Title:
Exploring Impossible Spaces: Practical Illusions in Virtual Reality
Abstract:
Movement in 3D space presents one of the fundamental interaction challenges for the field of immersive virtual environments. Expansive virtual worlds, such as those commonly required by immersive training simulators, are typically too large to fit within practical real-world workspaces, making them impossible to fully explore through natural physical body movement. In this talk, I will describe a series of virtual reality experiments that investigated the use of perceptual illusions to address this limitation, thereby forming “impossible spaces.” By leveraging phenomena such as change blindness and topological violations of Euclidean space, these illusions can be used to fool the senses into experiencing an expansive virtual environment, despite the fact that users are unknowingly walking in circles in the real world. Results from our formal studies have shown these manipulations to be extremely subtle and effective, thereby empowering natural locomotion for use in a wider range of practical environments and situations.
Bio:
Evan Suma is a Senior Research Associate at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. He received his Ph.D. in 2010 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and also holds a B.A. from Ithaca College. His research interests broadly include human-computer interaction and human perception, with a particular interest in natural interaction techniques that leverage physical body movement to improve the experience of virtual environments and 3D user interfaces. He is also the author of the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST), a middleware framework for the Microsoft Kinect that has been widely used by the virtual reality and hobbyist communities to integrate gestural control with third party user interfaces. He has published over 40 papers in the areas of virtual environments, 3D user interfaces, and information visualization. His work has been recognized by multiple best paper awards at academic conferences, and has been covered by news organizations such as NPR, Voice of America, Wired, CNN, and The New York Times.