iSpace Research Lab

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 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)

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

Project showcase on Friday December 9th 2016, 10am-2pm

On Friday December 9^th 2016, 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 10:00am — 2pm.

[update: see media cov­er­age from BlackPress at http://www.northdeltareporter.com/news/405786476.html]

IAT 445 immer­sive envi­ron­ments show­case Fall 2016

10 stu­dent teams show­cased 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 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 evok­ing a strong yet mean­ing­ful feel­ing of empa­thy: ”“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 empa­thy in a mean­ing­ful way. This could be empa­thy towards humans as well as non-human ani­mals, plants (e.g. trees) or even inan­i­mate nat­ural objects (moun­tains). So 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 pre­sen­ta­tion ses­sion on Thursday December  15^th at 4:30pm, 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.

Below are some of the project posters:

Alex, Mirjana and Katerina recently pre­sented their cur­rent projects in SIAT’s research col­lo­quium, here’s the video record­ing — Enjoy!

Alex Kitson: Are you dream­ing? A phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal approach to under­stand­ing lucid dreams as a tool for intro­spec­tion and mental well-being

Mirjana Prpa & Kivanc Tatar: Pulse Breath Water through the lenses of Art, Technology, Collaboration and Research

Katerina Stepanova: Earthgazement — a Virtual Reality Experience of the Overview Effect [some sound issues due to WiFi interference… ]

[talks start at 10:39]

On November 26^th (12:30–2:20),  stu­dents in my grad course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I teach this Fall 2016 give their final 5:30-min project pre­sen­ta­tions in the SIAT research col­lo­quium at Simon Fraser University. Enjoy!

here’s the video record­ing of the whole ses­sion:

Here’s the list of speak­ers and topics

• Elgin McLaren:   Attention Retention: The effec­tive­ness of neu­ro­feed­back sys­tems for cueing sus­tained attention
• Jeff Ens: Music and the role of dimen­sional com­plex­ity in sim­i­lar­ity judgements
• Arron Ferguson: Choose Wrong, Someone Dies: Measuring Engagement with Ethical Choices and Character Consistency in Interactive Narrative
• Duc-Minh Pham: Body-based Navigation: A Promising Locomotion Technique in Immersive Virtual Environment.
• Ray Pan: “Split, Horizontal or Overlapped?”: Comparing Social Presence and Body Ownership in Shared Video Views for Long Distance Relationships
• Denise Quesnel:   Are you awed yet? Objective and sub­jec­tive indi­ca­tors of awe, using vir­tual real­ity content
• Mia Cole: Time to Relax: No effects to the stress response after short-term use of an EEG-based brain-computer interface.
• Maha El Meseery:   Will track­ing user inter­ac­tions during visual explo­ration helps improve their analy­sis efficiency?
• Ted Nguyen Vo: Moving in a Box: A Visual Cue for Virtual Reality Locomotion
  Fatemeh Salehian Kia: Motive or Strategic Student: Comparing 3 Types of Visual Feedbacks on Students’ Performance with Different Learning Styles in Online Discussions
• Junwei Sun: Assessing Input Methods and Cursor Displays for 3D Positioning with HMDs
  Narges Ashtari: Exploring fac­tors which affect archi­tects design explo­ration struc­ture in CAD spaces
• Stephanie Wong: Easy A: assess­ing student’s abil­ity to cheat with smart­watch
  Abraham Hashemian: Leaning-Based 360 Locomotion Interfaces: How good are they for nav­i­ga­tion in Virtual Reality
• Serkan Pekcetin: Measuring the Effect of Binaural Audio on the Sense of Direction in Virtual Environments
• Xintian Sun: Where Was It? Evaluating Spatial Memory in Different Backgrounds from Static and Moving Viewpoints

Our con­fer­ence paper at SUI 2016 just received an hon­ourable men­tion at the ACM SUI con­fer­ence in Tokyo, con­grat­u­la­tions to all!

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.