In the last two decades there has been a great deal of interest among scholars, business leaders, and the general public in real-time interactive 3D computer graphics for inmersive virtual environments, in which the user wears a head-mounted display and his/her movements are tracked by sensors. This technology offers great promise as a natural means of interacting with computer-generated environments. To date, however, immersive virtual environments have had difficulty accommodating multiple users, due both to a lack of available space and because of the inherent risk of collision when multiple users, each effectively blindfolded by a head mounted display, walk in the same area. The PI and his team have created a unique system called the HIVE (for Huge Immersive Virtual Environment) on the campus of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. This is the world's largest indoor immersive virtual environment by a factor of four, offering precise, wireless, untethered tracking of users in a 1000 m2 gymnasium. Additionally, the team has developed effective software algorithms that imperceptibly steer users towards the HIVE's center and away from its walls, a capability that can be leveraged to steer multiple users around each other to prevent collisions. Despite these advances, there are three ways in which the HIVE's capabilities need to be further enhanced to support multiple users:
1. The HIVE currently possesses only two wearable rendering systems; several more are needed to pursue multi-user applications.
2. The HIVE's optical position tracking system was designed for much smaller tracking volumes, and needs to be upgraded to support robust multi-user simulations.
3. Substantial effort will be required to enhance the HIVE's existing software base to include functionality such as collision prediction algorithms that can support multiple users.
This is funding to provide these enhancements to the HIVE's existing hardware and software infrastructure, which will have an immediate effect on its utility for research, education, data visualization, and training.
Broader Impacts: The enhanced infrastructure will enable research in computer science that: (a) develops, evaluates, and compares 3D user interfaces; (b) develops algorithms for collision detection and multi-user redirected walking; (c) explores the use of inertial sensors for position tracking in portable virtual environments; and (d) develops tools for collaborative computing environments. Additional behavioral research enabled by this funding will aim to improve our understanding of how humans learn and remember large spaces, and of the social dynamics of users who cohabit a computer simulation. The improved infrastructure will also have a dramatic impact on educators who use the HIVE, by enabling: (a) several students and an instructor to be simultaneously involved in educational simulations; (b) new opportunities for hands-on student projects, particularly those that involve partnerships with industry clients to develop real-world products, services, and interactive media; and (c) the digital preservation and demonstration of culturally important spaces.
In recent years, virtual reality (VR) has become an invaluable tool for research, development, training, healthcare, commerce, communication, and education, as well as a growing medium for entertainment. Immersive virtual reality systems – those that allow users to explore a simulated environment by naturally walking, turning, and looking – are particularly useful because they can provide increased realism by including rich sensory feedback to multiple sensory systems. Rather than using arbitrary motions like mouse commands or keyboard presses, immersive virtual reality systems enable users to navigate by means of their own natural body movements. Users of such systems still physically walk in the real world, but what they see and experience is a computer-generated environment. Historically, immersive virtual reality systems have had difficulties enabling multiple users to co-inhabit the same space. Our reseach has worked to improve the usability of large immersive virtual reality environments by developing computer algorithms that subtly steer users away from potential obstacles in the real world. These obstacles may be either physical objects in the environment (e.g., walls) or other users. These steering algorithms work by imperceptibly rotating the virtual world around the user's viewpoint, inducing the user to walk in a known direction (e.g., toward the center of the tracking space.) Our research has determined what kinds of steering algorithms tend to be most effective, and the circumstances under which one algorithm may be more effective than another. Unlike most researchers who investigate such techniques, our research makes use of real users (not simulations) walking in a very large (gymnasium-sized) environment. Complementing these efforts, our research group is also developing the technology to simulate truly large-scale environments in immersive virtual realtiy. This new class of virtual enviornment technology leverages our advancements is using inertial information to track user's position, and has resulted in a portable immersive virtual realtiy system that is not dependent on existing infrastructure. This system is relatively low-cost and wearable, and can be used in any large, flat area such as a gymnasium, parking lot, or open field. To date, most VR facilities have been centralized, specialized, and expensive, and have thus been relatively unavailable to a great majority of the population. In developing and creating VR systems that are portable and relatively inexpensive, our research has made significant steps toward making VR less exclusive. De-centralizing VR will make the technology available to a much broader range of people than has heretofore been possible, providing first-hand exposure to cutting-edge concepts and models in science and technology to any population that educators or researchers choose.
