Where was Professor Won from March 18th-22nd? Venice Beach? Nope. Aruba? Not quite. How about Reutlingen, Germany? You got it!

Won traveled to IEEE VR 2018, the 25th IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces at the Stadthalle Reutlingen in Reutlingen, Germany. On March 21st, Professor Won presented on a panel that discussed how social reality should work. Because there are now several social applications for virtual reality systems that are reaching a broader audience, more users are starting to immerse themselves in these environments for longer periods of time. By using these applications, users are performing tasks in different spaces with a different representation of humans.

The lab’s presence at the conference is not ephemeral, however. On March 21st, Omar Shaikh, a member of the Virtual Embodiment Lab since 2016, presented research from the VEL’s Idea Generation project headed by Yilu Sun.  The “Movement Visualizer for Networked Virtual Reality Platforms”  tracked and presented two individual’s live movements and their association (in this case, a measure of nonverbal synchrony) in a consumer networked virtual reality platform. Such a visualizer can be useful when comparing other variables such as the topics of conversation and self-reported variables (e.g., concentration level).

To take a deeper dive into the research, click here to see the poster abstract!  The code for the visualizer can also be downloaded through the published link in the abstract.