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. …
My favorite thing to do when I teach my graduate computer graphics is live coding. Don’t get me wrong. I love working through mathematical principles on the whiteboard. I really enjoy free-ranging conversations with the class on various topics. But live coding is in its own category. That’s the moment when the class sees me …
A few years from now you go out to a local hangout with your date. The two of you, together with lots of other people in the room, put on your XR glasses,. Suddenly you are all sharing another world. You can walk around in that world, listen to stories, play games, experience moments of …
I was asked to give a lightning talk this week, part of a series of lightning talks on related topics. I was told that the talk is to last 15 minutes, and that I can’t use more than five slides. I found this contraint to be highly refreshing. Rather than meander all over the place, …
