MoVRI - The Museum of Virtual Reality Illusions

Kurzbeschreibung

The goal of this project is to develop a virtual museum - the MoVRI (The Museum of Virtual Reality Illusions). In contrast to a physical museum, the MoVRI is not a real-world building, but an interactive virtual reality (VR) application. Moreover, the museum does not exhibit pieces of art, but famous “pieces” of scientific VR research: a collection of VR illusion techniques.

Aufgaben im Projekt:

The goal of VR systems in general is to simulate artificial realities for training, education, entertainment, or other purposes. However, a range of different challenges makes implementing VR applications difficult - for example, the tracking space in which the user can move around in the real world might be limited, users might reach out to touch virtual objects but only find thin air, or properties of virtual objects interacted with could not be perceived (e.g. objects might feel weight-less).

To solve these (and several other challenges), VR researchers have come up with VR illusion techniques that play with the user’s perception, often without users even noticing it.

Examples of such VR illusion techniques (for the above mentioned problems) are the techniques of Redirected Walking, Change Blindness Redirection, Redirected Touching, Haptic Retargeting, or Pseudo-Haptic Feedback.

While all these techniques have been documented and published in research papers, it is often difficult and cumbersome for people new to VR to understand and imagine how the techniques work and what the effects feel like in VR. An easy way to try out famous VR illusion techniques does not exist today and existing demos are usually specialized on only a single technique.

It is this gap that is to be filled with the MoVRI developed in this project. The virtual museum will allow users interested in VR illusion techniques to explore different virtual “exhibition rooms”, each demonstrating and explaining a different VR illusion technique. The final VR application should be suitable for demos such as for example at the open house day of the university.

The goal of this project is to 

1. identify and understand a set of interesting VR illusion techniques that are to be implemented in the museum (the supervisors can provide the project team with the corresponding research papers describing the techniques and further links).

2. design the virtual museum experience by planning the spatial layout of the museum, the VR navigation technique used by the users to explore the museum, as well as the individual exhibition rooms. Additional technical details (such as tracking of physical objects if necessary) should also be considered and solutions be planned.

3. implement the MoVRI and the exhibited VR illusion techniques as a VR application using the Unity 3D engine. The application should be designed with modularity in mind, so that new VR illusion techniques could easily be added to the museum.

4. test and optimize the MoVRI application for demonstrations so that it works reliably and is easy to use also for users that are not experienced with VR.