Connor DeFanti

Hi everyone, I’m sad to say that this will be my last blog post for the FRL, as I will be leaving here Friday after 5 years working with the lab. It’s been a great journey working with everyone here! My original plan was to write a retrospective on what I’ve done in the lab,

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a quick and easy calibration method. This calibration method allowed us to not only map a virtual space to a physical space with reasonable accuracy, but synchronize a virtual space between multiple users. However, as I used this method in practice with the new Oculus Quest, I

Last Sunday, I successfully defended my dissertation on Co-Located Augmented and Virtual Reality Systems, thus completing my Ph.D. program here are the lab. It’s been a wonderful time over these past 5 years, and the FRL has been a great place to study. *Of course, this isn’t the end for me, but really just the

One of the things our lab has been doing for several years now has been taking people in the same physical space and placing them in a shared virtual space. One of the tricky things about this is that most virtual reality applications have some sort of built-in tracking system, but do not yet have

I have been working hard on my thesis, but it’s nice to take a break from thinking about it every once in a while, so I’m going to talk about something different today. I recently celebrated my 27th birthday, so naturally, cubes have been on my mind (wait, what do you mean that’s weird?)… In

I continually move closer and closer to defending my thesis every day. Today, I made some of the steps that push me into a final sprint! I’m quite excited to make these steps, so I’ll be writing about this today. The biggest of these steps was writing a rough draft of an abstract for the

This will be a shorter post than usual because I’ve been quite busy. Each day, I’m coming closer and closer to writing my Ph.D. thesis, and I wanted to give a very quick summary of what it will cover. Over the past 5 years at the FRL, I’ve been studying VR and AR, particularly in

I am getting closer and closer to graduation, which means that I am getting busier and busier. Sometimes, I find it helps to take a mental break from intense focus and think about something else for a little bit. So, today I’d like to write about something I find fun to program. One of the

When I was a kid, I used to enjoy playing with toy blocks. They were colorful and varied in size, but were otherwise nondescript. However, I never noticed the plainness of the blocks as a kid. To me, they were infinite in form, anything but plain. In those blocks, I saw buildings, spaceships, monsters, and