From June 12nd-17th, the 8th International UBI Summer School (UBISS) 2017 took place at the University of Oulu, Finland. The summer school comprised four parallel 6-day workshops. Prof. Norbert Haala and me from the University of Stuttgart visited Oulu as instructors of one of the four workshops – Virtual City Models.
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.
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.
At the end of last month, Michael Klein from 7reasons, Vienna, visited the Visualization Research Center of the University of Stuttgart (VISUS). Within the Lecture Series “Visual Computing“ carried out by the Universities of Stuttgart and Konstanz within the research project SFB-TRR 161, he gave an enlightening talk about the application of computer graphics for cultural heritage preservations.