Mini Retreat »Filtering«

Abstracts of the PhD Candidates

Michael Droste: Visualisation and Interaction for High-dimensional and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Virtual Reality

Humans perceive the world surrounding them as Euclidean and three-dimensional. Basic orientation, depth perception and the scale of objects we see are estimated based on a profound collection of knowledge obtained from experience. Modern physics and maths utilize models and concepts based on high-dimensional and non-euclidean geometry that are perceived as unintuitive and contradictory to the established, ›natural‹ world view.

Michael Droste will research wether virtual reality can be utilized as a tool that allows users to peek in the unintuitive and strange spaces that occur in modern physics and maths and if the first-hand experience allows to comprehend the concepts behind these spaces. His research will focus on suitable interaction techniques for the virtual environments (VE) and the effect the simulation of non-euclidean or high-dimensional geometry has on the users feeling of presence in the VE: Is it possible to ›feel present‹ in an environment that fundamentically differs from our natural environment?

Sebastian Keppler: Collaborative manual tasks in distributed virtual enviroments

Virtual environments (VE) offer a way to bring people from different places together. Compared to classical telecommunication, such as video or telephone conferences, VE offer the possibility of a more natural communication and interaction, which resembles collaborative work from reality. VE offer a common virtual space that can be shared with others. For a particularly natural interaction within the VE, the use of your own hands is recommended. With their hands, humans are able to intuitively perform numerous tasks, such as manipulating the environment by grasping, moving or changing objects. Another form of interaction is communication through the use of hand gestures. This thesis investigate, how humans interact with other participants in a virtual environment, via the hands, in a collaborative scenario. The aim is to draw conclusions about which methods of collaborative interactions with the hands can be improved in order to enhance both the work outcome and the user experience.

Julien Letellier: Collaborative Prototyping for Augmented Reality: Authoring Tools and Case Studies for Cultural Applications

Designing and prototyping interactive applications for augmented reality (AR) poses several challenges. Many well-established prototyping techniques from interaction design cannot be easily transferred to AR. Since the AR industry is still evolving, there is a lack of authoring tools. Software manufacturers are providing increasingly complex tools to build interactive 3D environments, such as 3D engines, standard development kits and specialised platforms for different AR devices. Especially for cultural scientists, creative artists and small research and development teams, it is a challenging task to develop simple prototypes and conduct feasibility studies using these tools. The presentation reviews the early development process of two AR applications and derives the following research questions. What kind of authoring tools are necessary for collaborative prototyping of AR applications in the cultural domain? What are suitable design/prototyping methods for AR? What are relevant filtering dimensions involved in the prototyping process and how do they affect the AR experience? Considering prototypes as filters that traverse a design space, a new class of authoring tools should focus on their filtering dimensions (e.g. appearance, data, interactivity, sensory perception). The presentation concludes with a general approach and proposes some case studies to answer the above-mentioned questions as part of a three-year PhD research.

Sebastian Schwesinger: Virtual Acoustics. Cultural Media History of Room Acoustic Simulations

Over the last 30 years, virtual acoustics has established itself as sub-discipline of acoustics. However, the methods it uses for room acoustic simulations have a much longer history. The PhD project traces the epistemic genealogy of geometric methods in modern acoustics which are not only structuring the virtual sonic environments that we are increasingly inhabiting, but are also substantial for our contemporary conception of sound and acoustic environments at all. In this regard the project investigates, first, the diagrammatical representation of sound and its implications for a corresponding communication model, second, the authentication procedures of virtual methods, and third, the role of listening in virtual environments. The case studies this research draws on range from historical concert hall acoustics to current historical research in which methods of virtual acoustics are applied as epistemic tools. Finally, considering the transgression of virtual acoustics procedures and algorithms into popular culture products, such as video games, music production, or social media might evoke the cultural impact of their epistemic conditions.

André Selmanagić: Interaction design and prototyping for XR applications

XR applications (e.g. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality) pose new challenges for designers, when it comes to exploring the design space by experimenting with and testing of their ideas. Most prototyping software focuses on 2D content and thus cannot handle the inherent spatiality and dynamism of XR, where anything within the virtual or real world can potentially be a user interface. Recently, new products like Adobe Aero and Wiarframe were published to tackle these problems. They allow easy creation of 3D worlds and XR prototypes, but offer only limited interactivity within these worlds. For testing though, it is only necessary that the prototype feels interactive to the user. One method for evoking such a feeling of interactivity without creating a time-costly fully-interactive implementation is the so-called Wizard-of-Oz method. There, a human merely simulates the results of a computer system, creating the illusion that the computer is solving the task at hand.

This research topic aims to support the design and prototyping of XR applications by using the Wizard-of-Oz method within the design process. As such, interaction designers can evaluate concepts without having to implement them - instead, a human will simulate the effects of the interaction. This poses challenges for the user interface of the wizard itself: how will he/she be able to efficiently and authentically simulate the world of the test user?

Maja Stark: XR Interactive Art – Forms and Potentials of Interactive Art in the Extended Reality

Expanded Reality (XR) technologies such as Virtual and Augmented Reality are not only used in areas such as medicine or industry – XR has also been discovered as a new artistic medium that has to be taken seriously: At the turn of the millennium, artists started to integrate XR into their artistic practice using glasses and mobile devices in order to »create worlds that have never existed before« (Tamiko Thiel). Today, more and more artists experiment with these immersive media, there are XR art awards and exhibitions in galleries and museums – but there is not much research on these current art forms yet. One of the most fascinating possibilities of XR is the interaction between human beings and the virtual world(s). The intended research project focuses on this dynamic and multifaceted aspect at the intersection of art, science and technology. Its objective is to investigate which new potentials and insights can be derived from the new genre in the context of comparable digital interactive art, e.g. with regard to the aesthetics of reception, the image act and the embodiment.