Triangle Computer Science Distinguished Lecturer Series
Enhancing Spatial Cognition in Immersive Virtual Environments
| Speaker: | Victoria Interrante
University of Minnesota |
| Date: |
Monday, November 21, 2011 |
| Time: |
4:00pm - 5:00pm |
| Location: |
130A North Building, Duke (telecast from UNC) |
|
|
Abstract
Immersive virtual environments technology offers the potential to
enable people to experience a three-dimensional, computer-modeled
space as if they were actually there. As such, it has tremendous
potential for a wide variety of applications in diverse fields from
psychology to training to design and visualization. A key concern in
the use of virtual environments for design is ensuring that the
spatial judgments people make about a computer model of a virtual
place are equivalent to the judgments they would have made in
reality. A related concern is enabling people to derive an accurate
spatial understanding of a large virtual space by actively exploring
it. In this talk I will describe the valuable role that virtual
environments technology can play in architectural design and
education, and will review the efforts that my colleagues and I, in
the Digital Design Consortium at the University of Minnesota, have
been pursuing to more effectively harness the full potential of
immersive virtual environments technology for architectural design and
related applications.
Biography
Victoria Interrante is an associate professor in the Department of
Computer Science at the University of Minnesota. She received her PhD
in 1996 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and
worked from 1996-1998 as a staff scientist at ICASE, NASA Langley.
Her research broadly focuses on the application of insights from
visual perception to the design of more effective techniques for
conveying information through computer-generated images. She is a
recipient of the 1999 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists
and Engineers, is an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on
Applied Perception, was general chair of the first ACM SIGGRAPH
Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (2004),
and continues to actively serve on the program committees of the
leading conferences in virtual reality and visualization.
Hosted by: Russ Taylor, UNC; Rachael Brady, Duke