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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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% […]

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!  

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:

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

The SFU-Surrey open house video was just released — it fea­tures the new iSpace sim­u­la­tor (at 1:48, thanks Andrew for the nice pitch!) Below are some more pic­tures from the open house day — thanks to all who helped with it, it was a great success!

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:

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

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. […]