Colloquium Computer Science - Prof. Eelke Folmer (University of Nevada)

Title: How do we move around? Solving Virtual Reality's Locomotion Problem.

Abstract: Virtual reality (VR) has finally emerged from research labs into consumer hands and has significant potential to shape the future of how we interact with computers. Where navigating 3D environments has been a fundamental appeal of PC games, enabling this in VR has been a challenge. VR sickness as the result of visual-vestibular conflict is considered a major barrier towards the large scale adoption of VR. This talk will present some research results on exploring walking-based locomotion techniques that generate some or many of the afferents of real walking and that allows users to navigate at scale without becoming VR sick. Additionally we present some research that aims to improve teleportation by minimizing spatial disorientation and more effective use of available tracking space.

Biography. Eelke is a Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he is the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Eelke Folmer received his MS (Technical Computing Science) and PhD (Software Engineering) from the University of Groningen in 2001 and 2005. He spend a year as a Postdoc at the University of Alberta in 2005 focusing on the software engineering challenges of game development. In 2006, he accepted a tenure track assistant professor position in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2014, he spent his sabbatical at Google Research where he worked on Google Tango & Google Cardboard. His research interests have spanned from software engineering, human-computer interaction, accessibility, assistive technology, augmented reality (Google Glass) to currently: virtual reality. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and the National Institute of Health.