Tag Archives: VR

Familiar Stranger Army @ The Fringe

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A new performance piece melding live theatre and virtual reality has just opened as part of Army@TheFringe.

Familiar Stranger brings together live acting and virtual reality to tell the story of an Iraq War veteran returning to civilian life.

The 45-minute show is a collaboration between The University of Glasgow Department of Computing Science and Glasgow-based artist and coder collective RealRealReal.

Hosted in the Hepburn House Army Reserve Centre (Venue 210) in East Claremont Street, Edinburgh, it offers an insight into a veteran’s attempts to reintegrate into everyday life.

It opens with a monologue performed by career soldier Sergeant Major Garry Worrall, after which audiences are introduced to the Oculus Go VR headsets that plunge them into a virtual space, and the veteran’s inner life.

It ranges through his home and then into his memories of deployment – an experience that is simultaneously familiar and strange.

Afterwards the audience meet Garry again and have the chance to talk to him about his experiences in and out of the Army – opening up the space between the artists’ ideas of army life and his first hand knowledge.

Dr Julie Williamson, Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction at the university’s School of Computing Science, developed the technical set up and collaborated on the script.

She said:“Virtual reality is often considered a solitary activity, but I’m interested in exploring how we can use virtual spaces to expand shared experiences.

“Working with Dennis Reinmuller and Debbie Moody from RealRealReal and Army@TheFringe has given us a great opportunity to explore how theatre can be melded with VR to create an experience that can’t be delivered any other way.”

Familiar Stranger features the voice of Louise Oliver as The Magazine Soldier, guiding the viewer through the fictional veteran’s memory. The music is created by Sarah J Stanley of HQFU together with RealRealReal.

Army@TheFringe is presented by Army Headquarters Scotland as a way of engaging with wider society through the arts and initiating discussion about soldiering.

The venue, which runs from 10 to 25 August, is staffed by soldiers who run the bar and front of house services, and who mingle with the public before and after shows.

Familiar Stranger if supported by the University of Glasgow’s Dean’ Fund.

It runs until 24 August with performances at 1pm, 3.45pm and 6.45pm daily.

Public and Performative Interaction @ CHI 2018

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We are presenting two papers at ACM CHI 2018.  The links below will provide an open access copy of these papers.

Object Manipulation in Virtual Reality Under Increasing Levels of Translational Gain

Room-scale Virtual Reality (VR) has become an affordable consumer reality, with applications ranging from entertainment to productivity. However, the limited physical space available for room-scale VR in the typical home or office environment poses a significant problem. To solve this, physical spaces can be extended by amplifying the mapping of physical to virtual movement (translational gain). Although amplified movement has been used since the earliest days of VR, little is known about how it influences reach-based interactions with virtual objects, now a standard feature of consumer VR. Consequently, this paper explores the picking and placing of virtual objects in VR for the first time, with translational gains of between 1x (a one-to-one mapping of a 3.5m*3.5m virtual space to the same sized physical space) and 3x (10.5m*10.5m virtual mapped to 3.5m*3.5m physical). Results show that reaching accuracy is maintained for up to 2x gain, however going beyond this diminishes accuracy and increases simulator sickness and perceived workload. We suggest gain levels of 1.5x to 1.75x can be utilized without compromising the usability of a VR task, significantly expanding the bounds of interactive room-scale VR.

Acoustic levitation enables a radical new type of human-computer interface composed of small levitating objects. For the first time, we investigate the selection of such objects, an important part of interaction with a levitating object display. We present Point-and-Shake, a mid-air pointing interaction for selecting levitating objects, with feedback given through object movement. We describe the implementation of this technique and present two user studies that evaluate it. The first study found that users could accurately (96%) and quickly (4.1s) select objects by pointing at them. The second study found that users were able to accurately (95%) and quickly (3s) select occluded objects. These results show that Point-and-Shake is an effective way of initiating interaction with levitating object displays.

ACM DL Author-ize servicePoint-and-Shake: Selecting from Levitating Object Displays

Euan Freeman, Julie Williamson, Sriram Subramanian, Stephen Brewster
CHI ’18 Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018