In 1992 I first read Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. I was influenced by many things in that book, but one thing that struck me in particular was the way the Metaverse (a term Stephenson coined for that novel) relied on good facial expression. In the story, Juanita, an expert on facial expression, implements the…
One of the goals of our lab is to allow people in a shared mixed reality to collaborate together in manipulation of objects. Those objects might be real solid physical objects, or they might virtual objects, which exist only in our collective visual and auditory perception. One challenge is to create a seamless way of…
In the next few years SmartPhones will be augmented, and eventually replaced, by wearables. When that happens, we will be able to see and hear digital information floating in the air between and around us, even in casual conversation. This will have profound effects on everything from work to education to entertainment to social interaction.…
One of my heroes in the field of computer graphics, Lance Williams, once told me that one of the wonderful things about CGI is that it “is limited only by your imagination.” Accepting that realization gives us enormous power as creators, yet Peter Parker’s uncle Joe was also right when he cautioned that “with great…
I am currently working on ways to interact with four dimensional objects in virtual and mixed reality. It’s pretty much the realization of a childhood dream of mine. I always wondered what it would be like to be able to interact with objects that have four spatial dimensional, right here in our own world. As…
When I was a kid I would watch a cartoon called Tennessee Tuxedo and his Tales on Saturday morning TV. Tennessee Tuxedo, who was a penguin, would go on all sorts of adventures with his pal Chumley, who was a walrus. Whenever they ran into a problem they couldn’t solve, they would go to their…
This evening the students in my graduate computer graphics class showed their final projects. It was quite unlike anything I have ever seen. The projects were group experiences, with every participant wearing an Oculus Quest VR headset. With the help of WebVR software our research team had provided, the students created shared amazing interactive shared…
Today at the start of my graduate graphics class we showed a VR metaroom demo with multiple people in the classroom wearing Quest VR headsets, holding controllers and collaborating over WebVR. We made it even more interesting by having the entire scene — the room with all of its furniture and the avatars of all…
This last week or so I’ve been building a parallel world. I measured all of the sizes in a section of our lab — walls, floors, tables, and so forth. Then I built a computer graphic copy of that world, matching the real thing down to the centimeter. I can walk around in my parallel…
Today I surprised the 27 students in my graduate computer graphics class. I handed out an Oculus Quest VR system to every student. They will each get to use the Quest for the rest of the semester. They will be able to take the Quests home with them, and use them any way they like.…