/ for details

I’m hon­oured, exciTED (and a bit ner­vous) to have been selected to present at TEDxEastVan on September 16^th.

My TEDx talk will be titled “Could Virtual Reality Make us More Human” and will include some of our recent research and exam­ples from my teach­ing on immer­sive envi­ron­ments. Here are some of the ideas I’ll put forth:

Virtual real­ity is becom­ing increas­ingly acces­si­ble and afford­able, and offers the unique oppor­tu­nity to pro­vide first-hand and embod­ied expe­ri­ences. How could we use this poten­tial to go beyond enter­tain­ment and gaming, for cre­at­ing pos­i­tive or even trans­for­ma­tional expe­ri­ences we might oth­er­wise not be able to have? And how could we democ­ra­tize the medium and put this www.bernardspharmacy.com pow­er­ful tech­nol­ogy into the cre­ative hands of more people?

See http://tedxeastvan.com/ for details and tickets.

For those who couldn’t make it out to our Virtual Reality — Going Beyond show­case from the IAT 445 “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” course, here are some of the project videos. Thanks to all the stu­dents & TA Alex for all the www.canadianpharmacy365.net great work and inspir­ing projects!

Forlorn

Canvas of Sound

Echo

Adrift

Finding Home

The Cave

Here are some pic­tures and project posters from our Virtual Reality — Going Beyond show­case from the IAT 445 “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” course that I taught with lots of great help from TA & PhD stu­dent Alex Kitson. Project http://online-pharmacy.org videos will follow soon…

Pictures from showcase:

Project posters:

IAT 445 Project showcase on Friday June 23, 2017, 10am-2:30pm

On Friday June 23, 2017, the stu­dents from my course on “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” (IAT 445) will be pre­sent­ing their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10am — 2:30pm.

9 stu­dent teams will show­case their own immer­sive Virtual Reality projects that they devel­oped in the pop­u­lar game engine Unity3D and will present using the Oculus Rift head-mounted display.

Some projects draw from con­tem­po­rary indie/art com­puter games like Dear Esther, Journey, or Stanley’s Parable and cinema/television.

Students were tasked to design for a pur­pose­ful and immer­sive user expe­ri­ence — this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was Going beyond: “Use unity3D and guid­ing frame­works (e.g., immer­sion, pres­ence, user-centered sys­tems design etc.) to iter­a­tively ideate, design, pro­to­type, and eval­u­ate an immer­sive and inter­ac­tive vir­tual envi­ron­ment expe­ri­ence that “goes beyond”: How could you pro­vide inter­est­ing, inspir­ing, or mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences in VR? That is, what expe­ri­ences could you pro­vide in VR that are oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult, dan­ger­ous, or hard to expe­ri­ence? Instead of using VR as only a past-time and ulti­mate sen­sory over­load tool to wow people, how could you use it for some­thing more inter­est­ing, novel, excit­ing, or mean­ing­ful?” Be pre­pared for some excit­ing showcases!

In case you can’t make it to the inter­ac­tive project show­case, you can join the public project video http://www.buyvaliumonline.com pre­sen­ta­tion ses­sion on Thursday June 29^th  at 2:30pm, in Surrey room #5380, or wait for the best videos to be posted online.

See SFU’s Teaching & Learning blog for a news story on this course from Spring 2013, enti­tled: “How a SIAT course in immer­sive envi­ron­ments exposed stu­dents to the real world”

See my teach­ing page and last year’s SFU media release for more infos.

“We went to the Moon as tech­ni­cians, we returned as human­i­tar­i­ans” reflected Edgar Mitchell after his space flight. This describes the overview effect – a pro­found awe-inspiring expe­ri­ence of seeing Earth from space result­ing in a cog­ni­tive shift, lead­ing to a more con­scious and caring view on our planet. Experiencing Earth from space first-hand made many astro­nauts real­ize that Earth is frag­ile, with­out bor­ders, lead­ing to a feel­ing of con­nect­ed­ness to human­ity and our planet(see astro­nauts’ quotes). Such an aware­ness shift could have a pos­i­tive impact on our soci­ety and planet, espe­cially if we had a tool that allowed for more people to expe­ri­ence it with­out the risk, cost, and envi­ron­men­tal foot­print asso­ci­ated with actual space flight.
To this end, the iSpace Lab inves­ti­gates how we could best use the poten­tial of immer­sive vir­tual real­ity to give people a glimpse of the overview effect with­out having to send more rock­ets to space. At the same time, we use vir­tual real­ity as a tool allow­ing us to better under­stand the http://armodexperiment.com expe­ri­ence and under­ly­ing trig­gers of the overview effect phenomenon.

To this end, we will design a set of intro­spec­tive, phys­i­o­log­i­cal and

(1) design a set of intro­spec­tive, phys­i­o­log­i­cal and behav­ioural eval­u­a­tion research tools to better under­stand the overview effect phe­nom­e­non and how immer­sive VR could serve to induce it;

(2) Pilot these research tools as an essen­tial part of our larger research pro­gram through the cre­ation of a VR envi­ron­ment, gain­ing a deeper under­stand­ing of aspects of the per­sonal expe­ri­ences of the OE deliv­ered through VR, and as a result deriv­ing strate­gies for the design of piv­otal VR expe­ri­ences with the long-term goal of induc­ing pos­i­tive social change in the population.

Below is our first video explain­ing the over­all idea of the Earthgazement project. Thanks: IAT344 stu­dent team Joanna Chou, Katarina Shao, Lien Chou, & Sidi Zhong!

Here’s the offi­cial SFU 1-minute cov­er­age of my IAT 445 Immersive Environments course:

And below are some of the videos from our Immersive Environments course from our show­case on (IAT 445). For more infos, see Immersive Environments. We’ll offer the course again in Summer 2017 as a com­pact (inter­s­es­sion) course

 Parallel Minds

The Reef

The Painter

Retrograde