#hci #VirtualReality #virtual_reality

(part 4)

Seven league boots.

Here, you take a step, and your display shows your step covering a lot of territory. Then you throw up, because your vestibular system and your visual system are in violent disagreement. Also, you have trouble stopping precisely.

How to deal with this? You become a giant in virtual reality. Now your steps are in scale with your body, but you’re still covering lots of territory. People don’t have nearly the trouble with this, they’re able to make more precise movements.

I’m doing this from memory, and I think I may have missed some of her other hacks. It was a great talk.

#hci #VirtualReality #virtual_reality

(part 3)

So, these Human-Computer Inteface folks have a 3D “display” that consists of a lot of pegs in a matrix; the pegs can be raised and lowered to form a 3D tactile display, which you run your fingertips over as you look at it through your VR goggles.

But the pegs are big, and if you try to “display” a diagonal line, you get a jagged “aliased” line. Also, your fingers get snagged by the peg edges, and it’s just not a particularly high-resolution experience.

How to improve this experience?

First, let’s deal with the aliasing effect. You take care of this by physically making a non-diagonal line with no aliasing. The VR goggles show you that the line you’re touching is diagonal. Conveniently, humans don’t get thrown out of the illusion even when there’s a 45-degree difference between the physical display and the virtual display (45-degrees is critical, because it means you can do a full rotation by first using a horizontal line for the first 45 degrees, and then a vertical line for the next 45 degrees.

How to increase the resolution?

You increase the size of the physical display while your goggles are showing you an image of a smaller display (and I guess a “larger hand”). It turns out you can go up to 2x the size on the physical display before the user gets tossed out of the illusion.

#hci #VirtualReality #virtual_reality

(part 2)

Today I attended (virtually) a talk by Parastoo Abtahi of Princeton University. (https://www.cs.princeton.edu/people/profile/abtahi)

Title: From Perceptual Illusions to Beyond-Real Interactions in Extended Reality

Part 1, your VR goggles were lying to you about where your hand was, and you believed it, and were able to grab the object you thought was staitionary, even though it was actually drifting a bit.

This part, you reach for an item across the room (a chips bag or soft-drink can — these are graduate students, after all), and maybe you see your arm extends to reach the item, or maybe the item floats across the room to you. You point at the table where you want it, and it floats to the table. A progress bar is displayed, and when the progress bar finishes, you can pick up the item.

The progress bar was there because a robot (not shown to you by your virtual reality goggles) was busy moving the object from the shelf across the room to your table.