Department of Computer Science - The University of Iowa

My talk will focus on work that I conducted since August 2007 in the Hank Virtual Environment Laboratory at the University of Iowa in the areas of applied perception and virtual humans in immersive virtual environments. My talk will cover two research projects: one on interception and avoidance tasks in kids and adults in immersive virtual environments, and the other on the social influence of a peer in children's bicycle riding behavior.

Interception and avoidance tasks involve coordinating one's actions with the movements of other objects in the environment. We conducted a study to investigate how bicyclists adjust their speed to pass through a moving gap crossing their line of travel in an immersive virtual reality bicycle simulator. Our research suggests that cyclists appeared to use a multi-staged strategy to put themselves in a position where they could accelerate into the gap in the last few seconds.

I will also introduce a programmatically controlled peer cyclist, for the purpose of studying how social interactions influence children's bicycle riding behavior. The peer is controlled through a combination of reactive controllers that determine gross motion of the virtual bicycle, action-based controllers that animate the virtual bicyclist and generate verbal behaviors, and a keyboard interface that allows an experimenter to initiate the virtual bicyclist's actions during the course of an experiment. In a pilot study we found that, when children rode with the peer, there was a significant influence on the size of gaps taken as well as time left to spare between the participant and the trailing car in the crossed gap.


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Investigating Applied Perception and Peer Influence in Immersive Virtual Environments

Dr. Sabarish Babu University of Iowa

Abstract

Dr. Sabarish Babu
University of Iowa