A Research Summer at Oculus in Redmond

A Research Summer at Oculus in Redmond

In summer 2017, I was in a research intern at Facebook/Oculus in Redmond (USA). The internship happened at the very end of my Ph.D. and I was happy to have the opportunity to work in the industry yet. I worked in the perceptual science group at Oculus Research. I was very happy that my research was closely related to my thesis topic as well as to my research activities in the SFB-TRR 161 at the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems, University of Stuttgart (Germany). I was responsible for a psychophysical experiment, the experimental design, and the development of the study apparatus. I conducted a user study to investigate the effect of virtual body ownership on tactile perception. The experiment showed interesting effects of virtual hand appearances while integrating vision and haptic feedback in VR. Our paper "Touch with Foreign Hands: The Effect of Virtual Hand Appearance on Visual-Haptic Integration" is accepted and is now be published at SAP'18. The intern program and my time at Facebook/Oculus were just an amazing, a very intense, and fast experience. Orientation started in June '17 in the headquarter of Facebook in Menlo Park, California. Facebook has tons of exciting job opportunities available for university grads and other interns. I had the feeling to meet hundreds of people at the same time. The motto of Facebook was easy to learn: move fast and focus on impact. For me, it was a little bit too much “impact” after having a heavy (non-automated driving) car accident using Lyft somewhere in silicon valley. After orientation in Menlo Park, I found my new roommate somewhere at the airport in San Francisco and together we flew to Seattle and moved into our house (!) in Redmond for the next three months. Then, working at Oculus in Redmond during the Summer '17 was just an amazing and great experience. Working there was like being in a wonderland – learning from the best in the industry together with real industry related projects with great colleagues and great equipment. Facebook/Oculus offers an incredible amount of possibilities and opportunities. I must confess that returning to Germany after my internship was very hard. Anyone who has ever enjoyed all these benefits cannot leave there easily. I absolutely enjoyed the time there and can highly recommend this kind of internship for everyone who is interested in AR, VR, as well as mixed reality technologies. – Valentin
Touch with Foreign Hands: The Effect of Virtual Hand Appearance on Visual-Haptic Integration

Schwind, Valentin; Lin, Lorraine; Luca, Massimiliano Di; Jörg, Sophie; Hillis, James

Touch with Foreign Hands: The Effect of Virtual Hand Appearance on Visual-Haptic Integration Proceedings Article

In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP '18), ACM, New York, NY, 2018.

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