VR Systems and Humans ¶

Course Contents ¶

COURSE SCHEDULE AT A GLANCE

Getting Started: Course Info, Communication, HMDs

REGISTRATION TASKS, 1%
2023-11-03, 23:59

0.00 / 1.00
HOMEWORK, ~32%

Color Perception: The Magic of Chromatic Adaptation

0.00 / 10.00

WELCOME!¶

Dear students,

Virtual reality (VR) technology transports us to real or synthetic places that may be inaccessible, breathtaking, complex beyond our wildest imagination, or just simple and relaxing. Applications include entertainment, social interaction, virtual travel, remote training, architectural walkthroughs, cultural appreciation, and learning enhancement. Although VR has been around for decades, it always came with a high cost to enter the field because of advanced, expensive equipment and computing resources. Thanks to widespread progress in display, sensing, and computational technology, the newest VR systems are cheap, lightweight, and easy to program. This has caused a flood of excitement as almost anyone can pick up a VR headset and start developing experiences.

The purpose of this course is to provide you with a deep understanding of the fundamentals of VR. Because VR tricks our brains by presenting synthetic stimuli to our senses, it is extremely challenging to develop and analyze VR systems that are both effective and comfortable. To get a handle on these issues, this course will fuse together knowledge from a variety of relevant topics, including basics in human physiology, neuroscience, and perceptual psychology, and illustrate how they impact the development of VR hardware, software, and content.

We look forward to working with you!

The Course Staff.

Course Objectives¶

Upon completion of the course, you will:

Gain knowledge in human physiology and human perception in relationship to VR.
Understand common perceptual flaws of modern VR systems related to resolution, latency, frame rates, tracking, lens aberrations, drift, and jitter.
Be able to critically assess a given VR system or experience, and recommend improvements.
Participate in a human subject experiment that tests human perception.
Formulate a hypothesis about a VR experience, create such a VR experience in Unity3D, and design a human subject experiment testing the hypothesis.

Course Topics¶

Overview of human physiology, neuroscience, and human perception with relationship to VR.
Depth and scale perception.
Perception of screen resolution.
Perception of motion.
Perceptually optimal parameters for frame rate, latency, and drift in VR systems.
Perceptual training.
Comfort and VR sickness.
Psychophysical experiments.
Design of VR human subjects experiments.

Prerequisites¶

We expect students to come with a variety of backgrounds and we do not demand they have had particular background courses. It is important for you to assess whether you can handle the material. You can start by looking through the course info and the textbooks. Ask us if you are unsure.

Course Staff¶