Jason Jerald of NextGen Interactions has been involved with creating computer graphics and next-generation 3D computer interfaces for 20 years. His virtual reality consulting client list ranges from Oculus VR, Valve and Sixense Entertainment to NASA Ames Research Center, Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, Naval Research Laboratories, HRL Laboratories, DARPA & NIH.

We talk about some of his research and thoughts on VR latency, simulator sickness, presence and VR input devices & 3D user interface constructs. We also cover highlights from the IEEE VR, 3DUI, SIGGRAPH & Neurogaming conferences.

Topics

0:00 Intro

1:58 Consulting work with Oculus VR

2:46 Jason’s Ph.D work in reducing latency leading to work with Valve & Oculus VR

4:08 The 20ms latency threshold target

5:41 Research process for measuring VR latency

7:37 Other VR user studies comparing 3D user interface tasks with 2D equivalents

9:00 3D User Interface (3DUI) conference contest

10:46 The importance of VR hand input, point-to-fly UIs, & going beyond 2D menu constructs

12:43 VR input options of vision-based systems, physical based devices and data gloves

15:01 Comparing and contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of VR input devices

16:19 IEEE VR highlights including the Head-Mounted Display panel that Jason moderated

19:07 IEEE VR perspective on Facebook acquisition, and Henry Fuchs’ inspirational keynote.

20:24 The biases towards low-risk dissertations that prevented academia from making a VR breakthrough

22:25 IEEE VR Unity 3D workshop, MiddleVR, Virtual Human Toolkit, and AutoVerb binaural audio plug-in

25:27 Adoption of Unity in Academia

27:04 Academic VR frameworks & toolkits and UE4

28:04 Unity Asset Store and the Impulsonic AutoVerb Unity Plug-in for binaural audio

28:54 SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference and it’s connection to Virtual Reality

30:27 Jason’s background in real-time 3D graphics

31:24 Neurogaming conference impressions

32:34 Tradeoff of consumer EEG interfaces of ease of use vs. more powerful EEG signals with more electrodes & paste.

33:48 Using palm sweat and heart rate to measure VR presence

36:34 Quantitative and qualitative measures for researching simulator sickness

37:39 Sixense’s serious game grant for “Motion-Controlled Gaming for Neuroscience Education”

39:39 Potential of getting a VR dream job in academia

42:28 Keenly interested in the open problems of 3D user interfaces, researching simulator sickness best practices & moving towards higher-level VR problems rather than implementation

44:50 Wrap up and conclusion

Music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio