Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10919/23759
The Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology is uniquely partnered with the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech. By forging a pathway between trans-disciplinary research and art, educational innovation, and scientific and commercial discovery, the institute works to foster the creative process to create new possibilities for exploration and expression through learning, discovery, and engagement.

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Browsing Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) by Author "Bowman, Douglas A."

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
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    3D Sketching and Flexible Input for Surface Design: A Case Study
    Leal, Anamary; Bowman, Douglas A. (Brazilian Computing Society (SBC), 2014)
    Designing three-dimensional (3D) surfaces is difficult in both the physical world and in 3D modeling software, requiring background knowledge and skill. The goal of this work is to make 3D surface design easier and more accessible through natural and tangible 3D interaction, taking advantage of users' proprioceptive senses to help them understand 3D position, orientation, size, and shape. We hypothesize that flexible input based on fabric may be suitable for 3D surface design, because it can be molded and folded into a desired shape, and because it can be used as a dynamic flexible brush for 3D sketching. Fabric3D, an interactive surface design system based on 3D sketching with flexible input, explored this hypothesis. Through a longitudinal five-part study in which three domain experts used Fabric3D, we gained insight into the use of flexible input and 3D sketching for surface design in various domains.
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    Bare-hand volume cracker for raw volume data analysis
    Socha, John J.; Laha, Bireswar; Bowman, Douglas A. (2016-09-28)
    Analysis of raw volume data generated from different scanning technologies faces a variety of challenges, related to search, pattern recognition, spatial understanding, quantitative estimation, and shape description. In a previous study, we found that the volume cracker (VC) 3D interaction (3DI) technique mitigated some of these problems, but this result was from a tethered glove-based system with users analyzing simulated data. Here, we redesigned the VC by using untethered bare-hand interaction with real volume datasets, with a broader aim of adoption of this technique in research labs. We developed symmetric and asymmetric interfaces for the bare-hand VC (BHVC) through design iterations with a biomechanics scientist. We evaluated our asymmetric BHVC technique against standard 2D and widely used 3DI techniques with experts analyzing scanned beetle datasets. We found that our BHVC design significantly outperformed the other two techniques. This study contributes a practical 3DI design for scientists, documents lessons learned while redesigning for bare-hand trackers and provides evidence suggesting that 3DI could improve volume data analysis for a variety of visual analysis tasks. Our contribution is in the realm of 3D user interfaces tightly integrated with visualization for improving the effectiveness of visual analysis of volume datasets. Based on our experience, we also provide some insights into hardware-agnostic principles for design of effective interaction techniques.
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    The Effects of Incorrect Occlusion Cues on the Understanding of Barehanded Referencing in Collaborative Augmented Reality
    Li, Yuan; Hu, Donghan; Wang, Boyuan; Bowman, Douglas A.; Lee, Sang Won (Frontiers, 2021-07-01)
    In many collaborative tasks, the need for joint attention arises when one of the users wants to guide others to a specific location or target in space. If the collaborators are co-located and the target position is in close range, it is almost instinctual for users to refer to the target location by pointing with their bare hands. While such pointing gestures can be efficient and effective in real life, performance will be impacted if the target is in augmented reality (AR), where depth cues like occlusion may be missing if the pointer’s hand is not tracked and modeled in 3D. In this paper, we present a study utilizing head-worn AR displays to examine the effects of incorrect occlusion cues on spatial target identification in a collaborative barehanded referencing task. We found that participants’ performance in AR was reduced compared to a real-world condition, but also that they developed new strategies to cope with the limitations of AR. Our work also identified mixed results of the effect of spatial relationships between users.
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    Exploring Effect of Level of Storytelling Richness on Science Learning in Interactive and Immersive Virtual Reality
    Zhang, Lei; Bowman, Douglas A. (ACM, 2022-06-21)
    Immersive and interactive storytelling in virtual reality (VR) is an emerging creative practice that has been thriving in recent years. Educational applications using immersive VR storytelling to explain complex science concepts have very promising pedagogical benefts because on the one hand, storytelling breaks down the complexity of science concepts by bridging them to people’s everyday experiences and familiar cognitive models, and on the other hand, the learning process is further reinforced through rich interactivity aforded by the VR experiences. However, it is unclear how diferent amounts of storytelling in an interactive VR storytelling experience may afect learning outcomes due to a paucity of literature on educational VR storytelling research. This preliminary study aims to add to the literature through an exploration of variations in the designs of essential storytelling elements in educational VR storytelling experiences and their impact on the learning of complex immunology concepts.
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    Force Push: Exploring Expressive Gesture-to-Force Mappings for Remote Object Manipulation in Virtual Reality
    Yu, Run; Bowman, Douglas A. (Frontiers Media, 2018-09-28)
    This paper presents Force Push, a novel gesture-based interaction technique for remote object manipulation in virtual reality (VR). Inspired by the design of magic powers in popular culture, Force Push uses intuitive hand gestures to drive physics-based movement of the object. Using a novel algorithm that dynamically maps rich features of hand gestures to the properties of the physics simulation, both coarse-grained ballisticmovements and fine-grained refinementmovements can be achieved seamlessly and naturally. An initial user study of a limited translation task showed that, although its gesture-to-force mapping is inherently harder to control than traditional position-to-position mappings, Force Push is usable even for extremely difficult tasks. Direct position-to-position control outperformed Force Push when the initial distance between the object and the target was close relative to the required accuracy; however, the gesture-based method began to show promising results when they were far away from each other. As for subjective user experience, Force Push was perceived as more natural and fun to use, even though its controllability and accuracy were thought to be inferior to direct control. This paper expands the design space of object manipulation beyond mimicking reality, and provides hints on using magical gestures and physics-based techniques for higher usability and hedonic qualities in user experience.
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    Immersive Analytics: Theory and Research Agenda
    Skarbez, Richard; Polys, Nicholas F.; Ogle, J. Todd; North, Christopher L.; Bowman, Douglas A. (Frontiers, 2019-09-10)
    Advances in a variety of computing fields, including "big data," machine learning, visualization, and augmented/mixed/virtual reality, have combined to give rise to the emerging field of immersive analytics, which investigates how these new technologies support analysis and decision making. Thus far, we feel that immersive analytics research has been somewhat ad hoc, possibly owing to the fact that there is not yet an organizing framework for immersive analytics research. In this paper, we address this lack by proposing a definition for immersive analytics and identifying some general research areas and specific research questions that will be important for the development of this field. We also present three case studies that, while all being examples of what we would consider immersive analytics, present different challenges, and opportunities. These serve to demonstrate the breadth of immersive analytics and illustrate how the framework proposed in this paper applies to practical research.
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    Move the Object or Move Myself? Walking vs. Manipulation for the Examination of 3D Scientific Data
    Lages, Wallace S.; Bowman, Douglas A. (Frontiers, 2018-07-10)
    Physical walking is consistently considered a natural and intuitive way to acquire viewpoints in a virtual environment. However, research findings also show that walking requires cognitive resources. To understand how this tradeoff affects the interaction design for virtual environments; we evaluated the performance of 32 participants, ranging from 18 to 44 years old, in a demanding visual and spatial task. Participants wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset counted features in a complex 3D structure while walking or while using a 3D interaction technique for manipulation. Our results indicate that the relative performance of the interfaces depends on the spatial ability and game experience of the participants. Participants with previous game experience but low spatial ability performed better using the manipulation technique. However, walking enabled higher performance for participants with low spatial ability and without significant game experience. These findings suggest that the optimal design choices for demanding visual tasks in VR should consider both controller experience and the spatial ability of the target users.
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    Relative Effects of Real-world and Virtual-World Latency on an Augmented Reality Training Task: An AR Simulation Experiment
    Nabiyouni, Mahdi; Scirbo, Siroberto; Bowman, Douglas A.; Höllerer, Tobias (Frontiers Media, 2017-01-30)
    In augmented reality (AR), virtual objects and information are overlaid onto the user’s view of the physical world and can appear to become part of the real-world. Accurate registration of virtual objects is a key requirement for an effective and natural AR system, but misregistration can break the illusion of virtual objects being part of the real-world and disrupt immersion. End-to-end system latency severely impacts the quality of AR registration. In this research, we present a controlled study that aims at a deeper understanding of the effects of latency on virtual and real-world imagery and its influences on task performance in an AR training task. We utilize an AR simulation approach, in which an outdoor AR training task is simulated in a high-fidelity virtual reality (VR) system. The real and augmented portions of the AR training scenarios are simulated in VR, affording us detailed control over a variety of immersion parameters and the ability to explore the effects of different types of simulated latency. We utilized a representative task inspired by outdoor AR military training systems to compare various AR system configurations, including optical see-through and video see-through setups with both matched and unmatched levels of real and virtual objects latency. Our findings indicate that users are able to perform significantly better when virtual and real-world latencies are matched (as in the case of simulated video see-through AR with perfect augmentation-to-real-world registration). Unequal levels of latency led to reduction in performance, even when overall latency levels were lower compared to the matched case. The relative results hold up with increased overall latency.
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    TAGGAR: General-Purpose Task Guidance from Natural Language in Augmented Reality using Vision-Language Models
    Stover, Daniel; Bowman, Douglas A. (ACM, 2024-10-07)
    Augmented reality (AR) task guidance systems provide assistance for procedural tasks by rendering virtual guidance visuals within the real-world environment. Current AR task guidance systems are limited in that they require AR system experts to manually place visuals, require models of real-world objects, or only function for limited tasks or environments. We propose a general-purpose AR task guidance approach for tasks defined by natural language. Our approach allows an operator to take pictures of relevant objects and write task instructions for an end user, which are used by the system to determine where to place guidance visuals. Then, an end user can receive and follow guidance even if objects change locations or environments. Our approach utilizes current visionlanguage machine learning models for text and image semantic understanding and object localization. We built a proof-of-concept system called TAGGAR using our approach and tested its accuracy and usability in a user study. We found that all operators were able to generate clear guidance for tasks and end users were able to follow the guidance visuals to complete the expected action 85.7% of the time without any knowledge of the tasks.
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    Virtual replicas of real places: Experimental investigations
    Skarbez, Richard; Bowman, Douglas A.; Ogle, J. Todd; Tucker, Thomas; Gabbard, Joseph L. (2021-07-13)
    The emergence of social virtual reality (VR) experiences, such as Facebook Spaces, Oculus Rooms, and Oculus Venues, will generate increased interest from users who want to share real places (both personal and public) with their fellow users in VR. At the same time, advances in scanning and reconstruction technology are making the realistic capture of real places more and more feasible. These complementary pressures mean that the representation of real places in virtual reality will be an increasingly common use case for VR. Despite this, there has been very little research into how users perceive such replicated spaces. This paper reports the results from a series of three user studies investigating this topic. Taken together, these results show that getting the scale of the space correct is the most important factor for generating a "feeling of reality", that it is important to avoid incoherent behaviors (such as floating objects), and that lighting makes little difference to perceptual similarity.