ICRA 2015 Workshop: Challenges in Virtual Reality

The 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

ICRA 2015 WORKSHOP: Challenges in Virtual Reality

Date: 26 May 2015, Time: 8:30am - 5:30pm
Location: Room 604, Washington State Convention Center
Organizers: Steve LaValle (UIUC), Ming Lin (UNC), and Paul MacNeilage (LMU Munich)

We gratefully acknowledge partial support provided by Oculus/Facebook.

Thanks everyone for making this a fascinating and successful gathering!

Motivation:

What is all the hype about? Virtual reality (VR) has been around for decades, but the systems were never compelling enough to match the hype, excitement, and hopes that a generation of people had for this technology to change our everyday lives. It is different now, really! Thanks to recent advances in technology, high-fidelity, low-cost, portable VR headsets are widely available. For a few hundred dollars, they offer immersive experiences that are as good or better than previously obtained by older setups costing tens of thousands or even millions of dollars. Significant attention was generated by Oculus VR, when it was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, with other large companies investing in VR, including Google, Microsoft, Sony, Qualcomm, Valve, HTC. Samsung. The race is on to transform our lives on this exciting new medium or platform.

Due to their comfort with sensing, filtering, and control in the physical world, roboticists are well positioned to make crucial advances in this rising field. What should be we doing? Through telepresence, we can offer a new generation of virtual travel, telesurgery, and distributed social interaction systems. We can also contribute to systems that track motions in the physical world and bring representations of moving bodies into the VR space. To make contributions, it will become important for us to understand VR issues in the larger context, which extends well outside of robotics.

The goal of this workshop on virtual reality is to bring together experts from three areas: 1) the virtual reality industry, where current technological limitations and their possible near-term solutions are well understood; 2) perceptual psychology, where scientists strive to characterize interactions between vision, auditory, and vestibular systems under the unusual stimuli provided by this technology; 3) roboticists who want to build virtual reality systems and experiences. This unusual mix of experts should help develop an appreciation among attendees of the complex, low-level interactions between the hardware and the human body. An improved understanding could lead researchers to pursue new directions and interdisciplinary collaborations in this exciting and growing area of research.

Schedule:


Times	Speakers	Topic	Slides
Robotics Perspective
8:30-8:40	Steve LaValle, UIUC	Introduction, overview	[pdf]
8:40-9:10	Ming Lin, UNC Chapel Hill	Real-time Multimodal Interaction for VR
9:10-9:40	Allison Okamura, Stanford	Augmented Reality with Haptics for Medical Applications	[pdf]
9:40-10:10	Juan D. Tardos, U. Zaragoza	Real-time visual SLAM for precise user tracking in Virtual Reality
10:10-10:30	Break
Industry Perspective
10:30-11:00	Richard Yao, Oculus/Facebook	Perception is a Lazy Scientist
11:00-11:30	David Kasik, Boeing	The Visualization Business in Boeing
11:30-12:00	Abe Bachrach, Skydio	Unlocking the potential of drones	[pdf]
12:00-1:30	Lunch
Human Physiology/Psychology Perspective
1:30-2:00	Marty Banks, UC Berkeley	The importance of focus cues in 3D displays
2:00-2:30	Dana Ballard, UT Austin	Why do we look where we look?
2:30-3:00	Paul MacNeilage, LMU Munich	Deconstructing self-motion perception for VR
3:00-3:30	Break
3:30-4:00	John Stowers, IMP Vienna	Reverse Engineering Animal Vision with Virtual Reality and Genetics
VR Demo and Feedback Session
4:00-5:30	Socialize, discuss, have fun!

Special VR Demo and Feedback Session:

For the last part of the workshop, we invite participants to bring VR demos into the room to stimulate discussions, brainstorm, and get feedback from VR experts and fellow enthusiasts. If offering a demo is not feasible, then showing videos will alternatively suffice. "Official" demos/presentations:

Elizabeth A. Buffalo, Maria McKinley, Yoni Browning, Michael Jutras, Kelly Morrisroe, U. of Washington,
Using Virtual Reality to Assess Navigation and Spatial Memory in Nonhuman Primates, [VIDEO]
Alejo Concha and Javier Civera, U. of Zaragoza,
DPPTAM: Dense Piecewise Planar Tracking and Mapping from a Monocular Sequence
Raul Mur-Artal and Juan D. Tardos, U. of Zaragoza,
Monocular SLAM for User Viewpoint Tracking in Virtual Reality

In addition, all participants are welcome to "unofficially" present demos and discuss their projects with experts from the workshop. With a little luck, we can make some new friends and separate into interesting, diverse groups for dinner and drinks after the workshop.