iSpace Research Lab

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. 

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

At this year’s spa­tial cog­ni­tion con­fer­ence in Kloster Seeon in Bavaria, Germany, Bernhard co-organized a work­shop on “VR in Spatial Cognition Research” with Klaus Gramann. 

He also also pre­sented a paper on “Why the heck do we have not clue where we are in VR?” — below is the video of it. (after 10min the camera died, so you’ll have to look at the paper for final con­clu­sions, here’s the ref­er­ence, offi­cial paper title & link:

Riecke, B. E. (2012). Are Left-Right Hemisphere Errors in Point-to-Origin Tasks in VR Caused by Failure to Incorporate Heading Changes? In C. Stachniss, K. Schill, & D. Uttal (Eds.), Spatial Cognition 2012 (Vol. 7463, pp. 143–162). Springer Berlin / Heidelberg. (Download)

Earlier this month, Bernhard pre­sented at the International Conference on Spatial Cognition (ISCS 2012) in Rome, Italy, on “Moving through vir­tual real­ity with­out moving”. Below is a video of the pre­sen­ta­tion for those who couldn’t make it to Rome The paper was pub­lished in Cognitive Processing as

Riecke, B. E., Sigurdarson, S., & Milne, A. P. (2012). Moving Through Virtual Reality Without Moving? Cognitive Processing, 13(1), 293–297. doi:10.1007/s10339-012‑0491–7 (Download)

The short paper enti­tled “Self-Motion Illusions (Vection) in VR – Are They Good For Anything?” that we pre­sented ear­lier this year at the IEEE VR con­fer­ence was not only accepted (with a 9.5% accep­tance rate for short papers) but also received an hon­or­able men­tion to be amongst the best  short papers! We are honored!

Below is a video of the presentation:

In essence, this is prob­a­bly the first study to really show that self-motion illu­sions (“vec­tion”) are not only cool, but can actu­ally enhance user’s behav­ior in VR by facil­i­tat­ing per­spec­tive switches that are oth­er­wise difficult.

A paper dis­cussing Sonic Cradle’s the­o­ret­i­cal under­pin­nings, includ­ing our psy­cho­log­i­cal frame­work of immer­sion and 15 iter­a­tive co-design ses­sions was not only accepted, but awarded an hon­ourable men­tion at this year’s ACM con­fer­ence on Designing Interactive Systems.  The con­fer­ence had an accep­tance rate just under 20%, and the award puts our paper in the top 2.5% of almost 500 sub­mis­sions.  We are honoured!

The paper is called “Sonic Cradle: Designing for an Immersive Experience of Meditation by Connecting Respiration to Music” and here’s a short descrip­tion from the con­fer­ence pro­gram where we’re part of a ses­sion called “In The Moment”:

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Could an inter­ac­tive system trig­ger the psy­cho­log­i­cal ben­e­fits of med­i­ta­tion? We are pur­su­ing an answer to this ques­tion through a sys­tem­atic “research through design” approach which explores a psy­cho­log­i­cal frame­work of media “immer­sion”. Our approach has gen­er­ated Sonic Cradle: an inter­ac­tive system aimed at com­bin­ing sen­sory depri­va­tion, res­pi­ra­tory biofeed­back and music into a medi­ated expe­ri­ence of mind­ful­ness.
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I will present the paper in Newcastle in June — hope to see y’all there!