Projects

Immersive User Interface in VR Environment
In this project, we are developing methods to provide the users intuitive and immersive ways to interact within virtual environments combining a variety of sensory devices including motion capture devices, surface electromyography devices, and electroencephalography devices.
-Hyun Joon Shin, PhD, Ajou University

Virtual Exertions: a user interface combining visual information, kinesthetics and biofeedback for virtual object manipulation
Virtual Reality environments have the ability to present users with rich visual representations of simulated environments.  However, means to interact with these types of illusions are generally unnatural in the sense that they do not match the methods humans use to grasp and move objects in the physical world.  We demonstrate a system that enables users to interact with virtual objects with natural body movements by combining visual information, kinesthetics and biofeedback from electromyograms (EMG).  Our method allows virtual objects to be grasped, moved and dropped through muscle exertion classification based on physical world masses.  We show that users can consistently reproduce these calibrated exertions, allowing them to interface with objects in a novel way.
-Kevin Ponto, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Effective Replays and Summarization of Virtual Experiences
Direct replays of the experience of a user in a virtual environment is difficult for others to watch due to unnatural camera motions. We present methods for replaying and summarizing these egocentric experiences that effectively communicate the user’s observations while reducing unwanted camera movements. Our approach summarizes the viewpoint path as a concise sequence of viewpoints that cover the same parts of the scene. The core of our approach is a novel content dependent metric that can be used to identify similarities between viewpoints. This enables viewpoints to be grouped by similar contextual view information and provides a means to generate novel viewpoints that can encapsulate a series of views. These resulting encapsulated viewpoints are used to synthesize new camera paths that convey the content of the original viewer’s experience. Projecting the initial movement of the user back on the scene can be used to convey the details of their observations, and the extracted viewpoints can serve as bookmarks for control or analysis. Finally we present performance analysis along with two forms of validation to test whether the extracted viewpoints are representative of the viewer’s original observations and to test for the overall effectiveness of the presented replay methods.
-Kevin Ponto, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Virtual Sound rendering
As audio plays a very important role in the virtual experience, the goal of this project is to develop a scheme to approximately simulate acoustic phenomena in virtual environments. By approximately reproducing the phenomena, we believe that we can provide a better awareness of the virtual environment and improve the user's immersion into it.
-Hyun Joon Shin, PhD, Ajou University

Cultivating Imagination Project
Successfully engaging patients in adopting positive health behaviors and extinguishing negative ones may rely more on expanding their capacities for imagination than on the plethora of currently available cognitive behavioral approaches.  Imagination shares key features with the human characteristic of mindfulness, and, with proper training and practice, may demonstrate benefits far beyond acceptance of what is to the ability to envision and achieve what might be, and form a robust basis for healthy living.  Yet systematic study of imagination and its potential for clinical value has remained out of grasp for the over 100 years that psychologists have realized its importance.  Recent developments in computer technologies and virtual reality now afford the chance to systematically characterize imagination, determine the extent to which it can be cultivated in individuals, and create clinical interventions unhampered by the challenges faced by existing cognitive behavioral treatment approaches.  The purpose of this research project is to accelerate the engagement of individuals in their own health by applying emerging computer technologies to better understand the human experience of imagination, to discern alignment between various approaches to manipulating and measuring imagination, and to evaluate interventions.  We have assembled a team of senior scholars in the fine arts, computer sciences, engineering and health sciences who have made a commitment to dedicate substantial time toward understanding each other perspectives, leveraging them to best understand imagination, and to address clinical concerns.  We will adopt innovative project management approaches, drawn from computer-supported cooperative workgroup lessons, to engage our internal research team as well as the larger scientific and technical communities towards these efforts.

Creating knowledge about imagination as an atomic human skill by characterizing it, using an innovative visual immersion experience to cultivate or inhibit it, and devising individual and community interventions that activate and reinforce imagination may be a breakthrough in eliminating behavior-induced medical disease.
-Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Just-in-Time Information for Consumers
If a house could look inside its refrigerator and report back on what it found, would that help the people living in that house eat healthier meals? The home may be the ultimate site for behavioral interventions in the general public.  Library and information science (LIS) brings a valuable perspective to these interventions. Unlike medicine and nursing, in LIS, the information-seeker is the focus of the process. This focus places control with the information-seeker rather than with the healthcare professional. This is an ideal perspective from which to investigate preclinical behaviors around health-related information and to isolate specific components of diabetes and nutrition information which “contribute most to behavior change and long-term clinical benefit.” Virtual reality (VR) is a technology that allows us to study individual agency, in action: and information in context, as it is used in real-time by healthy consumers. I want to understand this dimension of information behavior through exploratory research. VR CAVE™s may provide sufficient contextual cues to best test real-world, real-time approaches.
-Catherine Arnott Smith, PhD, University of Madison-Wisconsin 

Trauma Bay Scenario
This project works to simulate an ER trauma bay based on similar training space in the UW Hospital Simulation Center and enables users to diagnose and treat a simulation of tension pneumothorax.  The thrust of this project is to further develop and utilize this scenario to conduct research on individual and team performance in stressful trauma settings.  We also hope to evaluate the efficacy of medical procedural training in a virtual environment, while offering an opportunity to develop multiple clinical scenarios in varied settings for medical teamwork and procedural training.  Ideally, this scenario will help other researchers create improved clinical spaces and instrumentation where practitioners can deliver medical care.
-Robert Radwin, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Virtual Box Project
The aim of this project is to investigate how observers perceive and physically localize 3D virtual objects in a CAVE&trade. Real and virtual cubes of varying size, vertical and horizontal locations relative to the observer will presented physically and projected inside of the six-sided CAVE&trade. Participants are then asked to stand on a mark projected on the floor and touch a specific corner of the projected cube using the stylus tip of an ultrasonic tracked wand pointer.  The exact corner location is recorded when the subject presses a trigger on the wand.  This project is a pilot study in preparation for development of virtual environments for simulating homes and workplaces, with the ultimate objective to have scenarios where participants interact with virtual objects in a more natural way that using a wand.
-Robert Radwin, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison