Crystal: a spherical Fish Tank VR display

Crystal is an interactive spherical 3D display based on fish tank VR that uses stereo and head-coupled virtual reality on high-resolution desktop displays. Our new class of fish tank VR display technology uses the spherical shape to create a contained virtual reality volume. It allows visualization and interaction with 360 degrees of visibility. We investigated the perceptual factors focusing on depth perception in the virtual environment. Prototypes of Crystal have been demonstrated in several conferences such as SIGCHI and IEEE VR.

Video

Publication

Qian Zhou, Fan Wu, Ian Stavness, and Sidney Fels. Closer object looks smaller: Investigating the duality of size perception in a spherical fish tank VR display. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2020, to appear [preprint_pdf]

Qian Zhou, Georg Hagemann, Dylan Fafard, Ian Stavness, and Sidney Fels. An evaluation of depth and size perception on a spherical fish tank virtual reality display. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 25(5): 2040–2049, 2019. [pdf] [video]

Qian Zhou, Fan Wu, Ian Stavness, and Sidney Fels. Match the cube: Investigation of the head-coupled input with a spherical fish tank virtual reality display. In IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), pages 1281–1282. IEEE, 2019. [pdf]

Qian Zhou, Gregor Miller, Kai Wu, Ian Stavness, and Sidney Fels. Analysis and practical minimization of registration error in a spherical fish tank virtual reality system. In Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), pages 519–534. Springer, 2016. [pdf]

CoGlobe: a co-located multi-person Fish Tank VR experience

We expanded the design of Crystal to supports multiple people co-located in a shared space working and playing together through two different multiplayer games and tasks. Additional viewers can also watch using a variation of mixed reality with a tracked mobile smartphone. Using a smartphone as a second screen registered to the same virtual world enables multiple people to interact together. Prototype of CoGlobe has been demonstrated during 2018 Siggraph Emerging Technologies

Video

Publications

Qian Zhou Georg Hagemann, Sidney Fels, Dylan Fafard, Andrew Wagemakers, Chris Chamberlain, and Ian Stavness. Coglobe: a co-located multi-person fish tank VR experience. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 Emerging Technologies, page 5-6. ACM, 2018. [pdf] [video]

Dylan Fafard, Qian Zhou, Chris Chamberlain, Georg Hagemann, Sidney Fels, and Ian Stavness. Design and implementation of a multi-person fish tank virtual reality display. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST), page 1-9. ACM, 2018. [pdf] [video]

Media and Press

2019 Siliconrepublic Could this large ‘crystal ball’ display be the future of collaborative VR?
2019 City News in Vancouver ‘Crystal ball’ takes virtual reality to next level
2019 Siggraph CoGlobe: Collaborative VR in a Fish Tank

Gripmark: Transform Hand Grips into Tangible Input in MR

Gripmarks is a system that enables users to opportunistically use objects they are already holding as input surfaces for mixed reality head-mounted displays (HMD). Leveraging handheld objects reduces the need for users to free up their hands or acquire a controller to interact with their HMD. Gripmarks associate a particular hand grip with the shape primitive of the physical object without the need of object recognition or instrumenting the object. From the grip pose and shape primitive we can infer the surface of the object. We explore two categories of input objects 1) tangible surfaces and 2) tangible tools with representative applications.

Publication

Qian Zhou, Sarah Sykes, Sidney Fels, and Kenrick Kin. Gripmarks: Using hand grips to transform in-hand objects into Mixed Reality input. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2020, to appear. [preprint_pdf]

Automatic Calibration of Multiple-projector Display System

Modeling the projector as an inverse camera, we estimate the intrinsic and extrinsic projector parameters automatically using a set of projected images. A single camera is placed beneath to observe partially visible projected patterns. Using the correspondence between the observed pattern and the projected pattern, we reconstruct the shape of the spherical display and finally recover the 3D position of each pixel on the display. We demonstrate our automatic approach can achieve an on-surface point mismatch less than 1mm and line mismatch less than 1 degree on a 30 cm diameter spherical screen. The calibration approach is accurate for a desktop 3D display and can be applied to other multiple-projector displays with vairous shapes of screens.

Video

Publication

Qian Zhou, Gregor Miller, Kai Wu, Daniela Correa, and Sidney Fels. Automatic calibration of a multiple-projector spherical fish tank VR display. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), pages 1072–1081. IEEE, 2017. [pdf] [video]

Qian Zhou, Kai Wu, Gregor Miller, Ian Stavness, and Sidney Fels. 3dps: An auto-calibrated three-dimensional perspective-corrected spherical display. In Virtual Reality (VR), 2017 IEEE, pages 455–456. IEEE, 2017. [pdf]

I Got Your Point: Perceiving Pointing Gesture in the Virtual Environment

We designed and evaluated an intelligent virtual agent (IVA) that can point to some location in reality as accurately as a real person. We conducted studies to assess different pointing gestures and compared the performance with real person pointing in reality. Our IVA design mitigated the known ambiguity due to the eye-fingertip alignment commonly found in human pointing and provided design strategies for visual representations of IVA’s pointing gestures.

Publication

Fan Wu, Qian Zhou, Kyoungwon Seo, Toshiro Kashiwaqi, and Sidney Fels. I got your point: An investigation of pointing cues in a spherical fish tank virtual reality display. In IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), pages 1237–1238. IEEE, 2019. [pdf]

Realistic Eye Contact in the Virtual Environment

We describe the design, implementation and initial evaluation of a spherical Fish Tank Virtual Reality (FTVR) display for realistic eye-contact. We identify display shape, size, and depth cues as well as model fidelity as important considerations and challenges for setting up realistic eye-contact and package it into a reproducible framework.

Publication

Georg Hagemann, Qian Zhou, Ian Stavness, and Sidney Fels. Investigating spherical fish tank virtual reality displays for establishing realistic eye-contact. In IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and3D User Interfaces (VR), pages 950–951. IEEE, 2019. [pdf]

Georg Hagemann, Qian Zhou, Ian Stavness, Oky Dicky Ardiansyah Prima, and Sidney S Fels. Here’s looking at you: A spherical ftvr display for realistic eye-contact. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS), pages 357–362. ACM, 2018. [pdf]