We’ve listed some current and recent projects at the Virtual Embodiment Lab:

Moon Phases

Learning Moon Phases in Virtual Reality is an ongoing collaboration with the Cornell Physics Department. Together we built a virtual environment in which students can learn about moon phases in an interactive space. The environment situates students above the north pole or far above the earth as they grab the moon and move it around themselves while watching it change phases. Throughout this experience, students are quizzed as they interact and learn the material.

The graduate student leads for this project are Byungdoo Kim, Jack Madden, Swati Pandita, and Yilu Sun

Idea Generation

This project by VHIL alumna Yilu Sun explored nonverbal behavior during competitive and collaborative creative ideation. A poster describing the design and validation of the movement visualization module was presented at IEEE VR in Reutlingen, Germany on March 21, and the first full paper presenting the results of the study was just published in PLOS One.  Materials related to the study can be found here.

Companionship

In the companionship project, we are studying the effects of social support in virtual environments on pain perception.

Grocery Study

In this study, participants were asked to shop in a virtual grocery store for one week’s worth of groceries in a “food desert”. Items varied in relative health benefits as well as price, with each participant having a budget of $60.

Senior research assistant Aishwariyah Dhyan Vimal led this phase of the project.

NOTE: We are in the process of gathering details and images of several other projects in the VEL which will be added soon.