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While they have long been a subject of academic study, social virtual reality (SVR) systems are now attracting increasingly large audiences on current consumer virtual reality systems. The design space of SVR systems is very large, and relatively little is known about how these systems should be constructed in order to be usable and efficient. In this paper we present Ubiq, a toolkit that focuses on facilitating the construction of SVR systems. We argue for the design strategy of Ubiq and its scope. Ubiq is built on the Unity platform. It provides core functionality of many SVR systems such as connection management, voice, avatars, etc. However, its design remains easy to extend. We demonstrate examples built on Ubiq and how it has been successfully used in classroom teaching. Ubiq is open source (Apache License) and thus enables several use cases that commercial systems cannot.

Computer-Generated Holography (CGH) offers the potential for genuine, high-quality three-dimensional visuals. However, fulfilling this potential remains a practical challenge due to computational complexity and visual quality issues. We propose a new CGH method that exploits gaze-contingency and perceptual graphics to accelerate the development of practical holographic display systems. Firstly, our method infers the user's focal depth and generates images only at their focus plane without using any moving parts. Second, the images displayed are metamers; in the user's peripheral vision, they need only be statistically correct and blend with the fovea seamlessly. Unlike previous methods, our method prioritises and improves foveal visual quality without causing perceptually visible distortions at the periphery. To enable our method, we introduce a novel metameric loss function that robustly compares the statistics of two given images for a known gaze location. In parallel, we implement a model representing the relation between holograms and their image reconstructions. We couple our differentiable loss function and model to metameric varifocal holograms using a stochastic gradient descent solver. We evaluate our method with an actual proof-of-concept holographic display, and we show that our CGH method leads to practical and perceptually three-dimensional image reconstructions.

In recent years, everyday activities such as work and socialization have steadily shifted to more remote and virtual settings. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the switch from physical to virtual has been accelerated, which has substantially affected various aspects of our lives, including business, education, commerce, healthcare, and personal life. This rapid and large-scale switch from in-person to remote interactions has revealed that our current technologies lack functionality and are limited in their ability to recreate interpersonal interactions. To help address these limitations in the future, we introduce "Telelife," a vision for the near future that depicts the potential means to improve remote living better aligned with how we interact, live and work in the physical world. Telelife encompasses novel synergies of technologies and concepts such as digital twins, virtual prototyping, and attention and context-aware user interfaces with innovative hardware that can support ultrarealistic graphics, user state detection, and more. These ideas will guide the transformation of our daily lives and routines soon, targeting the year 2035. In addition, we identify opportunities across high-impact applications in domains related to this vision of Telelife. Along with a recent survey of relevant fields such as human-computer interaction, pervasive computing, and virtual reality, the directions outlined in this paper will guide future research on remote living.

With the continuing development of affordable immersive virtual reality (VR) systems, there is now a growing market for consumer content. The current form of consumer systems is not dissimilar to the lab-based VR systems of the past 30 years: the primary input mechanism is a head-tracked display and one or two tracked hands with buttons and joysticks on hand-held controllers. Over those 30 years, a very diverse academic literature has emerged that covers design and ergonomics of 3D user interfaces (3DUIs). However, the growing consumer market has engaged a very broad range of creatives that have built a very diverse set of designs. Sometimes these designs adopt findings from the academic literature, but other times they experiment with completely novel or counter-intuitive mechanisms. In this paper and its online adjunct, we report on novel 3DUI design patterns that are interesting from both design and research perspectives: they are highly novel, potentially broadly re-usable and/or suggest interesting avenues for evaluation. The supplemental material, which is a living document, is a crowd-sourced repository of interesting patterns. This paper is a curated snapshot of those patterns that were considered to be the most fruitful for further elaboration., Comment: 24 pages, 15 figures

Virtual Reality (VR) has become more and more popular with dropping prices for systems and a growing number of users. However, the issue of accessibility in VR has been hardly addressed so far and no uniform approach or standard exists at this time. In this position paper, we propose a customisable toolkit implemented at the system-level and discuss the potential benefits of this approach and challenges that will need to be overcome for a successful implementation., Comment: This work was presented at the ACM CHI 2021 Workshop on Design and Creation of Inclusive User Interactions Through Immersive Media. https://sites.google.com/view/acm-chi-iicw21/home

Sketch and speech are intuitive interaction methods that convey complementary information and have been independently used for 3D model retrieval in virtual environments. While sketch has been shown to be an effective retrieval method, not all collections are easily navigable using this modality alone. We design a new challenging database for sketch comprised of 3D chairs where each of the components (arms, legs, seat, back) are independently colored. To overcome this, we implement a multimodal interface for querying 3D model databases within a virtual environment. We base the sketch on the state-of-the-art for 3D Sketch Retrieval, and use a Wizard-of-Oz style experiment to process the voice input. In this way, we avoid the complexities of natural language processing which frequently requires fine-tuning to be robust. We conduct two user studies and show that hybrid search strategies emerge from the combination of interactions, fostering the advantages provided by both modalities., Comment: Published at IMX 2021

A lot of work in social virtual reality, including our own group's, has focused on effectiveness of specific social behaviours such as eye-gaze, turn taking, gestures and other verbal and non-verbal cues. We have built upon these to look at emergent phenomena such as co-presence, leadership and trust. These give us good information about the usability issues of specific social VR systems, but they don't give us much information about the requirements for such systems going forward. In this short paper we discuss how we are broadening the scope of our work on social systems, to move out of the laboratory to more ecologically valid situations and to study groups using social VR for longer periods of time.

In the past twelve months, our team has had to move rapidly from conducting most of our user experiments in a laboratory setting, to running experiments in the wild away from the laboratory and without direct synchronous oversight from an experimenter. This has challenged us to think about what types of experiment we can run, and to improve our tools and methods to allow us to reliably capture the necessary data. It has also offered us an opportunity to engage with a more diverse population than we would normally engage with in the laboratory. In this position paper we elaborate on the challenges and opportunities, and give some lessons learned from our own experience.

There are many potential measures that one might use when evaluating mixed-reality experiences. In this position paper I will argue that there are various stances to take for evaluation, depending on the framing of the experience within a larger body of work. I will draw upon various types of work that my team has been involved with in order to illustrate these different stances. I will then sketch out some directions for developing more robust measures that can help the field move forward.

Collaboration using mixed reality technology is an active area of research, where significant research is done to virtually bridge physical distances. There exist a diverse set of platforms and devices that can be used for a mixed-reality collaboration, and is largely focused for indoor scenarios, where, a stable tracking can be assumed. We focus on supporting collaboration between VR and AR users, where AR user is mobile outdoors, and VR user is immersed in true-sized digital twin. This cross-platform solution requires new user experiences for interaction, accurate modelling of the real-world, and working with noisy outdoor tracking sensor such as GPS. In this paper, we present our results and observations of real-time collaboration between cross-platform users, in the context of a geo-referenced virtual environment. We propose a solution for using GPS measurement in VSLAM to localize the AR user in an outdoor environment. The client applications enable VR and AR user to collaborate across the heterogeneous platforms seamlessly. The user can place or load dynamic contents tagged to a geolocation and share their experience with remote users in real-time., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, International Symposium of Mixed and Augmented Reality Conference, IEEE

Grounded haptic devices can provide a variety of forces but have limited working volumes. Wearable haptic devices operate over a large volume but are relatively restricted in the types of stimuli they can generate. We propose the concept of docking haptics, in which different types of haptic devices are dynamically docked at run time. This creates a hybrid system, where the potential feedback depends on the user's location. We show a prototype docking haptic workspace, combining a grounded six degree-of-freedom force feedback arm with a hand exoskeleton. We are able to create the sensation of weight on the hand when it is within reach of the grounded device, but away from the grounded device, hand-referenced force feedback is still available. A user study demonstrates that users can successfully discriminate weight when using docking haptics, but not with the exoskeleton alone. Such hybrid systems would be able to change configuration further, for example docking two grounded devices to a hand in order to deliver twice the force, or extend the working volume. We suggest that the docking haptics concept can thus extend the practical utility of haptics in user interfaces.

Drawing tools for Virtual Reality (VR) enable users to model 3D designs from within the virtual environment itself. These tools employ sketching and sculpting techniques known from desktop-based interfaces and apply them to hand-based controller interaction. While these techniques allow for mid-air sketching of basic shapes, it remains difficult for users to create detailed and comprehensive 3D models. In our work, we focus on supporting the user in designing the virtual environment around them by enhancing sketch-based interfaces with a supporting system for interactive model retrieval. Through sketching, an immersed user can query a database containing detailed 3D models and replace them into the virtual environment. To understand supportive sketching within a virtual environment, we compare different methods of sketch interaction, i.e., 3D mid-air sketching, 2D sketching on a virtual tablet, 2D sketching on a fixed virtual whiteboard, and 2D sketching on a real tablet. %using a 2D physical tablet, a 2D virtual tablet, a 2D virtual whiteboard, and 3D mid-air sketching. Our results show that 3D mid-air sketching is considered to be a more intuitive method to search a collection of models while the addition of physical devices creates confusion due to the complications of their inclusion within a virtual environment. While we pose our work as a retrieval problem for 3D models of chairs, our results can be extrapolated to other sketching tasks for virtual environments., Comment: 10 pages

Coarse building mass models are now routinely generated at scales ranging from individual buildings through to whole cities. For example, they can be abstracted from raw measurements, generated procedurally, or created manually. However, these models typically lack any meaningful semantic or texture details, making them unsuitable for direct display. We introduce the problem of automatically and realistically decorating such models by adding semantically consistent geometric details and textures. Building on the recent success of generative adversarial networks (GANs), we propose FrankenGAN, a cascade of GANs to create plausible details across multiple scales over large neighborhoods. The various GANs are synchronized to produce consistent style distributions over buildings and neighborhoods. We provide the user with direct control over the variability of the output. We allow her to interactively specify style via images and manipulate style-adapted sliders to control style variability. We demonstrate our system on several large-scale examples. The generated outputs are qualitatively evaluated via a set of user studies and are found to be realistic, semantically-plausible, and style-consistent., Comment: project page: http://geometry.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/2018/frankengan/

We suggest a rasterization pipeline tailored towards the need of head-mounted displays (HMD), where latency and field-of-view requirements pose new challenges beyond those of traditional desktop displays. Instead of rendering and warping for low latency, or using multiple passes for foveation, we show how both can be produced directly in a single perceptual rasterization pass. We do this with per-fragment ray-casting. This is enabled by derivations of tight space-time-fovea pixel bounds, introducing just enough flexibility for requisite geometric tests, but retaining most of the the simplicity and efficiency of the traditional rasterizaton pipeline. To produce foveated images, we rasterize to an image with spatially varying pixel density. To reduce latency, we extend the image formation model to directly produce "rolling" images where the time at each pixel depends on its display location. Our approach overcomes limitations of warping with respect to disocclusions, object motion and view-dependent shading, as well as geometric aliasing artifacts in other foveated rendering techniques. A set of perceptual user studies demonstrates the efficacy of our approach.