Voices of VR Podcast

Professor Eric Hodgson explores some of the psychological impacts of virtual reality when it comes to spatial perception & memory, and effects like change blindness. He also talks about how to walk in infinite VR spaces within limited physical spaces with a technique called redirected walking. Finally, he talks about insights from IEEE VR community on this consumer VR revolution, compares the split between the old VR community to the new VR community, 3D user interfaces, data visualizations, and some examples for how corporations and the military are using VR.

Eric Hodgson is the director of the Smale Visualization Center & also works with the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at the Miami University of Ohio. He runs the HIVE (huge immersive virtual environment), which is a gym-sized VR Lab. For more information on Eric, here’s some of his VR research publications.

Topics

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:04 Redirected Walking
• 3:50 Factors that go into spatial perception & visual dominance
• 5:26 Why was the HIVE lab built?
• 8:10 How our spatial memory works
• 10:49 Change blindness for changes that are out of the field of view
• 12:12 Navigating geometrically impossible spaces & how we mentally fill in gaps
• 13:29 Movement speeds in virtual environments – natural vs. VR movement speeds
• 14:38 Why VR movement speeds are 2x normal walking speeds. Field-of-view?
• 15:42 IEEEVR community perspective on the rise of consumer VR
• 17:20 The divide between Old VR vs New VR communities
• 19:03 Future of Professional VR companies & high-end VR markets
• 20:41 How the military is using VR
• 22:42 How corporations are using VR
• 25:04 Why now? The timing of this VR revolution. Previous low-end VR headsets
• 27:01 Cutting-edge demos and prototypes at IEEE VR conference
• 30:03 3DUI conference, and user interface research in VR environments
• 30:58 Highlights of the future of telepresence keynote from the IEEE VR conference
• 34:03 Where VR is headed within five years & what gets you excited about what’s to come
• 35:41 Data visualization within 3D VR environments

Links:

• “Redirected Walking – Playing with your perception’s limits” blog post with a great overview of the technique by Sébastien “Cb” Kuntz
• Video of Reverend Kyle visiting Eric’s VR lab and walking in the virtual grocery store.
• Comparing the four approaches to generalized redirected walking
• Selective attention test
• IEEE VR 2014 Conference
• Older VR companies that a lot of people within the consumer VR world haven’t heard of: Vicon, Polhemus, Haption, Advanced Realtime Tracking (ART), Worldviz, Sensics, NVIS, and CyberGlove Systems.
• Slide from Henry Fuchs’ IEEE VR keynote on Why Oculus make this $2 Billion dollar breakthrough?

Music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio