Introduction to Virtual Reality (Sept 4)

• Introduction to Virtual Environments: lecture notes by Benjamin Lok (Univ. of Florida)
  
• History of VR: lecture notes by Benjamin Lok (Univ. of Florida)
  
• "Fish Tank Virtual Reality", by Colin Ware, Kevin Arthur and Kelly Booth (ACM/CHI 1993)
  
• "Nonimmersive Virtual Reality", by George Robertson, Stuart Card and Jock Mackinlay (IEEE Computer 1993)
  

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Head Mounted Display Technology and Applications (Sept 23, 25)

• Christoph Bungert's Head Mounted Display Comparison Chart
  
• Kevin Arthur's PhD dissertation: "Effects of Field of View on Performance with Head-Mounted Displays"
  
• Pausch, Proffitt and Williams (1997) "Quantifying Immersion in Virtual Reality"
  
• Helmet Mounted Displays: Design Issues for Rotary-Wing Aircraft (online book)
  

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Sound in VR (Sept 30)

• International Community for Auditory Display
• International Conference on Auditory Display
• Tom Funkhouser's Interactive Acoustic Modeling for Virtual Environments Research
• Dinesh Pai's research on sound and multimodal interaction simulation
• SIGGRAPH 2002 course on Computational Sound for Graphics, Virtual Reality and Interactive Systems
• Nicolas Tsingos' research links on interactive acoustics simulations and computer graphics
  

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Mixed and Augmented Reality (Oct 2)

• Motion Tracking: no silver bullet, but a respectable arsenal", survey paper by Greg Welch ad Eric Foxlin.
  
• IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2008
• Augmented Reality Research at the Bauhaus University Weimar
• Some other links to Augmented Reality resources, current as of about 2006, maintained by Jim Vallino.

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Haptics (Oct 7)

• IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics
• Haptics Community Web Site
• Haptics-e, electronic journal of haptics research
• Allison Okamura's ME/CS 530/651: Haptics for Virtual Reality course
  
• Passive Haptics Significantly Enhances Virtual Environments, PhD dissertation by Brent Insko, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2001.
• Toward the merging of real and virtual spaces, a paper by B. Lok in Communications of the ACM
• Project GROPE: Haptic displays for scientific visualization, by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Ming Ouh-Young, James J. Batter and P. Jerome Kilpatrick, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1990, 177-185.

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Using the Wii for VR (Oct 9)

• Johnny Chung Lee's Wii projects
• Using a Wii controller as an input device for VR [YouTube video], by Oliver Kreylos

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Immersive Projection Displays (Oct 14)

• UNC's Office of the Future
  
• The Blue-C at ETH-Zurich, a "spatially immersive display and 3D video portal for telepresence"
  
• Wikipedia page on the CAVE
• A survey of large-scale immersive displays, by Ed Lantz, in Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop on Emerging Displays Technologies.
• A Survey of Large High-Resolution Display Technologies, Techniques, and Applications by Tao Ni; Schmidt, G.S.; Staadt, O.G.; Livingston, M.A.; Ball, R. and May, R. in Proceedings of IEEE Virtual Reality 2006, 223-236.

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Spatial Perception in Virtual Environments (Oct 16)

• Visual Perception of Egocentric Distance in Real and Virtual Environments", by Jack M. Loomis and Joshua M. Knapp, in Virtual and Adaptive Environments, L. J. Hettinger and M. W. Haas, eds.

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Gesture-based Interfaces (Oct 30)

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Avatars (Nov 4)

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Tracking (Nov 6)

• Tracking: beyond 15 minutes of thought, SIGGRAPH course notes by Greg Welch, Gary Bishop and B. Danette Allen.

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Presence (Nov 11)

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Applications of VR in Psychiatry (Nov 13)

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Devices and Methods for Object Manipulation in VEs (Nov 18)

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Applications of VR in Data and Information Visualization (Nov 20)

• The ARCHAVE System (CAVE-based archaeological visualization at Brown)
• Virtual reality in scientific visualization, by Steve Bryson, Communications of the ACM, 39(5): 62-71, May 1996.

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Systems for Managing and Rendering Virtual Worlds (Nov 25)

• Vizard, a virtual reality toolkit from WorldViz
• Alice, a programming environment developed initially for VR by Randy Pausch et al.
• OGRE 3D, an open source graphics rendering engine
• BioPack customizable VR applications
• Virtools
• Google's VR Software listings

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Locomotion in Virtual Environments (Dec 2)

• Seven League Boots: A New Metaphor for Augmented Locomotion through Moderately Large Scale Immersive Virtual Environments, by Victoria Interrante, Brian Ries and Lee Anderson, IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces 2007.
• Walking > walking-in-place > flying, in virtual environments, by Martin Usoh, Kevin Arthur, Mary C. Whitton, Rui Bastos, Anthony Steed, Mel Slater and Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1999, 359-364.
• Redirected Walking, by Sharif Razzaque, Zachariah Kohn and Mary C. Whitton, Eurographics 2001 (short papers).
• Exploring large virtual environments with an HMD when physical space is limited, by Betsey Williams, Gayathri Narasimham, Bjoern Rump, Timothy P. McNamara, Thomas H. Carr, John Rieser and Bobby Bodenheimer, Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization 2007, 41-48.

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Use of VR in military simulation (Dec 4)

• RealityV
• Avatars, Virtual Reality Technology, and the U.S. Military: Emerging Policy Issues, a Congressional Research Service Report, April 9, 2008.
• How Stuff Works: Virtual Reality Military

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Resources

• Citeseer (an excellent tool for finding research papers on VR and a wide variety of other topics)
  
• ACM Digital Library
  
• IEEE Xplore
  
• Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments (a link through the UMN library website)
  
• IEEE Virtual Reality conference proceedings
• Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments
• Immersive Projection Technology Workshop
• ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology 2004
• Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR)

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Some Virtual Environments Courses at Other Schools

• Understanding Virtual Reality: course notes from Bill Sherman's textbook
• Anthony Steed and Mel Slater's Virtual Environments course at University Colleve London
• Doug Bowman's CS 5754: Virtual Environments, at Virgina Tech
• Larry Hodges' ITCS 8125/5125/4125: Virtual Environments, at UNC-Charlotte
• Benjamin Lok's CISE 6930/4930: Design and Creation of Virtual Environments, at the University of Florida
• David Laidlaw's CS 137: Virtual Reality Design for Science, at Brown University
• Andy Johnson's CS 528: Virtual Reality, at the University of Illinois, Chicago
• Randy Pausch's interdisciplinary course: Building Virtual Worlds, at Carnegie-Mellon University
• David Zeltzer's CS 196-2: Virtual Reality: Immersion, Decisions, Empathy, at Brown University

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Some Research Labs (very incomplete list)

Research in Perception and Virtual Environments at the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

Research on Perception in Real and Virtual Environments in Dennis Proffitt's Lab

UCSB Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behaviour

UNC-CH Effective Virtual Environments research

Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington

Research at the Iowa State Virtual Reality Applications Center

Research in 3D Interaction at Virginia Tech

Tangible Media Group at MIT

NASA Ames Advanced Displays and Spatial Perception Laboratories

Georgia Tech Virtual Environments Group

Modeling, Virtual Environments, and Simulation (MOVES) at the Naval Postgraduate School

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