Professor Eric Hodgson explores some of the psychological impacts of virtual reality when it comes to spatial perception & memory, and effects like change blindness. He also talks about how to walk in infinite VR spaces within limited physical spaces with a technique called redirected walking. Finally, he talks about insights from IEEE VR community on this consumer VR revolution, compares the split between the old VR community to the new VR community, 3D user interfaces, data visualizations, and some examples for how corporations and the military are using VR.

Eric Hodgson is the director of the Smale Visualization Center & also works with the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at the Miami University of Ohio. He runs the HIVE (huge immersive virtual environment), which is a gym-sized VR Lab. For more information on Eric, here’s some of his VR research publications.

Topics

0:00 Intro

1:04 Redirected Walking

3:50 Factors that go into spatial perception & visual dominance

5:26 Why was the HIVE lab built?

8:10 How our spatial memory works

10:49 Change blindness for changes that are out of the field of view

12:12 Navigating geometrically impossible spaces & how we mentally fill in gaps

13:29 Movement speeds in virtual environments – natural vs. VR movement speeds

14:38 Why VR movement speeds are 2x normal walking speeds. Field-of-view?

15:42 IEEEVR community perspective on the rise of consumer VR

17:20 The divide between Old VR vs New VR communities

19:03 Future of Professional VR companies & high-end VR markets

20:41 How the military is using VR

22:42 How corporations are using VR

25:04 Why now? The timing of this VR revolution. Previous low-end VR headsets

27:01 Cutting-edge demos and prototypes at IEEE VR conference

30:03 3DUI conference, and user interface research in VR environments

30:58 Highlights of the future of telepresence keynote from the IEEE VR conference

34:03 Where VR is headed within five years & what gets you excited about what’s to come

35:41 Data visualization within 3D VR environments

Links:

Music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio