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
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.
@inproceedings{Schwind2018d,
title = {Touch with Foreign Hands: The Effect of Virtual Hand Appearance on Visual-Haptic Integration},
author = {Valentin Schwind and Lorraine Lin and Massimiliano {Di Luca} and Sophie J\"{o}rg and James Hillis},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3225153.3225158
https://vali.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2018-SAP-HapticIntegrationInVR.pdf},
doi = {10.1145/3225153.3225158},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-08-03},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP '18)},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY},
abstract = {Hand tracking and haptics are gaining more importance as key technologies of virtual reality (VR) systems. For designing such systems, it is fundamental to understand how the appearance of the virtual hands influences user experience and how the human brain integrates vision and haptics. However, it is currently unknown whether multi-sensory integration of visual and haptic feedback can be influenced by the appearance of virtual hands in VR. We performed a user study in VR to gain insight into the effect of hand appearance on how the brain combines visual and haptic signals using a cue-conflict paradigm. In this paper, we show that the detection of surface irregularities (bumps and holes) sensed by eyes and hands is affected by the rendering of avatar hands. However, sensitivity changes do not correlate with the degree of perceived limb ownership. Qualitative feedback provides insights into potentially distracting cues in visual-haptic integration.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Hand tracking and haptics are gaining more importance as key technologies of virtual reality (VR) systems. For designing such systems, it is fundamental to understand how the appearance of the virtual hands influences user experience and how the human brain integrates vision and haptics. However, it is currently unknown whether multi-sensory integration of visual and haptic feedback can be influenced by the appearance of virtual hands in VR. We performed a user study in VR to gain insight into the effect of hand appearance on how the brain combines visual and haptic signals using a cue-conflict paradigm. In this paper, we show that the detection of surface irregularities (bumps and holes) sensed by eyes and hands is affected by the rendering of avatar hands. However, sensitivity changes do not correlate with the degree of perceived limb ownership. Qualitative feedback provides insights into potentially distracting cues in visual-haptic integration.