THE CAAV - Day #3

The shortest day, only in the morning.

Day 3 started with one of the developers of XR content for Microsoft Hololens and Oculus Rift.

Followed by a panel where the audience reported their own successes and failures when working with alliances with other institutions

One interesting presentation was from a from student at IU that's now part of the permanent staff at AVL there. He showed us his experience developing 4D VR demos, particularly a hot air balloon ride with hot lamps and fans around the user to enhance the experience (I posted picture of this experiment yesterday

And that's all from Bloomington, Indiana. Despite all the interesting presentations and demonstrations that I attended, I would argue that the most important outcome of this while experience was the various contacts with faculty and researchers of the field of virtual and augmented reality and visualization.

This might be an important step towards partnerships in national or even international projects. Time will tell!

THE CAAV - Day #2

Second day of the event started with us being reminded that serious games should first and foremost be playful (usually developers are always too concerned with the pedagogical aspects that they forget the ludic facet of such applications).

Then we learned about initiatives that are using VR as a means to attract people back to traditional libraries. The one presentation I liked the most discussed brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and the upcoming event of BCI Game Jam.

Then, a panel of specialists discussed trans-disciplinary collaborations followed by a presentation that discussed the creation of collaborative virtual environments where multiple users can interact in the same environment each one wearing its own VR gear.

During every break we get to try first-person on several applications developed by students and researchers presenting at the CAAV

We learned about the experience of our host the Indiana University regarding their virtual reality laboratory called Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL)

Another interesting presentation was on "Virtual Archeology" that explained that one characteristic of that field is that it is destructive, meaning that a dig can only be explored once before all be gone forever. By using VR its possible for a professor to explore the same scenario multiple times, for a fraction of the cost that bringing students to a remote location cost.

The day ended with a presentation of the sponsor where it was discussed the new technologies available for visualizing VR content, followed by the social event of the conference: bowling & billiards

THE CAAV - day #1

Hello all,

Today was day 1 of The CAAV - The Campus Alliance for Advanced Visualization) (https://rt.iu.edu/thecaav19/index.html) in Bloomington, IN.

In summary, I attended a series of presentations of several subjects involving virtual (and augmented) reality, applications, a discussion panel about hardware & software for VR/AR. Also, several demonstrations of applications of VR/AR developed by researchers and students from different universities.

Here some consideration I drew after pondering about what I heard, saw and discussed today:

• Regarding modeling solutions the following technologies have been mentioned:
  • Autodesk Revit
  • Blender
  • Autodesk Maya
  • Autodesk 3DS Max
  • Conduit
• Regarding game engines:
  • Unity (almost the totality of the projects mentioned it)
  • CryEngine
• Regarding augmented reality solutions:
  • AR toolkit (the majority)
  • Vuforia (mentioned several times)
• Other considerations:
  • Many universities mentioned that the fact they don't have a specific VR/Games program significantly impairs them on researching the field
  • General opinion regarding Unreal Engine vs Unity: UE is specific to games, Unity is general-purpose. Also, Unity is much less demanding in terms of computation demands = in conclusion: choose Unity

Below some pictures of the event and the demonstrations