Blog – valentin schwind

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Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Vestibulum tortor quam, feugiat vitae, ultricies eget, tempor sit amet, ante. Donec eu libero sit amet quam egestas semper. Aenean ultricies mi vitae est. Mauris placerat eleifend

Blog Post 3

Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Vestibulum tortor quam, feugiat vitae, ultricies eget, tempor sit amet, ante. Donec eu libero sit amet quam egestas semper. Aenean ultricies mi vitae est. Mauris placerat eleifend

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.

Is there an Uncanny Valley of Virtual Animals? A Quantitative and Qualitative Investigation

Approaching a high degree of realism, android robots, and virtual humans may evoke uncomfortable feelings. Due to technologies that increase the realism of human replicas, this phenomenon, which is known as the uncanny valley, has been frequently highlighted in recent years by researchers from various fields. Although virtual animals play an important role in video games and entertainment, the question whether there is also an uncanny valley for virtual animals has been little investigated. This paper examines whether very realistic virtual pets tend to cause a similar aversion as humanlike characters.

“Where’s Pinky?”: The Effects of a Reduced Number of Fingers in Virtual Reality

The hands of one’s avatar are possibly the most visible aspect when interacting in virtual reality (VR). As video games in VR proliferate, it is important to understand how the appearance of avatar hands influence the user experience. Designers of video games often stylize hands and reduce the number of fingers of game characters. Previous work shows that the appearance of avatar hands has significant effects on the user’s presence—the feeling of ‘being’ and ‘acting’ in VR. However, little is known about the effects of missing fingers of an avatar in VR. In this paper, we present a study (N = 24) that investigated the effect of hand representations by parametrically varying the number of fingers of abstract and realistically rendered hands.

“These are not my hands!”: Effect of Gender on the Perception of Avatar Hands in Virtual Reality

Rendering the user’s body in virtual reality increases immersion and presence – the illusion of ‘being there’. Recent technology enables determining the pose and position of the hands to render them accordingly while interacting within the virtual environment. Virtual reality applications often use realistic male or female hands, mimic robotic hands, or cartoon hands. However, it is unclear how users perceive different hand styles. We conducted a study with 14 male and 14 female participants in virtual reality to investigate the effect of gender on the perception of six different hands.

Determining the Characteristics of Preferred Virtual Faces Using an Avatar Generator

Video game developers continuously increase the degree of details and realism in games to create more human-like characters. But increasing the human-likeness becomes a problem in regard to the Uncanny Valley phenomenon that predicts negative feelings of people towards artificial entities.

Historical, Cultural, and Aesthetic Aspects of the Uncanny Valley

This article explores the hitherto little-discussed historical emergence and contemporary impact of the Uncanny Valley and shows that it is strongly connected to intentions, aesthetics, and cultural aspects of artificial figures.

Science Visualizations for ACM SIGCHI

We (Solveigh Jäger and me) cut, edited and partly recorded* some nice research videos for the CHI2014 in Toronto, Canada. The most important video is the CHI2014 promotional trailer for the human-computer interaction conference itself:

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