Simulating Virtual Environments

Simulating Virtual Environments screenshot

While I was working at EVENTLab I helped to build and execute an experiment. This experiment aimed to measure how different kinds of input and visualization affected the presence perception in a virtual reality environment. All this research and its results were published in a technical paper called Simulating Virtual Environments within Virtual Environments as the Basis for a Psychophysics of Presence at SIGGRAPH 2010.

In the experiment, a person wearing a fullbody MoCap suit was tracked and a virtual avatar replicated her movements. This person could see her virtual self via an HMD, immersed in a small room with a couple of tables and a mirror.

My tasks

To model and texture the scene in which the participants would appear, to integrate and help debug the library that maps a real body to the virtual avatar, to implement the various input and visualization methods and finally to execute the experiment to many random people.

Credits