30. November
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Lang (Universität zu Köln): Virtual Reality: From technological developments to applicability for different purposes.
I will give an overview on hardware developments of display and interaction technologies and devices, that have been developed since more than 50 years. Interaction concepts have been pursued in parallel. Based on increasing processing performance and large investments of companies such as Facebook, we see human centered interfaces e.g. based on gesture recognition coming up. This drives mass market oriented developments embedded into new social media environments such as a metaverse. On the other side a large potential to use virtual and augmented reality for visual analytics of big data volumes.
The University of Cologne has installed a CAVE, i.e. a 5 sided back projection room with stereo projection as well as head and hand tracking. Examples of CAVE usage in different scientific domains will be explained. In most cases the CAVE is a communication platform for small groups of people. It is either used for teaching students complex spatial structures and systems in biochemistry, archeology, medicine, astrophysics, etc. Scientist use the CAVE for research, e.g. to understand time dependent simulations, or measured spatial data at excavation sites. CAVEs can also be used for communicating scientific content to the general public.
Head mounted devices and CAVEs can be coupled to interact in shared virtual worlds. Thus both device types benefit from their actual developments.