IIS: Effectively Harnessing Virtual Environments Technology for Visualization and Design

在这个项目中，PI将领导一个跨学科团队，探索如何有效地利用虚拟现实技术在可视化和设计方面的全部潜力。研究的具体重点将放在建筑应用上。在此背景下，PI将寻求通过头戴式显示器和大型投影屏幕对大型沉浸式3D虚拟环境进行准确和直观的空间理解。对于通过头戴式显示器呈现的环境，PI将探索用户空间感知和存在感的准确性如何受到以下因素的影响：提供用户身体的忠实表现；提供低延迟的视觉和触觉反馈，关于在真实和虚拟环境中共存的跟踪对象的大小和距离的用户；并提供空间化的3D环境声音提示。对于通过立体大屏幕后投影系统呈现的信息，PI将探索观众如何获得对内部或外部最准确的直观空间理解的能力受到以下问题的影响：向人们展示从尽可能接近他们自己眼睛位置的视点生成的场景图像的重要性，包括横向和距离地面的距离；通过投影系统显示的虚拟环境中，观众可能采用对尺寸和距离关系的解释的条件，该投影系统基于对图片中尺寸和距离的解释的假设，而不是直接观看场景中的尺寸和距离的解释；当考虑在大屏幕上显示时，是否越大越好，或者是否最大的好处来自于以“真人大小”显示场景，但显示太大可能会产生负面后果。PI将进一步探索改进的隐喻的设计和评估，以便通过大规模沉浸式虚拟环境实现直观的运动，以及在这种环境中有效地使用抽象来表示不确定或模糊的信息。更广泛的影响：这项工作将导致从仔细的人类受试者实验中得出的基本观察和经验法则，这将为涉及虚拟环境使用的广泛研究工作提供信息，如科学和信息可视化、态势感知和多样性培训等领域。它还将导致建筑教育的改进，这源于虚拟环境技术的有效使用，以教授视觉想象的基本概念，并将以自我为中心的视角整合到设计过程的早期阶段。

In this project, the PI will lead an interdisciplinary team in a quest for fundamental insights into how to effectively harness the full potential of virtual reality technology for visualization and design. The specific focus of the research will be on architectural applications. Within this context, the PI will seek to enable accurate and intuitive spatial understanding of large, immersive 3D virtual environments presented both via head mounted displays and on large projection screens. For environments presented via a head mounted display, the PI will explore how the accuracy of the user's spatial perception and sense of presence is affected by factors such as: providing a faithful representation of the user's body; providing low latency visual and haptic feedback about the sizes and distances from the user of tracked objects that co-exist in both the real and virtual environments; and providing spatialized 3D ambient sound cues. For information presented via a stereoscopic large screen rear-projection system, the PI will explore how the viewer's ability to attain a maximally accurate intuitive spatial understanding of an interior or exterior is impacted by questions such as: the importance of presenting people with an image of a scene that is generated from a viewpoint that is as close as possible to their own eye position, both laterally and in distance from the ground; the conditions under which the viewer is likely to adopt an interpretation of size and distance relationships in a virtual environment shown via a projection system that is based on the assumptions that underlie interpretations of size and distance in pictures, as opposed to interpretations of size and distance in directly viewed scenes; and whether, when considering display on a large screen, bigger is always better, or if the maximum benefit comes from displaying a scene at "life size" with the possibility that negative consequences might arise from displaying things too large. The PI will further explore the design and evaluation of improved metaphors for enabling intuitive locomotion through very large scale immersive virtual environments, as well as the effective use of abstraction for the representation of uncertain or ambiguous information in such environments.Broader Impacts: This work will lead to basic observations and rules of thumb derived from careful human subjects experiments that will inform a broad range of research efforts involving the use of virtual environments, in such domains as scientific and information visualization, situational awareness, and diversity training. It will also result in improvements in architectural education stemming from the effective use of virtual environment technology to teach fundamental concepts in visual imagination and integration of an egocentric perspective into the earliest stages of the design process.