iSpace Research Lab

The “overview effect” is an aware­ness shift expe­ri­enced by astro­nauts when they see the Earth from space and real­ize how frag­ile it is. This is described as a pro­found effect lead­ing to more con­scious and caring view on our planet. Could we use immer­sive Virtual Reality (and some other tricks) to give people a glimpse of this expe­ri­ence with­out having to spend all the money and fossil fuel to send rock­ets out into space? We’ll post more infos about this project on our Virtual EarthGazing project page soon. Feel free to con­tact us if you’re inter­ested in collaborating. 

here’s a nice overview video of the over­all topic (thanks to the plan­e­tary collective)

Here’s a video of my pre­sen­ta­tion at the 2016 International Psychonomics Conference in Granada about an online spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion study and the rather unex­pected response pat­terns that we observed — and how we might be able to make sense of them.

You can find more infos about this project at this page

Here’s the ref­er­ence for the talk:
Riecke, B. E., Stepanova, E. R., & Kitson, A. 2016. New response pat­terns in point-to-origin tasks depend­ing on stim­u­lus type and response mode. Talk pre­sented at the International Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Granada, Spain.

Last year Alex Kitson gave a great pre­sen­ta­tion at the 2^nd International Workshop on Movement and Computing (MoCo) in Vancouver, co-located with ISEA.
here’s at last a record­ing and the full ref­er­ence: Kitson, A., Riecke, B. E., & Stepanova, E. R. (2015).  (pp. 100–103). Presented at the MOCO’15 – 2^nd International Workshop on Movement and Computing, Vancouver, Canada: ACM. doi:10.1145/2790994.2791014
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=279. Enjoy!

Here’s a record­ing of an invited talk I just gave about some aspects of our the­o­ret­i­cal frame­work on spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion and ref­er­ence frame con­flicts.
The talk was enti­tled “Qualitative Modeling of Spatial Orientation Processes and Concurrent Reference Frame Conflicts using Logical Propositions” and pre­sented at the International Workshop on Models and Representations in Spatial Cognition at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany from March 3 – 4, 2016

I just pre­sented 2 papers at the 2015 ACM Spatial User Interaction Symposium in LA. Below are ref­er­ences & a simple video record­ing for those who couldn’t make it down to LA. 

Kruijff, E., Riecke, B. E., Trepkowski, C., & Kitson, A. (2015). Upper Body Leaning can affect Forward Self-Motion Perception in Virtual Environments (pp. 103–112). Presented at the SUI ’15: Symposium on Spatial User Interaction, Los Angeles, CA, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2788940.2788943, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2788943 

https://youtu.be/kZUkhI2UI7s 

Kitson, A., Riecke, B. E., Hashemian, A. M., & Neustaedter, C. (2015). NaviChair: an embod­ied inter­face to nav­i­gate vir­tual real­ity (pp. 123–126). Presented at the SUI ’15: Symposium on Spatial User Interaction, Los Angeles, CA, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2788940.2788956, see http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2788940.2788956 for the full paper

Jake Freiberg just suc­cess­fully defended his Master’s thesis about Design Representations in Architectural Practice.  Congratulations!!

here’s the video of the defense talk for those who couldn’t attend in person, enjoy! For more info about the project, see our VR in Architecture Design & Review page. 

On Friday June 26^th, the stu­dents from the summer 2015 course offer­ing of “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.

10 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 DK2 head-mounted display.

Some projects draw from con­tem­po­rary indie/art com­puter games like Dear Esther, Journey, or 5 nights at Freddy’s 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 & hope to see you there, 

Bernhard

P.S> In case you can’t make it to the inter­ac­tive project show­case, you can join the public project video pre­sen­ta­tion ses­sion on Friday July 3^rd at 10:30am, in Surrey room #2600 (the large the­atre), 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 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.

Sample project videos from the summer 2015 student teams

 CDM by team Much VR

 Mystic by team Mystikal Lab

 B-Eye by team Bees

 The Passage by team M.O.S.T.

Over the last year we’ve been col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Vancouver offices of Perkins + Will, and just fin­ished a project video on it (thanks to the great stu­dents team from IAT334: Linda Nguyen, Danny Blackstock, Jason Chen, and Justin Poon!).

One guid­ing ques­tion for the project was how to best use immer­sive Virtual Reality and embod­ied loco­mo­tion inter­faces to to design more  cost– and space-efficient solu­tions for effec­tive pre­sen­ta­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion of archi­tec­tural designs and ideas.  Our over­all goal is to iter­a­tively design and eval­u­ate a novel embod­ied VR system that enables users to quickly, intu­itively, and pre­cisely posi­tion their vir­tual view­point in 3D space and nav­i­gate through the space while free­ing up both hands for inter­ac­tion with the envi­ron­ment and more nat­ural com­mu­ni­ca­tion using ges­tures (e.g., with stake­hold­ers and col­leagues during a design review ses­sion). The video describes our work so far (pub­li­ca­tions will follow soon hope­fully… more info at the project page). Enjoy!

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

-

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

—

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?

On Thursday Nov 28, 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 2:30 — 6:30pm.

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 build them­selves. Be pre­pared for some excit­ing showcases! 

Cheers, Bernhard

Below are the project posters for the showcase

see SFU’s Teaching & Learning blog for a news story on this course from Spring, 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 assis­tance by edu­ca­tional con­sul­tant Barb Berry.

Sample Project Videos

Here are some of the final project videos of the teams: 

Team Mindfulness: (REM)INISCENT

Team WAKE: WAKE

Team Segway: Azuria

Team Insanity: Conjecture

Impressions from the showcase:

On April 4 & 5^th (Thursday/Friday), 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 noon — 2:30pm.

9 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 build them­selves (rang­ing form mobile phones with stereo­scopic view­ers to larger dis­plays with view­ing boxes). Be pre­pared for some excit­ing showcases! 

Cheers, Bernhard

Below are some first impres­sions of the show­case — thanks to all the stu­dents for their great con­tri­bu­tions! Note that most of them had never before devel­oped in Unity3D. 

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

Here are some of the final project videos of the teams: 

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 assis­tance by edu­ca­tional con­sul­tant Barb Berry.

The IEEE VR/3DUI 2013 Conference was held in beau­ti­ful Orlando, Florida in mid-March and fea­tured poster pre­sen­ta­tions from two iSpace Lab members.

Paving the way into vir­tual real­ity — a tran­si­tion in five stages

Daniel Sproll and Jacob Freiberg revealed their poster and abstract at IEEE 3DUI. They present a frame­work for improv­ing immer­sion in Virtual Reality through use of an excit­ing and self ini­ti­ated tran­si­tion from the real world into the vir­tual envi­ron­ment. For more infor­ma­tion take a look at theposter and the two page abstract.

Do walk­ing motions enhance visu­ally induced self-motion illu­sions in vir­tual reality?

Jacob Freiberg pre­sented an exper­i­men­tal inves­ti­ga­tion of the rela­tion­ship between bio­me­chan­i­cally induced self motion illu­sions and visu­ally induced self motion illu­sions. He was nom­i­nated for best poster award at IEEE VR. The poster and the two page abstract can be viewed here.

Interested in con­tribut­ing to excit­ing research at the inter­sec­tion of Informatics, Psychology/Cognitive Science, Human Factors/HCI, and Virtual Reality in an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary multi-national team? We’re 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 who 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

This passed week I suc­cess­fully defended my Master’s thesis about Sonic Cradle and Immersion.  Thanks to SIAT, NSERC, GRAND and my advi­sory com­mit­tee: Dr. Bernhard Riecke, Dr. Diane Gromala, Dr. Carman Neustaedter, & Dr. Halil Erhan.

Special thanks to Jim Silvester for help­ing out with this video of the pre­sen­ta­tion I gave at the thesis defense :

For the first time, stu­dents from the SIAT grad­u­ate course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2012 at SIAT gave their final 6-min project pre­sen­ta­tion pub­licly in the SIAT research col­lo­quium. Enjoy! I think the stu­dents did a won­der­ful job — for many it was their first sci­en­tific research project and presentation!

Jake Freiberg                Biomechanical Influences on Visually Induced Rotational Vection
Audrey Desjardins       Exploring Computer Mice Materials and Affective Responses
Jim Silvester                 The Effect of Viewpoint Jitter on Circular Vection in Virtual Reality
Nadya Calderon            Animation of Real-Time Series: Trends and Common Fate
Mehdi Karamnejad      The Effects of Walking on Galvonic Skin Response
Saeedeh Bayatpour      The Ability of Fusion in Three-Dimensional Autostereogram
Omid Alemi                   Are We Biased Against Computers’ Creativity?
Lisa Donaldson            The Effect of Contrast on Circular Vection When Viewed Within Virtual Reality

The last two pre­sen­ta­tions were recorded in out normal sem­i­nar room a few days later:

Jillian Warren             The Effect of Textual and Pictorial Representation on Learning Ability with Interactive Tangibles
Laura Lande              The Effects of Nursing Experience on Diagnosing Fetal Position