News
How ILMxLab brought the Galaxy’s Edge to virtual reality
Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic Lab recently released the second and final episode Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge — Last Call VR experience, and in this article gives some behind the scenes info talking about their design process, gushing about the Star Wars fandom, and how home VR experiences are starting to parallel experiences within theme parks.
PrecisionOS & Virtual Reality Training of Orthopaedic Surgeons in Low-Resource Countries. | 6DOF Reviews
PrecisionOS, with support from Oculus and an Epic MegaGrant, teamed up with a a humanitarian organization to offer virtual reality training to new surgeons that provides practice and real scenarios that they're likely to encounter in the real world. Aside from reducing the cost of training, this has the potential of expanding access to advanced training for remote places in the world where medical training typically requires going abroad.
Reading
How Avatars Transformed the Internet — VirtualHumans.org
With the ease that platforms have made creating virtual avatars it's easy to not think about how we got here, but we feel it's good to take stock of the journey to how we got to where we are now. This article gives a good, short history and insights into what that means for how we represent ourselves online.
Research
Frontiers | Social Presence Outside the Augmented Reality Field of View | Virtual Reality
For those of us who create AR content this paper is an important one. It examines the engagement with virtual characters, and where they are placed within an AR experience effects if a user will actually interact with them based on where they are in their field of view. It makes sense that people off in the periphery would get less attention (gaze), but there is more to their findings than what you'd think.
Research study on field-of-view in VR | Illusioneering Lab
A researcher at Illusioneering Lab is looking for participants in a VR study on the influence of field-of-view modification techniques have on the virtual reality user experience. Helping science better understand the effects of VR and how to create better, more comfortable experiences is its own reward. But a gift card is also nice, too.
r/virtualreality - A school student needs help with Virtual Reality project
We came across this research study from a current student that we'd like to help get them a few more participants. It shouldn't take more than a minute to fill in, and if you want to lend a hand you can go right to the survey here.
A Systematic Review of the Convergence of Augmented Reality, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and the Internet of Things
This paper might be a bit technical for some, but we learned quite a lot that we know will help us talk about applications of smart virtual agents that we hadn't considered. One example we hadn't considered was the use of AR when testing in-home virtual agents as a way to track their "movement" within the space. Another things we enjoyed was seeing the citations. Every good paper has just as interesting references to dive deeper into the topic, and we've added a few of these to our reading list.
One More Thing
An eye tracking based virtual reality system for use inside magnetic resonance imaging systems | Scientific Reports
Claustrophobia while in an MRI isn't uncommon, and researchers at the King's College London are studying how VR can be used to help put patients at ease during the examination. Keeping still while panicking isn't easy, and can lead to extended times being scanned as movement and fidgeting can mean starting the scan over. Along with overcoming the hurdle of making an actual VR headset that can be safely worn around the strong magnets used in an MRI, this publication could represent a major advance in the therapeutic use of VR.
Commentary
In this issue we want to focus exclusively on some of the great research papers and efforts currently happening around AR and VR. Even though VR is more than 30 years old its still in its infancy, and we're still learning about the wide range of scenarios that VR and AR can be used. Entertainment, therapy, construction, advanced imaging, and thousands of other scenarios are already easily understood, but there are millions of use cases that we haven't considered that we're still learning about.
If you're looking for how you can participate in this research there are two opportunities in this issue within the Research section. But even if you choose not to participate we hope that you enjoy reading about some of the interesting publications researchers have shared recently.
Thank you for reading and subscribing, and we'll see you next week!
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