Panels

There were a lot of very interesting panels. I wish I could have been to all of them. Here is a brief summary of the panels I did attend.

Virtual Reality and Design

Quantifying Immersion in VR had a visually interesting experiment in which the bottom line was that training in a HMD/VE is superior to training from a monitor screen. However, it was not that the training was superior, rather the significant data represented that it was far worse to train on the HMD, possibly making that type of training unsafe.

Moving Cows in Space In listening to this paper I began to wonder why we insist on using physically stressful arm gestures to acomplish tasks in VR which mimic gestures of those which we use in reality. We are still locked into using the body in virtual environments like in real environments. New physiological methods of manipulating space are needed. Using hands and arms to move objects vs. looking at an object and pressing buttons. We are still designing systems which require outstretched arms. No need for such muscle fatigue in VR. Translate all arm moves 90 degrees in x so arm is down (making use of real gravity). How to physiologically "ride" the system needs to be re-addressed.

Sarnoff Corporation did not have a booth on the floor or in the garden but David Zeltzer was floating around with some very interesting literature on the JOVE.

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