Our new iSpace multi-modal VR sim­u­la­tor was first pub­licly demon­strat­ed at the SIAT show­case on 5. Feb 2011, togeth­er with the Sympathetic Guitar project by Jay Vidyarthi which pro­vides the live accom­pa­ni­ment for the video below that we shot during the demo.

This was the first public demo of new iSpace (Riecke) Lab Virtual Reality Simulator at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University, Canada, as pre­sent­ed at the SIAT show­case on February 5, 2011. 
The goal of the iSpace VR sim­u­la­tor is to pro­vide a flex­i­ble research appa­ra­tus to study human spa­tial per­cep­tion, cog­ni­tion, and behav­iour in repro­ducible, clear­ly defined and con­trol­lable exper­i­men­tal con­di­tions. We are using Virtual Reality to pro­vide a multi-modal, fairly nat­u­ral­is­tic and immer­sive stim­uli in a closed action-per­cep­tion loop. 

The Sympathetic Guitar walks the line between art and sci­ence, being both a man­i­fes­ta­tion of its cre­ator’s cul­tur­al lin­eage and the sub­ject of an exper­i­ment on social inter­ac­tions with tech­nol­o­gy. The gui­tarist’s hand posi­tion and per­for­mance dynam­ics are used to mod­u­late a deep dig­i­tal sitar drone as real-time accom­pa­ni­ment. The project rep­re­sents an explo­ration of whether a human-com­put­er inter­face can be designed specif­i­cal­ly to gen­er­ate an engag­ing social­ly-immer­sive rela­tion­ship with its user. See http://vimeo.com/17421550 for details.

iSpace Simulator Demo Video:

Driving through a vir­tu­al city:

Sympathetic Guitar Video:

The iSpace pro­gram is cen­tered on inves­ti­gat­ing what con­sti­tutes effec­tive, robust, and intu­itive human spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion and behav­iour. This fun­da­men­tal knowl­edge will be applied to design novel, more effec­tive human-com­put­er inter­faces and inter­ac­tion par­a­digms that enable sim­i­lar process­es in com­put­er-medi­at­ed envi­ron­ments like vir­tu­al real­i­ty (VR) and multi-media.

To tackle this ambi­tious agenda, we had to design and build our own flex­i­ble research appa­ra­tus, which con­sists of a motion chair mount­ed on top of a “cir­cu­lar tread­mill” (see illustrations/video), which allows us to phys­i­cal­ly rotate par­tic­i­pants and/or elicit com­pelling self-rota­tion illu­sions (induced by bio­me­chan­i­cal cues from step­ping along with the rotat­ing turntable). To design and build such a setup (which is com­mer­cial­ly unavail­able), we start­ed a highly fruit­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion with sev­er­al pro­fes­sors in Mechatronics and employed three Mechatronics 3^rd year under­grad­u­ate stu­dents as part of a co-op place­ment and later as RAs. Together, we start­ed to iter­a­tive­ly design, build, and eval­u­ate a world­wide unique multi-modal VR lab for perceptual/behavioural exper­i­ments (see pic­tures below). The most chal­leng­ing part, the con­struc­tion of the cir­cu­lar tread­mill-based motion sim­u­la­tor was recent­ly suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed by the three under­grad­u­ates and was the center piece of the show­case. This includ­ed the design and 3D mod­el­ing of the mechan­i­cal com­po­nents in solid­works includ­ing sim­u­la­tion and stress test­ing as well as the selec­tion and inte­gra­tion of the elec­tron­ics, motors, con­trol, gears, etc. and basic inter­fac­ing to a con­trol com­put­er. Together with my grad­u­ate stu­dents, we are cur­rent­ly work­ing on the 3D visual, 3D audi­to­ry, and subsonic/vibrational sim­u­la­tion, part of which is show­cased in the above video/pictures.

Thanks:

SIAT: all iSpacers

Mechatronics:

Supervision: Professors Gary Wang & Siamak Arzanpour

3^rd year under­grad­u­ates: Etienne Naugle, Adam Hoyle & Anton Brosas