Four Papers & Best Paper Award at CHI 2024

Four papers with the involvement of UMTL researchers have been accepted at CHI 2024 and one of them was awarded the Best Paper Award! Check out the research projects that range from sports technology, over VR illusions, to the preparation of human spaceflight missions to the Moon!

André Zenner receives the IEEE Virtual Reality Best Dissertation Award 2024

André Zenner received the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Best Dissertation Award 2024 for his dissertation on haptics for virtual reality, supervised by Antonio Krüger. The award recognizes outstanding academic research and development in the field of virtual reality, with selection criteria including the significance and impact of the scholarly contributions, and the clarity with which these contributions are communicated.

The Staircase Procedure Toolkit

We propose a novel open-source software toolkit to support researchers in the domains of human-computer interaction (HCI) and virtual reality (VR) in conducting psychophysical experiments. Our toolkit is designed to work with the widely-used Unity engine and is implemented in C# and Python. With the toolkit, researchers can easily set up, run, and analyze experiments to find perceptual detection thresholds using the adaptive weighted up/down method, also known as the staircase procedure. Besides being straightforward to integrate in Unity projects, the toolkit automatically stores experiment results, features a live plotter that visualizes answers in real time, and offers scripts that help researchers analyze the gathered data using statistical tests.

Detectability of Saccadic Hand Offset in Virtual Reality

On the way towards novel hand redirection (HR) techniques that make use of change blindness, the next step is to take advantage of saccades for hiding body warping. A prerequisite for saccadic HR algorithms, however, is to know how much the user’s virtual hand can unnoticeably be offset during saccadic suppression. We contribute this knowledge by conducting a psychophysical experiment, which lays the ground for upcoming HR techniques by exploring the perceptual detection thresholds (DTs) of hand offset injected during saccades. Our findings highlight the pivotal role of saccade direction for unnoticeable hand jumps, and reveal that most offset goes unnoticed when the saccade and hand move in opposite directions. Based on the gathered perceptual data, we derived a model that considers the angle between saccade and hand offset direction to predict the DTs of saccadic hand jumps.

Rapid Game Development 2023 - Erstellung eines Computerspiels in einem hochschulübergreifenden, interdisziplinären Team

Induce a Blink of the Eye: Evaluating Techniques for Triggering Eye Blinks in Virtual Reality

As more and more virtual reality (VR) headsets support eye tracking, recent techniques started to use eye blinks to induce unnoticeable manipulations to the virtual environment, e.g., to redirect users' actions. However, to exploit their full potential, more control over users' blinking behavior in VR is required. To this end, we propose a set of reflex-based blink triggers that are suited specifically for VR. In accordance with blink-based techniques for redirection, we formulate (i) effectiveness, (ii) efficiency, (iii) reliability, and (iv) unobtrusiveness as central requirements for successful triggers. We implement the soft- and hardware-based methods and compare the four most promising approaches in a user study. Our results highlight the pros and cons of the tested triggers, and show those based on the menace, corneal, and dazzle reflexes to perform best. From these results, we derive recommendations that help choosing suitable blink triggers for VR applications.