December 12th, 2003 Benjamin Lok Virtual Characters and Environments: New Modalities for Human Computer Interaction December 12th, 2003 Benjamin Lok

Overview Computer generated characters and environments Amazing visuals and audio Interacting is limited! Reduce applicability? Goals: Create new methods to interact Evaluate the effectiveness of these interaction methods Aki from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within Walking Experiment PIT - UNC

Life-Sized Virtual Characters Virtual Characters as a way to interact with information If virtual characters are presented with an adequate level of realism, would people respond to them as they would to other people? Effective Interaction Natural (> than keyboard and mouse) 3D, Dynamic (augmentable) Effective Collaboration Non-verbal communication (60%) High impact?

Interaction Each participant in a communication has three stages: perception, cognition, and response Investigate: Display, perception, efficacy Thinking Perceiving Responding Virtual Character Thinking Responding Perceiving Interaction Perceiving Responding Thinking Participant

Projects underway Interpersonal communication Teaching Distributed acting rehearsal Distributed engineering design Teaching Medical First Responder Training Future work: Universal Access Disabled Minorities Rural communities

Virtual Environments Been around for almost 30 years # of systems in research labs > day to day use Why? Interaction with the virtual environment is too poor Everything is virtual isn’t necessarily good Example, change a light bulb Approach: Real objects as interfaces to the virtual world Merge the real and virtual spaces Evaluate what VR is good for!

Merging real and virtual spaces Make 3rd larger

Videos of Task Explain Flashing So he can see the other virtual models and their constraints imposed on the task. Having a hybrid environment provides substantial benefits in prototype design.

Avatars in VE Most virtual environments do not provide an avatar (user self-representation) Why? Because tracking the human body is difficult. Solution: Use simple computer vision to track colored markers to generate an avatar

Locomotion in VR Most common locomotion: Use a ‘virtual walking’ metaphor. Does this reduce effectiveness? We can test this because of new wide-area tracking technologies.

VR Interaction Getting real objects into virtual environments How do you naturally interact with virtual objects?

Equipment 3 Graduate students 15’x15’x10’ wide area tracker Virtual Research V8 HMD 42” Plasma TV 8 data projectors Cyberware 3D scanner Collaboration with expertise in: Virtual Reality Digital Arts Image Processing Computational Geometry Human Computer Interaction Image Based Rendering