Stony Brook University – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

December 3, 2018

Pixvana and Limbix Aim to Combat Adolescent Depression Using VR

Pixvana is best known for its cloud-based virtual reality (VR) platform Spin Studio. Recently, the company announced a partnership with VR healthcare firm Limbix to create interactive immersive therapy for adolescent depression and anxiety.

Pixvana - VR Therapy

Through a collaboration between Pixvana, Limbix, Stony Brook, UT Austin, and Harvard researchers, they’re developing experiences that depict various situations that could lead to depression in adolescents. This, in turn, teaches teens how their brain functions and how thoughts and feelings develop, which will enable them to learn about controlling them as well as changing them for the better.

“The purpose of the project is not only to bring insight into depression – and let kids know they aren’t alone in their struggles – but also to teach kids how to process, confront and work through their feelings and challenges,” said Elise Ogle, Program Manager at Limbix in a statement. “Pixvana served as the perfect production partner, allowing us to focus on the lesson plan and research integration, while they ensured high-quality video and provided expert consultation.”

The VR project was filmed at Youngstown Arts and Cultural Center using a Google Jump camera, with each scene attempting to depict situations in a gender and age appropriate context so they can be shown in school classrooms. They will also be used by the professional therapist community.

Pixvana - VR Therapy scene

“The use of virtual reality as a medium can quickly put adolescents in familiar classroom settings, or immerse them in real-life scenarios, engaging them in a very meaningful, safe and lasting way,” said Rachel Lanham, Chief Operating Officer at Pixvana. “It’s an immersive and stimulating learning experience, and highly effective at communicating important messages and coping strategies. We hope this project can make a difference among teens by using technology to help break down stigmas that may exist about depression.”

VRFocus will continue its coverage relating to the latest VR therapy’s, reporting back with more announcements.

May 31, 2018

Infinite Walking In VR Thanks To A Clever Brain Hack

Locomotion in virtual reality (VR) has been something of a challenge for developers. For the most immersive experience, VR should be able to track the movement of the user, moving when they do, but this comes with several issues, though these might be solved thanks to the work of a group of researchers.

Computer scientists from Stony Brook University, Nvidia and Adobe have been working together to create a new framework that allows VR users to experience infinite walking in the virtual world, even though they are limited to a small physical space in the real world.

The framework utilises a natural function of the human eye in order to ‘hack’ the brain. The work revolves around something called the saccade. This is something that they human eye does when looking at different points in ur field of vision, such as when scanning a room of viewing a painting. These saccades occur without conscious direction and can happen several times in a second.

When a saccade is happening, the brain ignores the input coming in from the eye to avoid confusion, something called ‘saccadic suppression’. The process used by the research team takes advantage of this by using head and eye-tracking to detect when saccadic suppression is occurring and redirects the users’ walking path, making them walk in a circle without being consciously aware of it.

“In VR, we can display vast universes; however, the physical spaces in our homes and offices are much smaller,” says lead author of the work, Qi Sun, a PhD student at Stony Brook University and former research intern at Adobe Research and NVIDIA. “It’s the nature of the human eye to scan a scene by moving rapidly between points of fixation. We realized that if we rotate the virtual camera just slightly during saccades, we can redirect a user’s walking direction to simulate a larger walking space.”

The research paper produced is titled ‘Towards Virtual Reality Infinite Walking: Dynamic Saccade Redirection’ and the team will be presenting their work at SIGGRAPH 2018, which is due to take place from 12th-16th August in Vancouver, Canada.

For news on the latest developments in VR technology, keep checking back with VRFocus.

April 27, 2018

Researchers Exploit Natural Quirk of Human Vision for Hidden Redirected Walking in VR

Researches from Stony Brook University, NVIDIA, and Adobe have devised a system which hides so-called ‘redirected walking’ techniques using saccades, natural eye movements which act like a momentary blindspot. Redirected walking changes the direction that a user is walking to create the illusion of moving through a larger virtual space than the physical space would allow.

Update (4/27/18): The researchers behind this work have reached out with the finished video presentation for the work, which has been included below.

Original Article (3/28/18): At NVIDIA’s GTC 2018 conference this week, researchers Anjul Patney and Qi Sun presented their saccade-driven redirected walking system for dynamic room-scale VR. Redirected walking uses novel techniques to steer users in VR away from real-world obstacles like walls, with the goal of creating the illusion of traversing a larger space than is actually available to the user.

There’s a number of ways to implement redirected walking, but the strengths of this saccade-driven method is that it’s hidden from the user, widely applicable to VR content, and dynamic, allowing the system to direct users away from objects newly introduced into the environment, and even moving objects, the researchers say.

The basic principle behind their work is an exploitation of a natural quirk of human vision—saccadic suppression—to hide small rotations to the virtual scene. Saccades are quick eye movements which happen when we move our gaze from one part of a scene to another. Instead of moving in a slow continuous motion from one gaze point to the next, our eyes quickly dart about, when not tracking a moving object or focused on a singular point, a process which takes tens of milliseconds.

An eye undertaking regular saccades

Saccadic suppression occurs during these movements, essentially rendering us blind for a brief moment until the eye reaches its new point of fixation. With precise eye-tracking technology from SMI and an HTC Vive headset, the researchers are able to detect and exploit that temporary blindness to hide a slight rotation of the scene from the user. As the user walks forward and looks around the scene, it is slowly rotated, just a few degrees per saccade, such that the user reflexively alters their walking direction in response to the new visual cues.

This method allows the system to steer users away from real-world walls, even when it seems like they’re walking in a straight line in the virtual world, creating the illusion that the the virtual space is significantly larger than the corresponding virtual space.

A VR backpack allows a user at GTC 2018 to move through the saccadic redirected walking demo without a tether. | Photo by Road to VR

The researchers have devised a GPU accelerated real-time path planning system, which dynamically adjusts the hidden scene rotation to redirect the user’s walking. Because the path planning routine operates in real-time, Patney and Sun say that it can account for objects newly introduced into the real world environment (like a chair), and can even be used to steer users clear of moving obstacles, like pets or potentially even other VR users inhabiting the same space.

The research is being shown off in a working demo this week at GTC 2018. An academic paper based on the work is expect to be published later this year.

The post Researchers Exploit Natural Quirk of Human Vision for Hidden Redirected Walking in VR appeared first on Road to VR.

March 29, 2018

Want More Space for Roomscale VR? NVIDIA Research can do This Virtually

Roomscale virtual reality (VR) technology is a wonderful thing. It allows you to explore a virtual world with your own feet, being able to wander round a room and interact with objects as if you were really there. While the HTC Vive system for example can cover an area of 15ft x 15ft everyone doesn’t necessarily have that amount of space to work with, meaning walls and other furniture can quickly be bumped into if not careful. So during the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2018, NVIDIA Research demonstrated a new technique its been working on in collaboration with Adobe and Stony Brook University to make physical areas seem much bigger in VR.

NVIDIA redirected walking path1

Called Saccadic Redirected Walking, the technique utilises a quirk in your eyes where involuntary movements temporarily blind you a few times per second. These movements, known as saccades, are imperceptible because they last only tens of milliseconds.

So during those fractions of a second the technique rotates the scene ever so slightly. What this does without the user noticing it is guide them on a physical path that’s ever so slightly different to the one they’re viewing in the virtual world. As shown in the image above, this means the physical path of the player can be small whilst in VR it can seem far larger, imagine walking round a grand hall just in your living room. This also helps with avoiding objects like walls, or other players if systems are setup up nearby.

NVIDIA is demoing the technique this week at the VR Village using Quadro GPUs, HTC Vive and SMI eye tracking, with guests able to walk around a huge virtual Alice in Wonderland-like chess board with pieces the size of people, all within a 15×15 foot booth.

HTC Vive stock image 4

The teams will be taking the research to SIGGRAPH later this year to present a paper on the technique. As development progresses and further details released, VRFocus will keep you updated.