Monthly Archives: March 2013

First Group Assignment

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For class 4/4/13

Each team will give a short presentation.  The presentation should include

A brief description of your project

  • what you are attempting to accomplish?
  • what are your overall goals?

Description of the user’s experience

  • Does the user have a goal?
  • How will the user interact with the system?
  • What happens if the user doesn’t do what they are supposed to?

Equipment

  • What software and hardware do you plan to use
What are you most confident about knowing how to do?
What are you most unsure about knowing how to do?

Rough Timeline 

  • What contingency plans do you have?
  • What is the bare minimum you would consider a success?

 

 

 

Group Assignments

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Trying to determine teams was actually much more difficult than I thought.  I believe this alignment does not include anyone working on a project that they indicated they did not want to work on and should have a decent amount of overlap of interest.

The first steps are to come up with a team name and determine a project of mutual interest for the group.  Please email with an questions or concerns.

Group 1
Jerry C
Natalie
Hasti
Jerry H

Group 2
CC
Nick H
Kevin M
Lauren

Group 3
Russel
Dan
Nick P

Reading 8 (Due Wednesday, 3/20)

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Our reading for this week will be for class discussion on Thursday, March 21st. Discussion comments are due Wednesday, March 20th by 11:59 PM.

Questioning naturalism in 3D user interfaces
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2330687
By Doug A. Bowman, Ryan P . McMahan, and Eric D. Ragan
Communications of the ACM 2012 vol. 55 (9)

Note: The above link to ACM.org requires you to be on a campus Wi-Fi / wired network. Alternately, you can log into the UW Libraries site and retrieve the article PDF through this link.

Discussion: Please answer at least two of the questions below with at least a paragraph-length comment.

Question 1

Effective naturalistic 3DUIs may require higher fidelity input and feedback hardware than “magic” (i.e. non-naturalistic) 3DUIs. For some techniques especially, such as redirected walking, this hardware becomes elaborate to the point of impracticality. Do you agree or disagree with these statements, and why?

Question 2

Naturalistic 3DUIs are often successful when they plausibly recreate an interaction technique, or “metaphor”, previously used in physical reality. Non-naturalistic 3DUIs do not always have physical or real-world equivalents. Does this difference make non-naturalistic 3DUIs a more creative possibility space, or merely make them more difficult to develop and evaluate?

Question 3

Over the years, interactions that were considered arbitrary, unnatural or indirect have become commonplace—“natural”, even. This might include writing with a pen, typing on a keyboard, or moving a computer mouse in relation to a pointer on a screen. Therefore, are “natural” interactions best defined as “common and relatable” techniques, or as a set of techniques imposed by physical limitations?

Question 4

Suppose the attempts to develop the best possible system for high-fidelity three-dimensional user interfaces reach two divergent endpoints:

  1. Ultimate “naturalism”: a matter-manipulating “display” system, as imagined by Ivan Sutherland in “The Ultimate Display”, which could support any arbitrary physical interaction with perfect fidelity. Essentially, the system integrates “virtual reality” directly into the physical reality the user experiences normally.
  2. Ultimate “magic”: a highly sophisticated brain-computer interface, which could support arbitrarily abstract interactions unbound by physical limitations. This system allows “virtual-reality” to entirely replace the physical reality currently experienced by the user.

Based on your valuations of naturalistic and “magic” 3DUIs, which would you prefer? Which would be more practical? More powerful?

Lab Safety Training at WID on Tuesday, 3/19

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Hi all, Joe here with some info on what we’ll be doing in class on Tuesday, March 19th.

First, I’ll be subbing for Kevin this coming Tuesday and Thursday, since he’s out of town at IEEE 3DUI and IEEE VR (in Florida, at Walt Disney World, as you do).

More importantly, we’ll be doing lab safety training on Tuesday at WID, after which we’ll have a short training quiz to administer. This safety training is important, albeit less engaging than, say, meeting with your project groups and discussing ideas. Since we want to move on to the fun part of class on Tuesday, we ask that you please review the LEL CAVE Training Guide document before then.

LEL CAVE Training Guide (PDF)
http://blogs.discovery.wisc.edu/ds501/files/2013/02/Official-LEL-CAVE-Training-Guide.pdf

Reading 8 Extension

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The due date for comments for Reading 8 (soon to be posted) will be due Wednesday 3/20/13 at 11:59pm as opposed to our normal time at Sunday 3/17/13 at 11:59pm.  Remember that the second part of Assignment 3 is due on Sunday.

Rescheduling Office Hours

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This talk ended up running much longer than scheduled.  Please email me right away if you tried to meet with me today and we will find another time.  I will put rescheduled office hours next Friday on top of my office hours Thursday.

 

Project Pitches

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Pitches from Day 1

Jerry H
 Planting Music: Use gestures to cultivate music experiences

Hasti
Haunted Hotel: Create a frightening ghost based experience

Jerry C
Stainless Steel World:  Build worlds with real time realistic materials
Interior Spaces: Create realistic environments with emphasis on real time effects.

ChengCheng
Desert: Create a game like experience of surviving a desert
Under Water: Create the experience of “swimming with the fishes”

Kevin M
Kowloon Walled City: Create the experience of being in a strange location inspired by a real locale.

Dan
Street CAVE: Visualize google street view immersively for virtual tourism.
Wizard Duel: Be a wizard!

Nick P
Shipping Crates: Locate objects in the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc.
Magic Doors: Experience the door room from Monster’s Inc.

Nick H
Immersive Learning Environment: Create a static environment useful for teaching languages
Modeling WID Building: Create a accruate representation of the WID building
Scale Across the Universe: Create a visualization that is able to convey scale across a wide variety of objects
Historical Spaces: Explore spaces that we can no longer go to

Pitches from Day 2

Natalie
Portkey: Use objects to teleport to different environments like in Harry Potter

Lauren
Impossible Scaling Environment: Environments that change their scale as you enter them

Russel
Mountain Resort:  Escape a mountain resort by skiing down a mountain