Digital Excursion: Seeing the World in Three Dimensions

In this Digital Excursion we will visit the CAVE (map), UCL's Immersive Virtual Environments Laboratory, where Anthony Steed and David Swapp will demonstrate a current CAVE project.

The project to be demonstrated is co-partnered with Lancaster University Department of Psychology and the National Centre for Computer Animation and focuses on aspects of social interaction with virtual characters. Time permitting, other projects may be demonstrated as well. Concurrently in the foyer, there will be a demonstration of large scale haptic (touch) interfaces and discussion of current and future research directions.

The Immersive VR Lab is a facility for research spanning a broad range of academic disciplines. Current and recent collaborations include projects with partners in engineering, architecture, drama, social psychology and neuroscience. All of these projects share the research goal of understanding how to make virtual reality effective; to this end researchers at the facility perform experiments with participants, using a range of media from desktop setups to immersive VR in a CAVE-like display system, incorporating various modes of interaction. The research aims to find out what makes a difference to our sense of presence in a virtual environment, and our sense of co-presence with other people.

Anthony Steed is a Professor and head of the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group at the UCL Department of Computer Science. His research area is real-time interactive virtual environments, with particular interest in mixed-reality systems, large-scale models and collaboration between immersive facilities.

David Swapp is a Research Fellow working in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group, and is also manager of the UCL Immersive VR Lab. His principle research areas are in motion capture, character animation and multimodal perceptual issues that affect experiences and interactions within virtual environments.