Virtual Environments Group

We studied how perception-action coordination changed as VR users gain experience in virtual environments over time. This work highlights the need for carrying out VR studies over time and the influence that longitudinal calibration can have on spatial perception in long-term VR experiences.

This work considers the experience of users in locomotion and navigating desktop VEs when designing navigation aids and studying their effectiveness. Navigation aids that are appropriate for experienced users may actually not provide a suitable level of support for inexperienced users, and solutions that may improve the navigation performance of inexperienced users may not benefit experienced users beyond a certain degree. Our results will benefit the design of VR applications based on the users' capabilities and needs.

The mHealth phone application includes a digital human or embodied conversational agent (ECA) interface for reporting health status. It will be used for the remote monitoring of Prisma Health patients who suffer from pulmonary distress or heart failure. Additionally, we will measure the users' subjective impressions towards the embodied conversational agent (ECA) and the system usability.

This work attempts at laying a foundation for future investigations that seek to understand and further improve the on-air writing experience in immersive virtual environments. We study the effects of canvas geometry, inking triggers and input modalities on on-air writing performance, outlining guidelines and good practices to abide by when designing such interfaces.

Cybersickness, a malady like motion sickness strongly manifests in virtual experiences that involve locomotion. This work attempts to study how cybersickness is affected when secondary tasks have to additionally be performed in VR. We further evaluate whether secondary tasks affect other aspects of the VR experience.

End effectors represent the tools with which users perform actions and interact with the virtual world. This work seeks to investigate how end effector representations affect the efficacy of performance in interaction tasks in immersive virtual environments.

Focus of this project is to study effects of presence of users' end effectors and sensory modalities on the perception of tangibles in virtual reality (VR). Through this study we are trying to determine if the perception of size of the tracked tangibles are improved by providing the user's hand avatar in the VR environment.

Tradeoff between efficiency and accuracy while performing cornering tasks, in a VR environment of randomly arranged maze, is being studied.