It has not been an easy first year for ViAjero – the world has been turned upside down due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and some of the fantastic research we wanted to pursue in cars and planes has had to be postponed. However, despite these setbacks, we have been making exciting progress towards some of ViAjeRo’s key aims! New people have joined the project, with Daniel Pires de Sá Medeiros joining as an RA looking at passenger interaction techniques. On the papers front, we’ve published on the key challenges in passenger MR [1], workspaces suited to confined spaces [2] (see below, presented at ACM UIST), the feasibility of neurostimulation [3, 4], ethical challenges in mixed reality [5] and auditory mixed reality [6, 7].
We’ve given talks about the project to the likes of the Waterkant festival, Audi, and BBC R&D, and seen great interest in the concept of passenger mixed reality. Development wise, here’s a sneak peek of our in-car platform being tested in Glasgow, complete with accurate position and orientation tracking of a vehicle…
On the neurostimulation side, Gang Li and Frank Pollick have been building the platform needed to explore the physiological signals that might indicate the onset of motion sickness…
And regarding lab work, we recently took receipt of a RotoVR chair, which will enable us to explore motion sickness from the safety of a lab environment!
We hope that in the coming year society can start to get back to normal and beat Covid-19, and we’ll be pursuing more passenger MR research so that, when travel resumes, people can make the most of their travel time!
References
[1] M. McGill, J. Williamson, A. Ng, F. Pollick, and S. Brewster, “Challenges in passenger use of mixed reality headsets in cars and other transportation,” Virtual reality, 2019.
[2] M. Mcgill, A. Kehoe, E. Freeman, and S. Brewster, “Expanding the bounds of seated virtual workspaces,” Acm trans. comput.-hum. interact., vol. 27, iss. 3, 2020.
[3] G. Li, M. McGill, S. Brewster, and F. Pollick, “A review of electrostimulation-based cybersickness mitigations,” in 2020 ieee international conference on artificial intelligence and virtual reality (aivr), 2020.
[4] Honorable Mention Award G. Li, M. Varela, A. Francisco Habib, Q. Zhang, M. McGill, S. Brewster, and F. Pollick, “Exploring the feasibility of mitigating vr-hmd-induced cybersickness using cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation,” in 2020 ieee international conference on artificial intelligence and virtual reality (aivr), 2020.
[5] J. Gugenheimer, M. McGill, S. Huron, C. Mai, J. Williamson, and M. Nebeling, “Exploring potentially abusive ethical, social and political implications of mixed reality research in hci,” in Extended abstracts of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, USA, 2020, p. 1–8.
[6] M. McGill, S. Brewster, D. McGookin, and G. Wilson, “Acoustic transparency and the changing soundscape of auditory mixed reality,” in Proceedings of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, USA, 2020, p. 1–16.
[7] M. McGill, F. Mathis, M. Khamis, and J. Williamson, “Augmenting tv viewing using acoustically transparent auditory headsets,” in Acm international conference on interactive media experiences, New York, NY, USA, 2020, p. 34–44.