MoVRI 2.0 – Extending The Museum of Virtual Reality Illusions

Short Description

Note: While this text is written in English, the working language in the project can be German or English.

The goal of this project is to extend the existing 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.

MoVRI video: https://youtu.be/sASIswQuP7U?si=JwLmwPtStCC6kutO

Tasks:

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, Hand Redirection, 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. MoVRI offers an easy way to try out famous VR illusion techniques, but to this day suffers from scalability issues that limits its public use.

The goal of the project is to overcome these issues by moving MoVRI into a click & play application. The final VR application must be suitable for demos such as for example at the open house day of the university.

The goal of this project is to 

1. Understand the MoVRI system and a set of relevant VR illusion techniques that are currently implemented in the museum (the supervisors can provide the project team with the corresponding research papers describing the techniques and further links).
2. Identify current bottlenecks and pain points of MoVRI that prevent its adoption (e.g., complexity of calibration, need for additional hardware, use of outdated HMDs or poor documentation). This may be done with a usability test -> derive user requirements.
3. Implement the user requirements into MoVRI. The application should be keep its modularity, so that new VR illusion techniques could easily be added to the museum.
4. Test and Refine the MoVRI application for demonstrations so that it works reliably and is easy to use also for users that are not experienced with VR! Valdiate this through a small usability study.