Perry Hoberman

Immersive training games for smartphone-based head mounted displays

Thin computing clients, such as smartphones and tablets, have exhibited recent growth in display resolutions, processing power, and graphical rendering speeds. In this poster, we show how we leveraged these trends to create virtual reality (VR) training games which run entirely on a commodity mobile computing platform. This platform consists of a commercial off-the-shelf game engine, commodity smartphones, and mass produced optics. The games utilize the strengths of this platform to provide immersive features like 360 degree photo panoramas and interactive 3D virtual scenes. By sharing information about building such applications, we hope to enable others to develop new types of mobile VR applications. In particular, we feel this system is ideally suited for casual “pick up and use” VR applications for collaborative classroom learning, design reviews, and other multi-user immersive experiences.

Snared illumination

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Open virtual reality

The ICT Mixed Reality Lab is leveraging an open source philosophy to influence and disrupt industry. Projects spun out of the labs efforts include the VR2GO smartphone based viewer, the inVerse tablet based viewer, the Socket HMD reference design, the Oculus Rift and the Project Holodeck gaming platforms, a repurposed FOV2GO design with Nokia Lumia phones for a 3D user interface course at Columbia University, and the EventLabs Socket based HMD at the University of Barcelona. A subset of these will be demonstrated. This open approach is providing low cost yet surprisingly compelling immersive experiences.

Experiments in interactive panoramic cinema

For most of the past 100 years, cinema has been the premier medium for defining and expressing relations to the visible world. However, cinematic spectacles delivered in darkened theaters are predicated on a denial of both the body and the physical surroundings of the spectators who are watching it. To overcome these deficiencies, filmmakers have historically turned to narrative, seducing audiences with compelling stories and providing realistic characters with whom to identify. This paper describes several research projects in interactive panoramic cinema that attempt to sidestep the narrative preoccupations of conventional cinema and instead are based on notions of space, movement and embodied spectatorship rather than traditional storytelling. Example projects include interactive works developed with the use of a unique 360 degree camera and editing system, and also development of panoramic imagery for a large projection environment with 14 screens on 3 adjacent walls in a 5-4-5 configuration with observations and findings from an experiment projecting panoramic video on 12 of the 14, in a 4-4-4 270 degree configuration.

MobZombies: A Wearable Sensor For A Playground Style Electronic Game

MobZombies is a combination wearable sensor device and mobile game with a unique user interface. The game control requires physical, embodied movement that couples the wearable sensor to the game play. By walking or running and turning the wearable sensor controls the action within the game. We use a small sensor platform custom designed for MobZombies, together with software written for a hand-held computer, which serves as the main computational and display device. In the MobZombies game, the player is being chased by a swarm of brain-eating zombies and must move their avatar by using their body motion to direct the avatar away from the attacking swarm. This project is an investigation directed to research the use of wearable sensors as a platform for electronic games that are inspired from the physical nature of traditional pre-digital playground activities.

Immersive Design Fiction: Using VR to Prototype Speculative Interfaces and Interaction Rituals within a Virtual Storyworld

Immersive design fiction is a novel approach that embeds speculative interactions within a rich virtual reality (VR) storyworld. Immersive design fictions use VR to translate new design opportunities into story-driven, embodied experiences by positioning the participant as a character in a narrative world. This paper presents a case study of an immersive design fiction that depicts a fictionalized reimagining of an industry partners work practices. This VR experience explores speculative interfaces for creative work and collaboration in the context of a fictional workplace environment. By placing design fictions within rich immersive contexts such as room-scale VR, researchers and practitioners can go beyond prototyping imagined interfaces to also speculate about the interaction rituals and surrounding social context within an experiential storyworld. This approach makes methodological and theoretical contributions to design fiction research by demonstrating a toolkit for exploring and reflecting upon the intersections between speculation, embodiment, and narrative context.

Portable reality: Expanding available space

All of the components for creating fully immersive virtual worlds have suddenly become ubiquitous and cheap, often built into devices that we have already in our pockets and on our desktops. These devices have everything they need to become state-of-the-art platforms for immersive games and virtual reality: powerful graphics, high-resolution displays, and precision sensors. Just add some optics, and now a responsive, fully immersive virtual reality platform can be built for next to nothing. And once we can do that, theres nothing to stop us from unleashing a flood of alternate and augmented worlds that can be colocated with our physical surroundings, anywhere and any time. More than just information or annotation, we can begin to imagine a multiplicity of inhabitable, immersive, interactive, networked environments that can be coordinated with our everyday lives. The coming proliferation of virtual and augmented worlds will make manifest the idea that there is far more to reality than we are normally aware of, and that there are countless virtual realms that can now be brought into conscious experience.