The Origins of Computer Graphics in Europe: Part 2-The Early Spreading of Computer Graphics in Europe.

"The Origins of Computer Graphics in Europe," is being published in two parts: Part 1, published in the March/April issue of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (IEEE CG&A), is subtitled "The Beginnings in Germany"; Part 2, published in this May/June 2023 issue, is subtitled "The Early Spreading of Computer Graphics in Europe." I was a participant, contributor, and witness to the events reported here and I relate my personal story along with the broader history. Part 1 describes the origins and successful evolution of computer graphics in Germany, starting in 1965, and includes details of the people and subject matter of the earliest research groups.

The Origins of Computer Graphics in Europe: Part 1-The Beginnings in Germany.

"The Origins of Computer Graphics in Europe," is being published in two parts: Part 1, in this issue of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, is subtitled "The Beginnings in Germany"; Part 2, to be published in the May/June issue, is subtitled "The Spreading of Computer Graphics in Europe." I was a participant, contributor, and witness to the events reported here and I relate my personal story along with the broader history. Part 1 describes the origins and successful evolution of computer graphics in Germany, starting in 1965, and includes details of the people and subject matter of the earliest research groups.

From Holocaust Hidden Child to Computer Animation Laboratory.

The article describes my long journey as a Jewish-born hidden child who was handed over to a Catholic family before the Krakow ghetto was eliminated in 1943. My father survived and I was reunited with him. We traveled to Germany in 1950 and were accepted as Canadian refugees in 1952.

Lightning and Thunder: The Early Days of Interactive Information Visualization at the University of Maryland.

The thrill of scientific discovery, the excitement of engineering development, and the fresh thinking of design explorations were invigorating as we participated in the birth of a new discipline: Information Visualization. This discipline, based on graphical user interfaces with pointing devices, became possible as software matured, hardware sped up, and screen resolution improved. Driven by the concepts of direct manipulation and dynamic queries, we made interactive interfaces that empowered users and opened up new possibilities for the next generation of designers.

Adventures of a Government Researcher.

Visualization, interactive computer graphics, and related topics have been a particularly dynamic area of computer science, producing advances that impact society. Working at times in a research laboratory and at times for two science funding agencies, I held positions at the level of an individual researcher, Director of a VR Laboratory, and funding agency Program Director. This article will discuss some of my experiences, including insight into how science programs in funding agencies are initiated.

The Design of RenderMan.

The design of RenderMan was driven by the requirements of rendering for the movies. The rendered images could have no digital artifacts and they had to be able to be composited seamlessly with live-action footage. This article recounts the development of RenderMan.

Computer Graphics and Animation at The Ohio State University.

The research and production of computer graphics imagery and animation at The Ohio State University started with the artistic work of Prof. Charles Csuri. He developed the Computer Graphics Research Group in response to the award of a National Science Foundation Grant in 1974, and the group transferred its technology to a commercial production effort, Cranston/Csuri Productions, Inc.

Floor-vibration VR: Mitigating Cybersickness Using Whole-body Tactile Stimuli in Highly Realistic Vehicle Driving Experiences.

This work addresses cybersickness, a major barrier to successful long-exposure immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences since user discomfort frequently leads to prematurely ending such experiences. Starting from sensory conflict theory, we posit that if a vibrating floor delivers vestibular stimuli that minimally match the vibration characteristics of a scenario, the size of the conflict between the visual and vestibular senses will be reduced and, thus, the incidence and/or severity of cybersickness will also be reduced. We integrated a custom-built, computer-controlled vibrating floor in our VR system.

Interactive Graphics in Industry: The Early Days.

Computer graphics has a long history. Industrial organizations and laboratories drove significant improvements as they adapted and assembled basic capabilities into complex interactive applications. Of particular concern in the early days was providing interactive 3-D applications for computer-aided design and engineering.

The Graphics System for the 80's.

Forty years ago, the first General Purpose Raster Graphics Processor made the transition from research project to commercial product. This is the story of the creation of a new graphics system and the startup company that produced it in the early days of raster computer graphics.

Immersion and Coherence: Research Agenda and Early Results.

Presence has been studied in the context of virtual environments for nearly thirty years, but the field has yet to reach consensus on even basic issues of definition and measurement, and there are many open research questions. We gather many of these open research questions and systematically group them according to what we believe are five key constructs that inform user experience in virtual environments: immersion, coherence, Place Illusion, Plausibility Illusion, and presence. We also report on the design and results of a study that investigated the effects of immersion and coherence on user experience in a stressful virtual visual cliff environment.

History of the Marching Cubes Algorithm.

The Marching Cubes paper by Bill Lorensen and Harvey Cline, "Marching Cubes: A High Resolution 3D Surface Construction Algorithm," was published at SIGGRAPH 1987.1 According to Google Scholar, their paper has 15,667 citations (as of January 17, 2020), the most highly cited paper in computer graphics. Sadly, while writing this article Bill Lorensen passed away on December 12, 2019.

Origins of Global Illumination.

Global illumination refers to a complete shading model that simulates real lighting and reflection as accurately as possible. Whether used for product prototyping or special effects for entertainment, the goal is to match the appearance of the real world. The origins of global illumination come at the intersection of a steady progression of shading models with the ancient simulation technique of ray tracing.

Implementation and Evaluation of a 50 kHz, 28μs Motion-to-Pose Latency Head Tracking Instrument.

This paper presents the implementation and evaluation of a 50,000-pose-sample-per-second, 6-degree-of-freedom optical head tracking instrument with motion-to-pose latency of 28μs and dynamic precision of 1-2 arcminutes. The instrument uses high-intensity infrared emitters and two duo-lateral photodiode-based optical sensors to triangulate pose. This instrument serves two purposes: it is the first step towards the requisite head tracking component in sub- 100μs motion-to-photon latency optical see-through augmented reality (OST AR) head-mounted display (HMD) systems; and it enables new avenues of research into human visual perception - including measuring the thresholds for perceptible real-virtual displacement during head rotation and other human research requiring high-sample-rate motion tracking.

15 Years of Research on Redirected Walking in Immersive Virtual Environments.

Virtual reality users wearing head-mounted displays can experience the illusion of walking in any direction for infinite distance while, in reality, they are walking a curvilinear path in physical space. This is accomplished by introducing unnoticeable rotations to the virtual environment-a technique called redirected walking. This paper gives an overview of the research that has been performed since redirected walking was first practically demonstrated 15 years ago.

A Psychophysical Experiment Regarding Components of the Plausibility Illusion.

We report on the design and results of an experiment investigating factors influencing Slater's Plausibility Illusion (Psi) in virtual environments (VEs). Slater proposed Psi and Place Illusion (PI) as orthogonal components of virtual experience which contribute to realistic response in a VE. PI corresponds to the traditional conception of presence as "being there," so there exists a substantial body of previous research relating to PI, but very little relating to Psi.

Redirected Touching: Training and Adaptation in Warped Virtual Spaces.

is a technique in which virtual space is warped to map many virtual objects onto one real object that serves as a passive haptic prop. Recent work suggests that this mapping can often be predictably unnoticeable and have little effect on task performance. We investigated training and adaptation on a rapid aiming task in a real environment, an unwarped virtual environment, and a warped virtual environment.

Scene-Motion Thresholds During Head Yaw for Immersive Virtual Environments.

In order to better understand how scene motion is perceived in immersive virtual environments, we measured scene-motion thresholds under different conditions across three experiments. Thresholds were measured during quasi-sinusoidal head yaw, single left-to-right or right-to-left head yaw, different phases of head yaw, slow to fast head yaw, scene motion relative to head yaw, and two scene illumination levels. We found that across various conditions 1) thresholds are greater when the scene moves with head yaw (corresponding to gain < 1:0) than when the scene moves against head yaw (corresponding to gain > 1:0), and 2) thresholds increase as head motion increases.

Shader Lamps Virtual Patients: the physical manifestation of virtual patients.

We introduce the notion of Shader Lamps Virtual Patients (SLVP) - the combination of projector-based Shader Lamps Avatars and interactive virtual humans. This paradigm uses Shader Lamps Avatars technology to give a 3D physical presence to conversational virtual humans, improving their social interactivity and enabling them to share the physical space with the user. The paradigm scales naturally to multiple viewers, allowing for scenarios where an instructor and multiple students are involved in the training.

An Evaluation of Navigational Ability Comparing Redirected Free Exploration with Distractors to Walking-in-Place and Joystick Locomotion Interfaces.

We report on a user study evaluating Redirected Free Exploration with Distractors (RFED), a large-scale, real-walking, locomotion interface, by comparing it to Walking-in-Place (WIP) and Joystick (JS), two common locomotion interfaces. The between-subjects study compared navigation ability in RFED, WIP, and JS interfaces in VEs that are more than two times the dimensions of the tracked space. The interfaces were evaluated based on navigation and wayfinding metrics and results suggest that participants using RFED were significantly better at navigating and wayfinding through virtual mazes than participants using walking-in-place and joystick interfaces.

Use of visual and proprioceptive feedback to improve gait speed and spatiotemporal symmetry following chronic stroke: a case series.

Background And Purpose: Persistent deficits in gait speed and spatiotemporal symmetry are prevalent following stroke and can limit the achievement of community mobility goals. Rehabilitation can improve gait speed, but has shown limited ability to improve spatiotemporal symmetry. The incorporation of combined visual and proprioceptive feedback regarding spatiotemporal symmetry has the potential to be effective at improving gait.

The design and evaluation of a large-scale real-walking locomotion interface.

Redirected Free Exploration with Distractors (RFEDs) is a large-scale real-walking locomotion interface developed to enable people to walk freely in Virtual Environments (VEs) that are larger than the tracked space in their facility. This paper describes the RFED system in detail and reports on a user study that evaluated RFED by comparing it to Walking-in-Place (WIP) and Joystick (JS) interfaces. The RFED system is composed of two major components, redirection and distractors.

The integrated virtual environment rehabilitation treadmill system.

Slow gait speed and interlimb asymmetry are prevalent in a variety of disorders. Current approaches to locomotor retraining emphasize the need for appropriate feedback during intensive, task-specific practice. This paper describes the design and feasibility testing of the integrated virtual environment rehabilitation treadmill (IVERT) system intended to provide real-time, intuitive feedback regarding gait speed and asymmetry during training.

Lessons about Virtual-Environment Software Systems from 20 years of VE building.

What are desirable and undesirable features of virtual-environment (VE) software architectures? What should be present (and absent) from such systems if they are to be optimally useful? How should they be structured? To help answer these questions we present experience from application designers, toolkit designers, and VE system architects along with examples of useful features from existing systems. Topics are organized under the major headings of: 3D space management, supporting display hardware, interaction, event management, time management, computation, portability, and the observation that less can be better. Lessons learned are presented as discussion of the issues, field experiences, nuggets of knowledge, and case studies.