In May we had the pleasure to attend this year’s CHI conference in Denver, Colorado, USA. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) is the top conference for research on Human-Computer Interaction. It brings together thousands of international top researchers from academia as well as from industry. Several members of the University of Konstanz and the SFB-TRR 161 contributed in various ways to the conference.
This year’s EuroVis, one of the most important visualization conferences in Europe, as well as many co-located events took place in Barcelona, Spain. Despite outside temperatures of well beyond 30°C, the attendees enjoyed many interesting talks on the latest visualization research topics and discussed them with researchers in the field from all over the world.
With an increasingly globalized world, the language barrier problem becomes more prominent. And thus, inhibits proper interaction between not only humans but also information interfaces in the respective country. Navigating an interface in an unfamiliar language can be challenging and cumbersome. More often than not, poorly accessible language menu are of little to no help. Implicitly inferring a user’s language proficiency helps relieving customer frustration and boosts the user experience of the system. The following image shows a sketch of such a language-aware interface.
In the second half of April, I had the pleasure to attend the 10th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, usually called “PacificVis”, that was hosted this year by the Seoul National University in South Korea. I gave a talk at PacificVis about our Notes paper “Implicit Sphere Shadow Maps”. It presents a way to render high-quality soft shadows for particle data sets in real time.
During this spring, I spent two months at the Multimedia Signal Processing Group led by Prof. Dr. Dietmar Saupe at the University of Konstanz. During this stay I had the opportunity to meet many researchers who work in blind image and video quality assessment and pursue my research work.
Within the research group Cognition & Control in Human-Machine Systems at Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, we want to study fundamental principles of human perception, and translate them to a variety of applied fields, including the design of virtual environment. One of our research interests, and topic of today’s blog post, is the perception of self-motion.
Members of the SFB TRR 161 have recently participated in an “Workshop on Crowdsourcing” at the University of Konstanz. The organizers, Franz Hahn and Vlad Hosu, introduced the use of CrowdFlower for quantitative user-studies. The intention was to get participants familiar with the platform and the basic concepts of crowdsourcing for user studies. All participants were able to design and run their own hands-on experiment, to get a better feel of the challenges and benefits of crowdsourcing.
Inferring the 3D shape of objects shown in images is usually an easy task for a human. To solve it, our visual system simultaneously exploits a variety of monocular depth cues, such as lighting, shading, the relative size of objects or perspective effects. Perceiving the real world with two eyes even allows us to take advantage of another valuable depth cue, the so called binocular parallax. Because of the slightly different viewing position, the images projected to the retinas of both eyes will be slightly different. While objects close to the observer undergo a large displacement between the images, objects that are far away exhibit a small displacement. Because nearly all this happens unconsciously, we usually do not realize how tough this problem really is.
Spatial Memory is an essential part of our everyday life: There is no need for a map to find the way to our best friend’s home, we know where to find milk cartons in our preferred supermarket, and most of the time we remember where we placed the remote control of our TV. In a similar way, spatial memory and technology can be also combined: The desktop of our laptop represents a physical desktop and like in a physical environment, documents and tools can be placed at different positions. Navigating to them is easy when done regularly.
With increasing realism of computer graphics and virtual worlds and digital characters look more and more natural. However, the effect of Uncanny Valley, first described in 1970, prevents too realistic human characters from being accepted. In my Ph.D. thesis, I investigate how the Uncanny Valley affects the user experience in virtual environments and virtual reality and how the effect can be avoided.
