Jay Vidyarthi defends his M.Sc.!

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 :

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10 Student presentations from Bernhard's graduate course

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

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Bernhard presenting at Spatial Cognition Conf. in Bavaria

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)

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Bernhard presenting at ICSC 2012 in Rome

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)

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Award for IEEE VR conference paper

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:

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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.

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DIS Paper award for Sonic Cradle Design Phase!

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”:


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.

I will present the paper in Newcastle in June — hope to see y’all there!

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11 student presentations from Bernhard's grad course

Here’s a record­ing of the final 5-min stu­dent project pre­sen­ta­tions from a course that Bernhard was teach­ing in Spring 2012 at SIAT, enti­tled “Cognition, Learning, and Collaboration, and the Craft of Research and Writing for Publication (IAT812)”. Enjoy!

 

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Salvar presenting at IEEE VR 2012

Earlier this month, Salvar Sigurdarson had his first ever con­fer­ence talk at the IEEE Virtual Reality con­fer­ence in Santa Ana, California. There, he pre­sented a paper he authored, called “Can phys­i­cal motions pre­vent dis­ori­en­ta­tion in nat­u­ral­is­tic VR?” It went pretty well.

We recorded his talk for pos­ter­ity, so you can check it out here: YouTube Preview Image

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Bernhard presenting at TEDactive

I’m quite excited and hon­oured (and did I men­tion ner­vous?) about the oppor­tu­nity to give a short TEDyou pre­sen­ta­tion at TEDactive 2012 in Palm Springs! Title will be “Moving you in and through vir­tual real­ity”. After that I’ll def­i­nitely need to relax in the Sonic Cradle — get it ready Jay.

 

one of the demos shown during my TEDactive talk:

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You con­trol the Virtual Reality sim­u­lated motion by simply lean­ing into the direc­tion of intended travel.

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Sonic Cradle exhibit at TEDactive 2012

Jay Vidyarthi  and Bernhard Riecke will be demon­strat­ing the Sonic Cradle at TEDactive 2012 in Palm Springs!

It’s going to be a jam packed week, but we will try to keep the system up and run­ning for as long as pos­si­ble.  Come visit us and take a few min­utes to pacify your mind and solid­ify the inspi­ra­tion you’re sure to get from this year’s ever-fantastic TED talks.

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Opening: Admitting new PhD/MSc students

Interested in con­tribut­ing to world-class 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. See http://ispace.iat.sfu.ca/contact/ for details.

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iSpaceLab - new presentations

The iSpace Crew recently gave three pre­sen­ta­tions at the SIAT research col­lo­quium, and we’d like to share them with you. Enjoy!

 

Bernhard Riecke is giving a brief intro to the iSpace lab & intro­duc­ing his students

 

Salvar Sigurdarson on “Can phys­i­cal motions pre­vent dis­ori­en­ta­tion in nat­u­ral­is­tic VR?

 

Daniel Feuereissen on “Can Self-Motion Illusions facil­i­tate spa­tial Orientation?

 

Jay Vidyarthi on “Are you immersed? Characterizing “immer­sion” across lit­er­a­ture, art, and inter­ac­tive media

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iSpaceLab intro video

Below is a short intro video of the iSpace lab. Thanks Daniel for the video-editing!

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Photo update of motion chair projection setup

We recently took a few pic­tures of the iSpace immer­sive video-projection setup with the Gyroxus motion chair as an input device: lean­ing into the direc­tion you want to move in the vir­tual envi­ro­ment con­trols the sim­u­lated motions. We used a Polhemus 6DOF track­ing system instead of the built-in track­ing for more pre­cise motion control.

Driving through a pro­ce­du­rally gen­er­ated vir­tual city using Gyroxus motion chair: 

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SFU-Surrey open house video featuring iSpace simulator

The SFU-Surrey open house video was just released — it fea­tures the new iSpace sim­u­la­tor (at 1:48, thanks Andrew for the nice pitch!)

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Below are some more pic­tures from the open house day — thanks to all who helped with it, it was a great success!

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The TEDActive Travel Project

Hi Kids!

It’s Jay here… I recently had the honour of being invited to Palm Springs to con­tribute to a project geared toward improv­ing the con­tem­po­rary flight expe­ri­ence with TED.  Not really our main research focus here at iSpace, but since we’re all into design I thought I’d share anyway.

You can read what came out of the ses­sion in a piece I wrote for SparkSheet or get a softer taste with the fol­low­ing video doc­u­ment­ing my jour­ney (which is airing at ted.com for the cur­rent month in the ad slots after TED talks).

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Anyway, that’s all!  Hope all is at peace with you and yours…

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Interested in participating in Virtual Reality experiments?

We are cur­rently run­ning exper­i­ments and look­ing for par­ti­ciants. If inter­ested, sign up on sfu-siat.sona-systems.com or con­tact one of the iSpace stu­dents Daniel, Salvar, Lonnie, or Andrew (see ispace.iat.sfu.ca/people/). Below is a short video of the iSpace VR sim­u­la­tor that’s used in some of the experiments:

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SIAT iSpace Showcase on 5. Feb 2011

Our new iSpace multi-modal VR sim­u­la­tor was first pub­licly demon­strated at the SIAT show­case on 5. Feb 2011, together with the Sympathetic Guitar project by Jay Vidyarthi which pro­vides the live accom­pa­ni­ment for the video below that we shot during the demo.

This was the first public demo of new iSpace (Riecke) Lab Virtual Reality Simulator at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University, Canada, as pre­sented at the SIAT show­case on February 5, 2011.
The goal of the iSpace VR sim­u­la­tor is to pro­vide a flex­i­ble research appa­ra­tus to study human spa­tial per­cep­tion, cog­ni­tion, and behav­iour in repro­ducible, clearly defined and con­trol­lable exper­i­men­tal con­di­tions. We are using Virtual Reality to pro­vide a multi-modal, fairly nat­u­ral­is­tic and immer­sive stim­uli in a closed action-perception loop.

The Sympathetic Guitar walks the line between art and sci­ence, being both a man­i­fes­ta­tion of its creator’s cul­tural lin­eage and the sub­ject of an exper­i­ment on social inter­ac­tions with tech­nol­ogy. The guitarist’s hand posi­tion and per­for­mance dynam­ics are used to mod­u­late a deep dig­i­tal sitar drone as real-time accom­pa­ni­ment. The project rep­re­sents an explo­ration of whether a human-computer inter­face can be designed specif­i­cally to gen­er­ate an engag­ing socially-immersive rela­tion­ship with its user. See http://vimeo.com/17421550 for details.

iSpace Simulator Demo Video:

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Driving through a vir­tual city:

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Sympathetic Guitar Video:

The iSpace pro­gram is cen­tered on inves­ti­gat­ing what con­sti­tutes effec­tive, robust, and intu­itive human spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion and behav­iour. This fun­da­men­tal knowl­edge will be applied to design novel, more effec­tive human-computer inter­faces and inter­ac­tion par­a­digms that enable sim­i­lar processes in computer-mediated envi­ron­ments like vir­tual real­ity (VR) and multi-media.

To tackle this ambi­tious agenda, we had to design and build our own flex­i­ble research appa­ra­tus, which con­sists of a motion chair mounted on top of a “cir­cu­lar tread­mill” (see illustrations/video), which allows us to phys­i­cally rotate par­tic­i­pants and/or elicit com­pelling self-rotation illu­sions (induced by bio­me­chan­i­cal cues from step­ping along with the rotat­ing turntable). To design and build such a setup (which is com­mer­cially unavail­able), we started a highly fruit­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion with sev­eral pro­fes­sors in Mechatronics and employed three Mechatronics 3rd year under­grad­u­ate stu­dents as part of a co-op place­ment and later as RAs. Together, we started to iter­a­tively design, build, and eval­u­ate a world­wide unique multi-modal VR lab for perceptual/behavioural exper­i­ments (see pic­tures below). The most chal­leng­ing part, the con­struc­tion of the cir­cu­lar treadmill-based motion sim­u­la­tor was recently suc­cess­fully com­pleted by the three under­grad­u­ates and was the center piece of the show­case. This included the design and 3D mod­el­ing of the mechan­i­cal com­po­nents in solid­works includ­ing sim­u­la­tion and stress test­ing as well as the selec­tion and inte­gra­tion of the elec­tron­ics, motors, con­trol, gears, etc. and basic inter­fac­ing to a con­trol com­puter. Together with my grad­u­ate stu­dents, we are cur­rently work­ing on the 3D visual, 3D audi­tory, and subsonic/vibrational sim­u­la­tion, part of which is show­cased in the above video/pictures.

Thanks:

SIAT: all iSpacers

Mechatronics:

Supervision: Professors Gary Wang & Siamak Arzanpour

3rd year under­grad­u­ates: Etienne Naugle, Adam Hoyle & Anton Brosas

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Open Access Book chapter published

Riecke, B. E. (2010). Compelling Self-Motion Through Virtual Environments Without Actual Self-Motion – Using Self-Motion Illusions (“Vection”) to Improve User Experience in VR. In Virtual Reality (pp. 161 — 188). InTech: Available here

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SIAT Showcase: iSpace Multi-modal Virtual Reality Simulator & Sympathetic Guitar

Our new iSpace multi-modal VR sim­u­la­tor was first pub­licly demon­strated at the SIAT show­case on 5. Feb 2011, together with the Sympathetic Guitar project by Jay Vidyarthi which pro­vides the live accom­pa­ni­ment for the video below that we shot we shot after the offi­cial part was over we started play­ing with our new setup.

This was the first public demo of new iSpace (Riecke) Lab Virtual Reality Simulator at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University, Canada, as pre­sented at the SIAT show­case on February 5, 2011. See http://ispace.iat.sfu.ca/ for details or con­tact me at http://www.siat.sfu.ca/faculty/Bernha…

The goal of the iSpace VR sim­u­la­tor is to pro­vide a flex­i­ble research appa­ra­tus to study human spa­tial per­cep­tion, cog­ni­tion, and behav­iour in repro­ducible, clearly defined and con­trol­lable exper­i­men­tal con­di­tions. We are using Virtual Reality to pro­vide a multi-modal, fairly nat­u­ral­is­tic and immer­sive stim­uli in a closed action-perception loop.

The Sympathetic Guitar walks the line between art and sci­ence, being both a man­i­fes­ta­tion of its creator’s cul­tural lin­eage and the sub­ject of an exper­i­ment on social inter­ac­tions with tech­nol­ogy. The guitarist’s hand posi­tion and per­for­mance dynam­ics are used to mod­u­late a deep dig­i­tal sitar drone as real-time accom­pa­ni­ment. The project rep­re­sents an explo­ration of whether a human-computer inter­face can be designed specif­i­cally to gen­er­ate an engag­ing socially-immersive rela­tion­ship with its user. See http://vimeo.com/17421550 for details.

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Read more

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FCAT Professors Speak About Their Research & Teaching

In a series of videos cre­ated by Simon Fraser University’s Teaching and Learning Centre, eigh­teen Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology (FCAT) pro­fes­sors talk about the focus of their research, their cur­rent projects, and what excites them about teach­ing. The videos show­case the broad spec­trum of excit­ing research uniquely found in this one new Faculty. The pro­fes­sors share thought-provoking and con­tem­po­rary ideas that per­vade FCAT, demon­strat­ing the cre­ative mix of pro­grams that both chal­lenge and com­ple­ment one another, spawn­ing new and inter­est­ing dis­cov­er­ies amongst stu­dents and faculty.

Prof. Bernhard Riecke on his research inter­ests and vision:

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Playlist: Click here to watch all the videos

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Grand Opening of the new iSpace Website

Well, it’s actu­ally still under con­struc­tion, but we decided to put it online so we can start using it… 

Apologies for tech­ni­cal or con­tent errors…

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