Technical Papers

Date/Time: 04 – 13 December 2020
All presentations are available in the virtual platform on-demand.

Lecturer(s):
Ana Serrano, Universidad de Zaragoza, Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Germany
Daniel Martin, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
Diego Gutierrez, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
Karol Myszkowski, Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Germany
Belen Masia, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain

Bio:

Description: Virtual Reality (VR) systems increase immersion by reproducing users’ movements in the real world. However, several works have shown that this real-to-virtual mapping does not need to be precise in order to convey a realistic experience. Being able to alter this mapping has many potential applications, since achieving an accurate real-to-virtual mapping is not always possible due to limitations in the capture or display hardware, or in the physical space available. In this work, we measure detection thresholds for lateral translation gains of virtual camera motion in response to the corresponding head motion under natural viewing, and in the absence of locomotion, so that virtual camera movement can be either compressed or expanded while these manipulations remain undetected. Finally, we propose three applications for our method, addressing three key problems in VR: improving 6-DoF viewing for captured 360º footage, overcoming physical constraints, and reducing simulator sickness. We have further validated our thresholds and evaluated our applications by means of additional user studies confirming that our manipulations remain imperceptible, and showing that (i) compressing virtual camera motion reduces visible artifacts in 6-DoF, hence improving perceived quality, (ii) virtual expansion allows for completion of virtual tasks within a reduced physical space, and (iii) simulator sickness may be alleviated in simple scenarios when our compression method is applied.