This is funding to support participation by approximately 8 promising graduate students from educational institutions in the United States, along with about 5 senior members of the academic and industrial research communities as mentors, in a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) to be held in conjunction with the IEEE Virtual Reality (VR) 2016 conference that will take place March 19-23 in Greenville, SC, and which is collocated since 2006 with the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI). Virtual reality 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 the development and assessment of 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. More information about the conference may be found online at www.ieeevr.org/2016. The goal of the Doctoral Consortium is to provide a unique venue for interactive, supportive, and prestigious mentoring 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. Special efforts have been made by the organizers to achieve diversity among the students across institutions, and to recruit participants from groups traditionally underrepresented in the field of computer science, including women, persons of color, and people with disabilities.
This year's IEEE VR Doctoral Consortium builds on the successful format of the first three such events, which were also supported by NSF. The event will begin with a dinner on Saturday, March 19, immediately prior to the start of the IEEE 3DUI Symposium, to welcome the students and provide initial mentorship and tips for networking at the conference. The main activities will take place on Sunday, March 20, in parallel with the second day of IEEE 3DUI. 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. The VR conference will begin that evening, with a welcome reception where Doctoral Consortium participants will network with what they have learned over the first two days. Additional smaller activities will take place at scattered times over the rest of the week; in particular, small groups of 2-3 students will meet for mentoring lunches and/or other networking events with senior members of the VR/3DUI community.
