This is funding to support participation by approximately 12 graduate students (9 domestic and 3 international), along with 5 senior members of the community (faculty and industry researchers), in a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) to be held in conjunction with IEEE Virtual Reality 2014 conference that will take place March 29-April 2 in Minneapolis, and which is collocated with the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interface. Virtual reality (VR) is a multidisciplinary field involving human-centered computer simulations that seek to imitate or augment real world senses (usually sight, sound, and touch) and experiences. VR research includes developing and assessing methods and systems, and facilitating and understanding user perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors. First organized by the IEEE Computer Society in 1993 and held annually since 1995, IEEE Virtual Reality is the premier international conference and exhibition in this field and includes technical paper presentations, workshops, tutorials, research demonstrations, and exhibits from industry. The IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces has been held annually and colocated with IEEE VR since 2006. Based on prior year numbers, the combined 2014 conferences are expected to attract 350-400 registrants, 15-20 exhibitors, and 30 student volunteers. More information may be found online at www.ieeevr.org/2014.
This year's IEEE VR Doctoral Consortium is inspired by and similar in format to last year's successful inaugural event, which was also supported by NSF. The main activities of the DC will take place on Sunday, March 30, immediately prior to the start of the IEEE VR conference proper and in parallel with the second day of the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces; additional smaller activities will take place at scattered times over the rest of the week. The workshop will include morning and afternoon sessions in which each student presents his/her work to the other student participants and a panel of senior VR researchers, with sufficient time set aside after each talk for discussion and constructive feedback that addresses the strengths of the work, challenges and issues that may arise, and implications of the results. A group working lunch attended by all the students and mentors will be particularly valuable for unifying the individual goals and projects presented within the group as part of a "big picture" envisioning of the future of the field over the next 10-20 years. Each student will also be asked to prepare a poster on his/her research that will be on display during the conference as part of the poster sessions, and to submit a short (2-page) abstract to be archived in the IEEE Digital Library.
Broader Impacts: The goal of the Doctoral Consortium is to provide an interactive and supportive mentoring opportunity for mid-level graduate students in virtual reality, to afford these students a valuable opportunity to get independent perspectives on their research from senior individuals with a wide collective breadth and depth of knowledge, and to build a cohort of young researchers within the VR community. The organizers will make a special effort to recruit participants from groups traditionally underrepresented in computer science, including women, persons of color, and persons with disabilities. They will take steps to achieve diversity among the students with respect to research topics, disciplinary backgrounds, methodological approaches, and home institutions (for example, no more than one graduate student will be accepted from any given institution).
This project provided support for twelve graduate students (9 US, 3 international) to attend a doctoral consortium co-located with the IEEE Virtual Reality scientific conference held in Minneapolis, Minnesota in March-April 2014. The intellectual merit of the activity was significant. The students are conducting important research as part of their doctoral programs at universities across the country and beyond on topics ranging from the use of virtual environments for contextual learning to optimal use of new gigapixel data displays. The doctoral consortium provided expert mentoring for these students from recognized international leaders in virtual reality research. This helped students to immediately improve and deepen the intellectual contributions of their research to science and engineering. The broader impact of the project lies in helping to establish the careers of these top young scientists and engineers and in building an active collaborative research community to study virtual reality technologies. The project, which was just the second annual IEEE VR Doctoral Consortium, continued to establish the groundwork for an annual program through which the virtual reality and 3D human-computer interaction research communities can nurture a next generation of scientific leaders. The agenda of the doctoral consortium was designed specifically to help student participants to "think big" and develop the strategic insight and long range vision that will help guide them toward continued important contributions to science and engineering research beyond graduate school. Students and mentors were selected so as to foster diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds, with a special emphasis on involvement from groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences.
