Cinematic VR, Collaborative VR/AR, Immersive Analytics of Honey Bee Data, WebGL

In 2018, we are going to start our meetup with invited speakers, talking about WebGL, Cinematic VR, Collaborative AR/VR and beyond. Keep checking this space for updates.

Mie Moth-Poulsen, 'Can you Cut It? An Exploration of the Effects of Editing in Cinematic Virtual Reality'

The vast development of Virtual Reality (VR) displays and 360 degree video cameras has sparked an interest in bringing cinematic experiences from the screen and into VR. However, Cinematic Virtual reality is a new and relatively unexplored area within academic research. Historically editing has provided filmmakers with a powerful tool for shaping stories and guiding the attention of audiences. However, will an immersed viewer, experiencing the story from inside a 360 degree fictional world, find cuts disorienting? This question, founded two iterative studies investigating the application of editing in Cinematic Virtual Reality and if this causes disorientation for the viewer.

Huyen Nguyen, 'Immersive Analytics of Honey Bee Data'

Bees are dying – in recent years an unprecedented decline in honey bee colonies has been seen around the globe. The causes are still largely unknown. At CSIRO, the Global Initiative for Honey bee Health (GIHH) is an international collaboration of researchers, beekeepers, farmers, and industry set up to research the threats to bee health in order to better understand colony collapse and find solutions that will allow for sustainable crop pollination and food security. Integral to the research effort is RFID tags that are manually fitted to bees. The abundance of data being collected by the thousands of bee-attached sensors as well as additional environmental sensors poses a number of challenges with regard to the interpretation and comprehension of the data, both computationally as well as from a user perspective. In this talk, Huyen will discuss visual analytics techniques that have been investigated at CSIRO DATA61 to facilitate an effective path from data to insight, with a particular focus on interactive and immersive user interfaces that allow for a range of end users to effectively explore the complex sensor data.

Rowan Hughes, 'Data-Driven Real-Time Crowd Simulation'

In order to create plausible virtual humans it is important to model their movement and interactions with their environment in an accurate and realistic manner. A lot of time and effort is spent by artists and engineers modelling user interactions with virtual agents with which the user acts directly. Virtual crowds, however, form an important component of virtual worlds. It is generally not feasible to author scripted behaviours and interactions for individual members large virtual crowds, and it typical to rely on systems that allow for autonomous navigation and behaviour. In this talk, we look at some solutions developed over the course of Rowan’s research.

Carlos Dominguez, 'Extended Reality for Teaching – A web based solution'

Extended reality is the term used to describe all the immersive realities: virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and diminished reality. A web based solution incorporates those realities into the web using different frameworks such as a-frame, ar.js, html5, argon.js and other javascript libraries and APIs. Those objects then are incorporated into the academic curriculum resulting in Immersive Learning Objects (iLos). Our goal is to create iLos as auxiliary learning tools.

During the meetup, we'll have pizza :-)