Betty Mohler is a virtual reality researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics where she’s the project leader of Perception & Action in Virtual Environments Research Group in Tuebingen, Germany.
Her research interests include computer graphics, space perception, locomotion in immersive virtual environments, and social interactions in VR
At IEEE VR, she was on a panel discussing “Animation of Bodies and Identity.” Here’s the blurb for the research that she’s doing:
The Space & Body Perception research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics investigates the perception of self and other body size and how to create positive illusions of self and space. We have investigated the importance of the animation of the body of multi-users for effective communication. Through this research we can discuss our experience with different motion capture technology and animation techniques for the body, as well as insights into the importance of self-identification with a self-avatar for social interactions. Additionally, we are conducting research where we use high-res body scans to create self-avatars. We can further discuss the real-time challenges for the future if a photo-realistic self-avatar is part of the virtual reality application.
Some of the topics we covered were:
- Space and body perception
- Positive illusions of self & collaborating with Mel Slater on the VR-HYPERSPACE project. People identify with their avatar and how to use that to make them more comfortable. If you change size of someone’s avatar, then that impacts your real-world physical movements & can also change your attitudes.
- Currently working with eating disorder patients and see if VR & something like a high-end Kinect can help them see their body differently
- Even healthy people don’t even have an accurate perception of their body. You perceive your body in order to act. Seeing if eating disorder patients see themselves differently
- Helping with the doctoral consortium & presenting on social interaction challenges & potential in VR. What are the technology & human-in-the-loop challenges to social interactions
- Timing is crucial in social interactions because that changes meaning of social meaning can be lost, changed or unknown to the user. We adapting to social cues very quickly in real-time. What can we do that’s unique in VR? We can assess each other’s state, and hope to reduce timing limitations.
- Models for social interactions. Must understand how it works in the real-world first, and they looked at language learning through body language interactions. Must quantify success. For language learning, it’s guessing the right word in another language.
- Non-verbal social interactions like gestures and posture can communicate a lot of ease and comfort. A lot of big Telepresence implications for being able to feel like you’re sharing space with other people
- Look for synchrony between two people. You can change, amplify, or turn off someone’s body language within a social interaction to measure it’s impact. Both are providing important feedback in an interaction, and turning one side off breaks that synchrony that happens.
- How to make the most effective avatar in VR and measuring that. Taking high-resolution photos and then morphing it to a Marvel or Disney type of stylization. There’s some percentage that’s idea. How to navigate around the uncanny valley? Measure appeal and trying to get feedback from people about their preferences across a spectrum of stylizations.
- The uncanny valley can be thought of creepiness and that something not right. It’s about rules that we learn in our life, and we have certain expectations for the social interaction rules and cultural norms. And the uncanny valley is likely a product of these rules because the VR NPCs are subtly violating these rules. When it looks a human, then there’s a lot of expectations that have to be met. Having holes and defects in a telepresence avatars can help increase immersion
- Breaks in Presence, and how expectations can play into that. Low fidelity can provide more presence because we don’t have a lot of expectations for these fantasy worlds.
- Germany & France are powerhouses in VR. Works at the Max Plank institute because she sees it as one of the best labs in VR in the world. Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes do applied research. Germany’s car manufacturing has driving a lot of support for VR over the years
- Redirected walking and challenges in VR. Motivated by being a marathon runner and wanted to run through any city in the world in VR. Virtusphere has issues if you’re not the right weight. They’ve created a Virtual Tübingen to walk around freely and explore a virtual city. Our vestibular system is not perfect, and can take advantage of that flaw to trick someone to walk in a circle but make them feel like they’re walking in a circle
- Would need 30mx30m or larger to do redirected walking well. User can always do something against what’s suggested, and need multiple techniques. Can use a stop sign, and have someone turn around, and then turn around the environment 180-degrees.
- Currently interested in using VR with medical patients, and need better robustness with better battery life. Need to think about computer vision and how VR and AR will blend into a more mixed reality. Lots of challenges, and it make a big difference in the aging population.
- Consumer VR and where it’s going. Doesn’t think it’ll ultimately primarily be a gaming application for VR. How do you integrate it into society to be as widely used as a phone. Will people start to use VR in public transportation more?
- VR is potentially life changing, and hopefully will make her more connected, healthy and intelligent as she ages.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.285] Betty Mohler: I'm Betty Moeller from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. Actually, we're hopefully hosting IEEE VR in two years, so everybody should come. But yeah, so my history in VR is that I first, when I was an undergraduate, started working in a hospital doing medical simulators to try to help medical students perform surgery, minimally invasive surgery. And then I went to the University of Utah and learned a lot about how you need to understand the human in order to really create good VR, right? So you can be a great designer, but if you don't understand the person using the system or perceiving the system, it might just completely fail. So, and that's where I am now. I spend a lot of time thinking about the human. And I do a lot of experiments with space perception so kind of in the world of architecture, how do you make us design a space and perceive a space and Also with regard to your body, so I do a lot of self avatars so being able to look down and see your body and transforming that body to make it for example fatter or thinner or Just completely different
[00:01:18.813] Kent Bye: Nice. It sounds like there's a whole thing of a virtual body and identifying with it and the positive illusions of self. And maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the dimensions of self and virtual reality.
[00:01:30.977] Betty Mohler: Yeah, sure. I mean, this week, and one of the best people, I think, that researches that is the keynote speaker at VR this year, Mel Slater. And we've also worked together recently on a new project called VR Hyperspace, where there, what we wanted to do was, knowing that people quite easily identify with an avatar as their own, even if that avatar isn't exactly looking like them or isn't even exactly in the same location or the same size, what we tried to do was to use that avatar to make people feel more comfortable. And what we've shown at the Max Planck is that if you give people a body and it's a totally different size, then that immediately affects their action estimates. So like if I gave you a body and it was twice as big, like you were this big dude that was muscular, but big. If I asked you how you could perform actions or I asked you to perform actions, you change the way you perform those actions. And that's really amazing because it's not very long that you're experiencing this other avatar. And what Mel has shown and what I'd love to look at also in the future is that it doesn't just change your actions or the way you perceive things, but it changes your attitudes. So he's done some amazing work. I hope he talks about it on Wednesday with regard to having a childlike avatar or having an avatar of a different color and then looking at how that changes your attitudes. And I actually am mostly now, I came back from doing basic science to working in the hospital again. I'm working with eating disorder patients. And what we're trying to understand is exactly in the brain what's wrong with people that have severe eating disorders. But we're also trying to understand how we can help them to see their body differently and adapt to different size bodies. So we use something like Connect, a high-end photorealistic scanner, to give them really their own body. And then we alter it only in one way, which is to make them fatter or thinner.
[00:03:22.142] Kent Bye: And so what is that link between the perception of someone's identity and some of these things in terms of eating disorders? Have you been able to make that leap in terms of how to connect the dots between using something in VR versus helping someone solve their eating disorder?
[00:03:38.910] Betty Mohler: We've just really gotten started in the last year with that, so we don't really have a lot to say except for that what's interesting is that even healthy people don't have a accurate perception of their body. So we've started with that to really look at healthy people and how do you measure how big you think your body is, right? Because if I asked you, do you perceive your body in a Metrically right way like do you know how long your arm is? Well, you'll say yeah, of course I can act with it and so of course I do but the truth is you don't and a lot of scientists have shown that that you perceive your body to act and The way we're approaching it with the eating disorder patients is really from that perspective is do they also act differently? Do they make estimates really differently? And yeah, I'm I can't say too much more about it yet But because we've just gotten funding for it, but I'm excited in the next year what we can find out so
[00:04:28.231] Kent Bye: And what else are you presenting here at the conference?
[00:04:31.235] Betty Mohler: So at the conference, I'm actually helping with many other people to organize the doctoral consortium. So I get to hear 14 students that applied to learn a lot more about VR. That's all day tomorrow. But then on Wednesday, I'm presenting social interaction. challenges and potential because though what I've talked about is seeing your own body of course when you talk about avatars you're talking about social interaction right if we go to the extreme and imagine that me Betty can be here but I can also have a true virtual you know an avatar that I've chosen that really represents me that I really have ownership and and I identify with and I it is me somehow the virtual me then obviously we step into social interaction. So on Wednesday, we'll be with Anthony Steed and with Martin Bright. We're going to be talking all about social interaction and what we see as the challenges, both from the technology side, but also the human in the loop side.
[00:05:24.237] Kent Bye: And I think Laura from Oculus Research was supposed to be here as well, but I guess she's not able to make it. But in her description, they were talking about using eye tracking within HMD to be able to do like facial expressions within VR. And so what can you say in terms of some of the challenges that are involved with getting the full facial expression and eye contact within a VR social situation?
[00:05:48.470] Betty Mohler: Well, a lot of things. So on Wednesday, we have a whole 90 minutes to talk about that. But a lot of it comes down to timing. Right. So what I said earlier is I and I really think that is we are willing to see people and we bring with a lot of social rules, also basic rules from our real world to scenarios even if the visual representation is reduced. But we're really needing the temporal side of things to be accurate in order to not feel this uncanniness, right? So what I can say is there's a technical side of actually capturing all that information. But I don't think with consumer technology that that's that far off. I think what's really difficult when you talk about the faces, and it's still there also when you talk about the body, is the timing, right? Is the fact that if you get the timing off in some way, that the social meaning is lost, right? Or it's changed and unknown to the user, right? That's one side. And then the dynamic of people, right? The fact that when we're talking, I'm adapting to the way you're looking at me, the way your posture shifts, right? And the subtleties of that and how quickly all of that happens in the brain. That's going to be really difficult to get our heads around. So as technology people, VR people are often very technology-based, we can say, well, let's just get it perfect. But you know, and then it'll be fine. But until we have zero latency, everything right into the VR, then That's not going to happen. And so I like to take a different approach, which is to say, what can we do that's unique in VR? And of course, we can also learn those rules new. But what can we do that's unique in VR? And what I would say is, we can use that technology to assess the person's state, but also to render through a totally different person, right? That you learn that you can be an animal, or you can be anything you want, really, right? Things that you can't be in the real world. And then maybe the timing constraints can be reduced, right? So.
[00:07:41.963] Kent Bye: And so when you're looking at social interactions and coming from this IEEE VR, which is very scientific, academic, there's ways to, I guess, quantify and put numbers or put theories and models around these social interactions. And so when you're looking at social interactions in VR, what are some of those models or ways of quantifying that down to specific behaviors or numbers?
[00:08:04.958] Betty Mohler: Well, when you talk about social interaction, you have to talk about one of the many tasks that you do a social interaction, right? This is a social interaction, an interview scenario. And you have to understand how that dynamic works in the real world before you could measure it in the virtual world. But a good example that has been done in our lab by a research scientist named Trevor Dodds is we broke it down to language learning, right? In Europe, we learn languages all the time, especially if you're an American like me. And in a language learning task, you often, if you're lucky, you're learning from another, right? You're trying to convey the meaning of a word, and you You can't say that word and you probably can't even say words related to it. So you have to use your body language to convey that. And so what you have to do is you have to find tasks. So for example, for the face, another task might be object interaction between two people because you use your eyes to actually indicate what object you're going to work on or other things like that. And then you have to quantify from all those things what success is, right? What's a successful social interaction? Right? And that's what we did with the language learning. The successful interaction is guessing the word, right, in the language that you're learning it. And I think that's one side. That's the sort of scientific side. So the, obviously the consumer VR side is people buying it and using it to talk to their family and friends and being attached to that avatar. So paying for that representation of themselves. And I think that, I mean, that's already here to some extent, but I think that has great potential to help people in all kinds of ways. So for all kinds of social interactions, people that feel socially awkward and want a way to interact without their own body, for example.
[00:09:40.593] Kent Bye: And what are some of the nonverbal social interactions that we may do in a real interaction that we can also see happen in a virtual reality?
[00:09:49.664] Betty Mohler: Hm, nonverbal, I mean body gestures, right? So at our lab, and I think also with consumer VR, with the connect, you can really, your posture says a lot about, you know, your social ease in that situation, and you communicate a lot about how much you understand, right? So these are things that we can certainly already do in VR, is convey a person's body language and posture. And there's a lot of projects that are working on that, this thing of being together, right? The thing I like to call, you know, 3D Skype, right? Somebody else here who you should really talk to is Bernd Froehlich. He has an amazing setup that really allows multiple people to do that kind of 3D Skype where they're captured by Kinect and rendered elsewhere. And they can even see their own rendering of themselves in real time. I mean, it's really amazing. Yeah. So, there's a lot of projects on that kind of idea of being together or beaming yourself elsewhere. And that's really appealing since we all traveled here to France and it wasn't so easy getting here. If we could beam ourselves here, I think we'd have another thousand people that popped in and out here throughout the conference.
[00:10:50.311] Kent Bye: And is mimicry one of the things as well? Just sort of mimicking other people's body language as a sign that they're comfortable?
[00:10:57.254] Betty Mohler: Yeah, absolutely. I mean in that word language game that I mentioned, what we looked for was more or less synchrony between the two people. Also, the way we looked at that was more or less to, in part, is to change the animation. What's amazing from a basic researcher's perspective is that we can just change things, right? You and I are talking right here, and to change my posture, I'd have to be in it and moving around my arms really wildly or do something different, right? consciously but in VR if it's used for a tool to understand social interaction I can just amplify the motion or I can turn it off and that's exactly what we did and we looked at more or less what was happening between in the collaboration and what the conclusion of that work was to say that both of our speaking mattered that the listener in this case you because I'm talking in the interview then is giving important feedback by their body motions that if you turn that off or if you change it somehow you break the synchrony between the two persons movements
[00:11:52.520] Kent Bye: Interesting and there seems to also be this effect of the uncanny valley of you know getting to hyper realism it starts to be creepy or not as Real or believable as if you do sort of a low fidelity or a stylized avatar So I'm curious some of the work that you've looked at in terms of like What should an avatar look like when you're having a VR experience in order to create the greatest amount of immersion and presence?
[00:12:17.759] Betty Mohler: Yeah, totally. That's actually on Wednesday, my colleague Martin Bright and I are working with another student to work on stylized characters and really in the uncanny valley area. And we're asking the question, how do you make the most effective avatar and self avatar? Of course, you can ask people for their choices, what they like. We're doing some of that research to try to understand. Why people like video games about what about the avatar do they find draws them to that game? Specifically, but what we're doing that's really I think amazing is we're we're taking photo scans of people so using a very high-end medical scanner high photorealistic textures and polygons And then we're morphing it into any number of styles like Marvel or a Disney character, a specific Disney character. And we're asking the question of if you take a human and you morph them into completely, you know, Marvel or, you know, Megamind, for example, at what point do the people perceive it as looking the best, right? Because a stylized human is not what they do. They also change the texture completely and they don't retain, you know, normal kind of features that we have. And so what I can say so far from that, although we're working on publishing it, is that It seems as if there's some percentage towards that that seems idealistic throughout different characters, and you'll hear more about that on Wednesday. But the harder question is, how do you get at the Huncanny Valley exactly, right? So in the self-avatar case, you might get at it by them selecting it, like saying, I want that avatar. but in our case what we're doing is asking people to rate things like appeal and likeability and a lot of other people are doing that kind of work and it's really interesting to try to understand what's going on when you start to stylize these characters which by the way when you do a body scan when you take connect that's what you're doing because you're reducing the data right and you're what I mentioned before which I think is one of the biggest challenges is you're somehow sampling it in time And often cases in my work, often we're not getting nearly as much as we need for the face or the fingers, you know, which is a lot. Face and fingers is a lot about social interaction. So you are, no matter what, if you use current technology to do a self avatar scan, you're some way stylizing it, even if it's just artifacts from the technology. So it's important to know how people perceive that.
[00:14:22.976] Kent Bye: How do you think of the uncanny valley? Why is it that people find it less likable the more realistic? What is it about this spectrum between the low fidelity and high fidelity that you can explain what's actually going on there?
[00:14:36.742] Betty Mohler: Well, the way I think about it, I mean, it depends how you define uncanny valley. Many people define uncanny valley where you just look at something and you're disgusted by it, right? You're really like, oh my God, what's wrong with that, right? Something's really wrong, right? I think of uncanny valley and as I approach my research as more of Yeah, just this creepiness or uncanniness that doesn't have to be gut-wrenching like, oh my gosh, I should run and hide, right? But this something's not right. And when you frame it like that, then I think it's like a lot of things about rules that we learn in our life, right? A child might have very different experiences of these avatars than us because we have learned and maybe there's other people at this conference that have totally different social understandings and different rules and they also individually would have a different specific. I think it comes down to the rules that we have, that we expect from social interactions, from the way humans appear, from our set of interactions. And I think we can uniquely go after a lot of really interesting basic science questions there. Because, for example, I ventured a guess, because you're from Portland, that you and I'm from Germany, that you and I see different people. And we have totally different social norms. I've been to Portland. People on the bus say hello all the time. It's lovely. But that never happens in Tubingen. So you have a different set of social interaction rules than I do. And so it might be that certain self-avatars or stylized characters appear more creepy to you or to me based on my built-up of social norms. And I think that's where it's at, that we have to look at people more individually and in groups if we go after these kind of things. It's pretty complex.
[00:16:10.732] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I've also guessed that the higher fidelity you get, the more that you want everything to look correct.
[00:16:17.755] Betty Mohler: plays into the rules, that's exactly, sorry, so that's exactly really what I was thinking is, you know, when you see a little cartoon character, you don't know any rules, or you might from if you watch a lot of TV, you expect it to be cute and nice, or you expect to bin it into the villain or the hero, you know, a bystander or whatever, you have certain rules and ideas, but as it becomes human, then your social norms come in, right? And when it deviates from this, you start to have to say, okay, I have to recalculate all these norms, or all these expectations. I think it's a lot about expectations not being met. And a lot of it I think can be, you know, even with the current technology, if you deal with expectations and you convey in the story of your experience, you convey the right expectations, you could probably get away with technology that's not 100% there yet, but that has set the stage. for the right interaction. Now, for example, I love for Burns set up, because in his case, he has a really nice 3D scan, really good temporal information, but there's holes in the avatar coming up. And if you know that technology, and you know that what's happening is if there's holes, the cameras can't see you, and they're trying to be truthful about what they convey, right? Then all of a sudden, you're happy to see those holes, because you know that they're not filling anything in, that you know everything you see, you can trust. Right? So I think that's an example of a backstory for creating technology that's not 100% there, right? Because if the connect any optical tracking of and regeneration of self avatars in real time is going to have issues. But if you lay out the right expectations that what you see, it's real data, similar to what we have in Skype, Skype is also not perfect at times. And you know that, hey, if it's coming across, I can trust it's a signal that existed at one point in time. So yeah.
[00:17:56.055] Kent Bye: Yeah, in my own personal experience of virtual reality experiences, I found that the ones that give me the most presence have also been the ones that have been less photorealistic and more stylized and more like a low-poly rendition. And I don't know if there's been research or science that kind of validates that, that if the environment, the more photorealistic it is, the less that people feel present versus something that's a little bit more stylized and kind of low-poly or something that's more of a cartoon world.
[00:18:24.689] Betty Mohler: Well, I don't know either exactly. I mean, I know Mel's work again, the keynote speaker this week with regard to breaks in presence. I think what you're having is breaks in presence because of these expectations that I mentioned. And I can say that at my lab at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen is people come in with really high expectations because we have a humongous motion capture studio, 12 by 12 meters. They know they can walk. They know, at least in Germany there, that we have robotics. We have a lot of technology there, so they might come in with an expectation, certainly for a demo, that they're going to see amazing things. And they do see amazing things, but a lot of times I have the experience that even with even low polygon stuff, that they come in with the expectation that maybe they can open the door or touch the objects, right? And that's another example. It's just, it's really about expectations, right? So I think, and when you have a low polygon and the story is nice, right? So I think it's a lot about the story and helping to prevent you from having these breaks in presence. Like, oh wait, I thought that, and now it's like this, right? So what I'm so excited about consumer VR is this game push, right? Because the game development community knows how to tell these stories and they know how to prevent you from kind of going off the storyline or not getting to your end point. And I think that that meeting VR could be really amazing, right?
[00:19:38.858] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah. And I'm curious about this Max Planck Institute and its connection to virtual reality. Is there more VR research happening or are you the only sort of research there that happens to be doing VR stuff there?
[00:19:50.765] Betty Mohler: No, I mean, Germany is really, I see them as a powerhouse for virtual reality. There's a lot of VR, just like here in France, there's a lot of VR. The Max Planck Society that I know of, we're just one of 84 institutes throughout Germany. It's government funded work. And it's amazing, you know, the German population supports basic science. And in our lab, though, I do see it as one of the best. And that's why I went there now almost 10 years ago, because it's one of the best facilities for VR, because our director, Heinrich Bultoff, loves VR. And he supported people from the beginning with startup companies trying to promote not just VR display work, but also haptics, large treadmills. We have an omnidirectional treadmill that they built in a European project, one of the first certainly in Europe. And it's a great facility there. But I think because Germany also has so many great researchers that we benefit from that. So for example, nearby us is the Fraunhofer in Stuttgart. And they're not doing basic research like us. They're doing really applied research. But Stuttgart area, we're in Tübingen, that's only an hour away, is just a really strong place. And I think I don't know exactly why. I mean, it's partly basic science. It's from my director being very interested in VR. But we have a lot of car manufacturing, right? Porsche, BMW, Daimler. And they all have their own VR research facilities. So perhaps they've played a role in making it so strong in that region.
[00:21:10.156] Kent Bye: I see. Yeah, it makes sense to have that connection between VR and the ergonomics of actually sitting in a car. It seems like a very clear corporate application. You had also mentioned that you've done some redirected walking and some locomotion. And maybe you could tell me a bit about what type of research you've done in terms of the problems of locomotion in VR.
[00:21:28.903] Betty Mohler: Yeah, sure. So I mean, I was a marathon runner. So locomotion and VR really attracted me, because I love running. And I don't find it boring at all. But some people do. And when you start to running ultra marathons, right, you would love to have the ability to run through any city in the world, right? And so I know a lot about all the different, and there's an amazing number of omnidirectional treadmills out there. But they're expensive. They have user issues. For example, one that I love is the VirtuSphere. But it's designed for a person of a certain weight. And if you're not that weight, then you have to deal with it. And you can. Humans adapt really well. But anyway, what I did with a student who actually presented at Singapore IEEE VR and subsequently a journal article, his name was Christian Neff, what we wanted was people to be able to put on our HMD a small backpack and just walk through Virtual Tübingen, because we have a Virtual Tübingen model that's free for anybody. We've ported it into Unreal Engine and Unity. If anybody wants it, just email us. We'll hand it out, and it's already on the web. But anyway, we wanted people to be able to walk freely and explore Virtual Tübingen, and that's exactly what he did, building on other great people who have done redirected walking. We did that, and it was so great. People could walk for four kilometers in downtown Tübingen without having an experimenter say, oh, watch out for the wall, you know? And redirected walking, as you heard earlier, or as many of you may know, is just taking advantage of perceptual biases, right? Our inner ear, our ability to sense where we are in space is not perfect. Humans are, I mean, a lot of times I think people think humans are really perfect somehow because we do everything, we're amazing and we are much better than robots. But our vestibular system doesn't perceive us walking in a circle if that circle is big enough. It turns out that circle has to be really big. But we can take advantage of that. We can take advantage of redirecting people without them knowing. Especially if you use VR and the visuals are telling them they're walking straight, they will trust that.
[00:23:21.419] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the HTC Vive by Valve just came out with the Lighthouse system to do fully walkable virtual reality in a space that's 15 by 15, and I'm curious if that's, is that big enough to do a redirected technique, or is there a minimum amount of space you need to do in order to do redirected walking?
[00:23:39.064] Betty Mohler: Yeah, our space is 12 by 12 meters, so I should get that and try it out. as it would be almost enough in our space for one-to-one. But yeah, the space to do redirected walking would have to be something like 30 meters or 40 meters wide by 40 meters wide, which David Waller and Eric Hodgson, who you talked to earlier, they have a big space because he used a basketball field. But the problem with that, with redirected walking, is that the user always has control, right? The user can always turn and walk against where you want, right? So you do have to use gains that are perceptually noticeable. Just like today, we have latencies that are perceptually noticeable, but the human deals with that and can adapt. In the case that I mentioned with virtual tubing, we did have a way to prevent them from walking into the walls because they could always physically just ignore the cues that we were trying to distract them with, with virtual avatars or butterflies to try to get them to not walk into the world. They could always ignore that. They could always do something unexpected. And so what we had, what other people have done is just a stop sign. that told them to turn around. And then when they turned around, we actually rotated the world 100%. So we always had other redirected walking techniques as well to enable them to go where they wanted, because you want the user also to always have control. So you need multiple techniques, not just walking them in a circle.
[00:24:55.324] Kent Bye: And what are some of the big open problems that you see that are within the realm of virtual reality that you want to help work on?
[00:25:03.381] Betty Mohler: Well, I'm right now just most excited about using VR with patients. And in general, that means to me using VR that's cheap on one side, because you want to be able to get it out to a lot of different places, a lot of hospitals, or for example, for rehabilitation in the home, right? So I don't just mean patients in hospitals, I mean people that are needing special games to get better. But the challenges there I think are a lot about robustness, right? Battery life, you know, lasting longer as well. And just being able to work without someone like you or me who knows a lot about technology and can get it to work. So I think the consumer VR has definitely tackled a lot of those things, but I think we need to, as a community, maybe do more computer vision, more moving into the mixed reality, right? Making sure that people, as they're in the virtual world, also can have awareness of the world they're in at the same time and in a clever way, right? So you're not just switching these glasses on and off, but rather being able to use consumer technology in the home, in the hospital. seamlessly. I think that's a real, I mean, I think there's a lot of challenges, but that's a challenge I'm most excited about because I think it can be really used for a lot of different applications that will make a lot of difference for the aging population, for example.
[00:26:17.654] Kent Bye: And because you've been involved in VR for around 20 years and, you know, the last two or three years we've had certainly a lot of interest in the consumer world with Oculus Rift and Valve and Sony Morpheus and Gear VR and Google Cardboard, I'm curious from your perspective how you see the consumer VR movement, where you see that going?
[00:26:39.552] Betty Mohler: It's very interesting, because if you just talk about it in games, then I would say, OK, it's like another console, or it's like another Wii balance board, right? It's another auxiliary item that people might use in games. But I think, and I'm sure a lot of other people out there, as you know from the name of companies you just listed, and there are many more, that it's not going to be a gaming thing, I don't think. I certainly hope that some games come out that are convincing large numbers of people to buy consumer VR and to play games and have a really unique experience. But I think that we've moved into the world of gaming on the tablet and gaming on the phones. And I'm just really curious, and that maybe is a bigger challenge, is how do you get the VR technology to be part of the phone and integrated into society, as I said before? But I think that's where it is, is I have a Gear VR helmet with me here, and how do I use that on the airplane? And as we address in VR hyperspace, for example, how do I use that easily in this EU project where we know that, for example, some people have flown from New Zealand, right, the keynote speaker today, and could he use the VR on the on the plane and maybe on the train to just make him happier. And I think those are some of the future challenges. And I hope the direction is that your headset VR is a lot more towards the goal of Google VR, right? Google Glasses being able to completely replace the environment. And as I said before, integrate into the space. So I hope that that's the future. And I think that's really where it needs to go if it's going to reach the sales numbers, for example, that we see with tablets and cell phones.
[00:28:08.084] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:28:15.931] Betty Mohler: Well, I love VR, but it's hard to say. Just like much technology, I don't know. It's potentially life-changing, right? Just like our cell phones are life-changing. I hope that as I get older, it will help me be healthier. I hope it will help me be more connected. I hope it will help me be more intelligent and have more fun, right? But yeah, I think it can do really... VR in its all of its... Because we've been talking a lot about head-mounted displays, I think, but VR in its all of its classes and all of the things that are happening both here and at ISMAR and of course at the developers conferences, I mean, it has... Such great potential and as I said before I'm mostly excited about the potentials for people that you know as we grow older ourselves and in the health sector and Also the people we love that they can just you know older people that have had a stroke for example We also work with stroke patients that they can use VR and have a healthier and fun experience I mean, that's what I want to be doing when I'm 80 and having a hard time I want to I want to play again like I did when I was a child. Yeah, that's what I want. I
[00:29:18.703] Kent Bye: OK, great. Thank you.
[00:29:19.767] Betty Mohler: Yeah, thanks a lot. It was really enjoyable talking with you.
