1. February 27th, 2004 Benjamin Lok
Virtual Characters and Virtual Environments Research Projects of the Virtual Environments Group
February 27th, 2004
Benjamin Lok

2. Applications Driven Combines: Interactive Computer Graphics
Computer Vision
Human Computer Interaction

3. Virtual Experiences Group
PhD Students (2)
Kyle Johnsen (B.S. UF)
Cyrus Harrison (B.S., M.S. (expected) UF)
MS Students (1)
George Mora (B.S. UF) DAS
Undergraduates (4)
Sayed Hashimi (S)
Andrew Joubert (S)
John Samuelsen (S)
Art Homs (J)

4. 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

5. 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?

6. 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

7. Projects underway Interpersonal communication Teaching Future work:
Distributed acting rehearsal
Teaching
Medical Diagnosis Training
Training transfer
Future work:
Universal Access
Disabled
Minorities
Rural communities

8. 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!

9. Projects underway
Getting real objects into VR to aid engineering design
Collaboration w/ Mars Airplane (Langley Research Center)
Get tools, parts, and other (possibly distributed) collaborators in a shared space

10. 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.

11. Merging real and virtual spaces
Make 3rd larger

12. 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

13. 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.

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

15. Virtual Experiences Group
2 PhD students
1 MS
4 Undergraduates
15’x15’x10’ wide area tracker
Virtual Research V8 HMD
42” Plasma TV
4 data projectors
120” passive stereo display
Collaboration with expertise in:
Virtual Reality
Digital Arts
Image Processing
Computational Geometry
Human Computer Interaction
Image Based Rendering