Title: Powering up VR applications with eye gaze and mobility tracking

Date: 06/set/2022

Time: 9 a.m.

Access Link: meet.google.com/EWJ-DOJG-YZB

Virtual reality (VR) is taking a front seat in training, healthcare, and creative art, allowing new experiences and interactive applications to be created in a fully immersive environment. Capturing user attention is a key element for future VR development especially for personalised VR applications that can automatically adapt to user characteristics and social VR where people can interact and participate in shared activities with emotions.

In the past few years, we have had a series of projects on capturing and modelling human attention in VR. Our research shows that eye gaze and body movements share a pivotal role in capturing human perception, intent, and experience. We believe that VR is more than a computerised environment with fancy graphics. With the help of biometric sensors and machine learning, VR can become the best persuasive technology known to human-computer interaction (HCI) designers. In a recent project, we demonstrated how machine learning can be automated to improve visitors' experience in a VR art exhibition without any prior knowledge of the artwork. We are also exploring how the VR and AI can enable automated assessment and treatment of mental illness in a remote location, e.g., in patients’ own homes. This will ultimately help democratising mental health care.

In this talk, Dr Mu from Technology will give an overview of our latest research and exciting student projects on attention-aware VR designs. 

Speaker info: Dr Mu Mu is a Professor in Computing at University of Northampton, UK. His research covers human factors in multimedia distribution, intelligent networks, and immersive media. Mu has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers in international conferences and journals. He is Associate Editor of Springer Multimedia Systems Journal. Mu has been the principal investigator and lead researcher of research projects funded by the European Commission, UK Research Councils and other funding bodies.

P.S. A palestra é parte da Disciplina Seminários de Computação Aplicada e Telecomunicações do PPGEE, entretanto, será aberta ao público externo.