Overview

The field of virtual environments (VEs) has grown rapidly in recent years and encompasses many areas of computer graphics, geometric modelling, simulation and human-computer interaction.

Much emphasis has been placed on developing the technology of VEs by harnessing ever decreasing computing costs. A true virtual environment is one that can replace a real environment; in the extreme case it completely replaces the real world, and in appearance and behaviour it may be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. Perhaps the most strikingly successful example of this is the modern flight simulator. However, building genuinely useful VEs remains a challenging task, often because of the difficulty of constructing effective means for people to interact with the environments. This talk highlights some of the problems, and looks at some aspects of human perception to see whether they can help us overcome the difficulties. For example, we will look at what happens when we deliberately make the virtual environment behave differently from our expectations: do we notice? How does this help us? In other words: does the virtual environment have to be the same as the real world in order to seem the same?

Roger Hubbold is Professor of Virtual Environments at the University of Manchester, where he leads the Advanced Interfaces Group. The group focuses on three main lines of research: the design of software systems to support complex, real-world applications of virtual environment (VE) technologies; the application of VE technologies in collaboration with companies and researchers from other disciplines, to test that the systems developed really work; and the development of fundamental techniques and algorithms to improve methods for interaction with VEs. Details can be found at http://aig.cs.man.ac.uk.

Date and Time

23 February 2004, 19:30 – 21:30 GMT

Presenter

Prof Roger Hubbold