iSpace Research Lab

On November 26^th, the 9 stu­dents in my grad course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2014 gave their final 7-min project pre­sen­ta­tions in the SIAT research col­lo­quium at Simon Fraser University. Enjoy! I think the stu­dents did an amaz­ing job, quite proud of them! — for many it was their first sci­en­tific research project and presentation!

(alter­nate link)

Here’s the list of speak­ers and topics

• Alejandro V.:  Non-Expert Movement Observation Using Laban Movement Analysis
• Alex Kitson:  Individual fac­tors influ­enc­ing ori­en­ta­tion per­for­mance in vir­tual environments
• Jianyu Fan:  Groundtruthing and Validating the Soundscape Valence/Arousal Classification with Multiple Users
• William Li:  Validation of MotionCapture (MoCap) Labels in Movement
• Jason Procyk:  Video Feedback for Ice Hockey: Investigating the Effect on Shot Training
• Luciano Frizzera: 
• Effectiveness and effi­ciency of time rep­re­sen­ta­tion on human spa­tial move­ment map visualization
• Srilekha Kirshnamachari Sridharan:  Association of Colors to Phoneme-Grapheme pairs.
• Kıvanç Tatar:  Empirical Evaluation of a Commercial Synthesizer Automatic Calibration System
• Arefin Mohiuddin:  Exploration of Parallel Alternatives in Design Tasks — The Effect on Task Completion Times

On Friday November 28^th, the stu­dents from the “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” course (IAT 445) will be pre­sent­ing their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10:30am — about 1:30pm.

Three teams will show­case their own immer­sive Virtual Reality projects that they devel­oped in the pop­u­lar game engine Unity3D and will present using either the Oculus Rift DK2 head-mounted dis­plays or on immer­sive view­ing setups that they designed themselves.

Some projects draw from con­tem­po­rary indie/art com­puter games like Dear Esther and Slender Man and cinema/television. Students were tasked to design for a pur­pose­ful and immer­sive user expe­ri­ence — this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was evok­ing a strong yet mean­ing­ful emo­tional or vis­ceral response: “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 that evokes a strong yet mean­ing­ful emo­tional or vis­ceral response in the users.” So be pre­pared for some excit­ing showcases!

Cheers

Bernhard

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P.S. In case you can’t make it to the inter­ac­tive project show­case, you can join the public project video pre­sen­ta­tion ses­sion on Tuesday December 2^nd at 4:30pm, in Surrey room #2600 (the large theatre).

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 SFU media release for more infos. The redesign of the 2013 offer­ing of the course was sup­ported by a Teaching and Learning Development Grant and invalu­able ongo­ing assis­tance by edu­ca­tional con­sul­tant Barb Berry.

We just started our first online spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion exper­i­ment — below’s the ad. Enjoy!

Want to help out the Science?! Have 10 min­utes to spare in front of your com­puter? Contribute to the research in spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion in Virtual Reality by taking part in this online exper­i­ment study­ing spa­tial nav­i­ga­tion. The process will involve nav­i­ga­tion tasks fol­lowed by a number of ques­tion­naires.
We are look­ing for par­tic­i­pants with normal or cor­rected to normal vision and an access to a laptop or desk­top com­puter (no smart-phones or tablets please!). If you have any ques­tions or con­cerns please send an e-mail to erstepan@sfu.ca .
Also, par­tic­i­pants can enter in draw to win a PRIZE!
http://fluidsurveys.com/surveys/siat-survey/virtual-point-to-origin/

On Friday June 20^th, the stu­dents from the “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” course (IAT 445) will be pre­sent­ing their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10:30am — 2:30pm.

10 Teams will show­case their own immer­sive Virtual Reality projects that they devel­oped in the pop­u­lar game engine Unity3D and will present on immer­sive view­ing setups that they designed themselves.

This semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was relax­ation and stress-reduction: “Use unity3D and guid­ing frame­works to iter­a­tively ideate, design, pro­to­type, and eval­u­ate an immer­sive project that helps to relax and de-stress it’s users (incl. stu­dents like your­selves or SFU faculty/staff).” So be pre­pared for some excit­ing (and maybe even relax­ing?) showcases!

Cheers

Bernhard

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In case you can’t make it to the inter­ac­tive project show­case on the Mezzanine on Friday, you can still join the public project video pre­sen­ta­tion ses­sion on Tuesday June 24^th, in Surrey room #2600 (the large theatre).

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 SFU media release for more infos. The redesign of the 2013 offer­ing of the course was sup­ported by a Teaching and Learning Development Grant and invalu­able ongo­ing assis­tance by edu­ca­tional con­sul­tant Barb Berry.

Last year Daniel & Lonnie suc­cess­fully defended their MSc thesis, con­grat­u­la­tions! Here are the videos of their thesis pre­sen­ta­tions, enjoy (and thanks Daniel for the video editing)!

Lonnie B. Hastings (2013, December). The Influence of Shading, Display Size and Individual Differences on Navigation Performance in Virtual Reality in an Applied Industry Setting (MSc Thesis). Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, Canada. Retrieved from https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/thesis/etd8120

Daniel Feuereissen. (2013, August). Self-motion illu­sions (vec­tion) in Virtual Environments: Do active con­trol and user– gen­er­ated motion cueing enhance visu­ally induced vec­tion? (MSc Thesis). Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, Canada. Retrieved from https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/thesis/etd7976

Here’s a simple video of the talk I had the honour to give at the 2013  Psychonomics Conference in beau­ti­ful Toronto, Canada for those who couldn’t make it.

Riecke, B. E., & Sigurdarson, S. (2013). Simple Modifications of Visuals can Enhance Spatial Orientation Ability in Virtual Environments, Whereas Adding Physical Rotations May Not. Talk pre­sented at the 54^th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (Psychonomics), Toronto, Canada.  (http://iSpaceLab.com/publications/)

Interested in con­tribut­ing to inno­v­a­tive research at the inter­sec­tion of Psychology/Cognitive Science, Informatics, Human Factors/HCI, and Virtual Reality in an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team? I’m cur­rently look­ing for bright and moti­vated PhD/MSc stu­dents to join the iSpace lab at the School of Interactive Arts & Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University in the greater Vancouver region in beau­ti­ful British Columbia, Canada.

Please please care­fully read http://ispace.iat.sfu.ca/contact/ to assess how you might fit in, and check SIAT’s grad admis­sion pro­ce­dures and con­tact me before sub­mit­ting your appli­ca­tion. Off-cycle admis­sion is pos­si­ble for excel­lent can­di­dates. I look for­ward to hear­ing from you! Bernhard

Earlier this Fall Steve Palmisano and I had the honor to be invited to present our vec­tion research at the vec­tion sym­po­sium in Fukuoka, Japan, orga­nized by Takeharu Seno. Lots of inspir­ing con­ver­sa­tions (and incred­i­ble Japanese hos­pi­tal­ity and food). Hope to find some time to edit the pre­sen­ta­tion video and upload it soon…

Recently, all 14 SIAT grad­u­ate course in my grad course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2013 gave their final 6-min project pre­sen­ta­tion pub­licly in the SIAT research col­lo­quium. Enjoy! I think the stu­dents did an amaz­ing job — for many it was their first sci­en­tific research project and presentation!

Here are the pre­sen­ters & talk titles:

Carolyn Pang    Evaluating the Usability of Desktop and Mobile Government Portals
Mirjana Prpa    Can an immer­sive dis­play enhance the expe­ri­ence of self-motion illu­sions in VR?
Sujoy Hajra    Evaluating EEG based mea­sures for lan­guage ther­apy assess­ment in stroke patients
Xiaolan Wang    Does pre­vi­ous con­tact with fund­ing orga­ni­za­tions affect the money com­mu­nity gar­dens get?
Emily C    Color’s effect on learn­ing symbol-sound rela­tion­ships
Ankit Gupta      Can seman­ti­cally labeled graphs help you find infor­ma­tion faster?
Xiao Zhang    Progressive or regres­sive visual inter­face design: com­par­ing user expe­ri­ence sup­ported by iOS 7 versus iOS 6
Ethan Soutar-Rau     It all started with a Penguin
Reese Muntean    Effects of Gender on Beer Preference
Sohail.Md    Melodic com­par­i­son in META-MELO system
Xin Tong    Comparison between two kinds of Virtual Reality dis­play: the Oculus Rift HMD & the Firsthand dis­play
Sanam Shirazi    Can we pre­dict stu­dents’ aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance from engage­ment in online learn­ing activ­i­ties?
Srecko Joksimovic The level of social pres­ence in online learn­ing com­mu­nity as a pre­dic­tor of stu­dents’ aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance
Jacqueline Jordan     Does vec­tion inten­sity differ between Virtual Reality displays?