Abstract
Have you ever met yourself? Have you met your past? This report is meant to make a phenomenon known in which VR users at a break-in-presence do not fall back into the lab environment. However, we are not yet able to provide tangible evidence and systematic research about it. Setup: We describe a virtual reality application which originally was intended to provide control for a search and rescue robot. Due to a design requirement to use very limited resources, we developed a sparse representation of the past of the robot. The user encounters the past path of the robot in VR as a collection of 360° photo-spheres which each captures one instant. Multiple users of the application can individually review all past pictures. The most recent picture represents the current perspective of the robot. In addition, each user can interact with virtual objects, e. g., control the robot. Observation: According to perceptual research, breaks-in-presence might occur after sensory conflicts. An encounter of one’s self in VR introduces a perceptual and cognitive conflict. Users were able to realign with their own episodic memory and did not fall back into the lab environment as a result of this new type of break-in-presence.
About the author
Dr. Markus von der Heyde received his PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Bielefeld for his work at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics Tübingen in 2000. His approach to adopt biological principles into distributed computer applications in order to enhance stability and robustness was applied in DFG and EU funded research projects. Between 2003 and 2011 he served as ICT director of Bauhaus University in Weimar and focussed on topics such as information security, service management, strategy and governance. Since 2011 he is CEO of vdH-IT and management consultant specializing in IT governance and digital transformation in higher education. In cooperation with various partners he has conducted the German CIO studies since 2014. Since 2016 he has organized the HEI CIOs congress in Germany. He supports ZKI, GI, EUNIS and EDUCAUSE, and serves as a program committee member as well as a proposal reviewer for conferences and the scientific community. From 2016 to 2018 he also was Head of Research and Development in an AR/VR start-up in Vancouver and combined biologically motivated robotics and perceptually oriented VR design. In 2018 he was appointed Adjunct Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at Simon Fraser University (SFU), Vancouver. Recently he conducted the Open Data Repository Landscape Analysis for the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), adding science policies and strategic planning on a national level to his portfolio. See more publications and details on https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Markus_Von_Der_Heyde3.
Acknowledgment
The author thanks Bernhard E. Riecke and his team at the iSpace Lab of Simon Fraser University, David Clement of Wavesine Solutions, and Saeed Dyanatkar and his team at the Emerging Media Lab of the University of British Columbia for fruitful discussions on VR and robotics. Without the robotics team at Archiact Interactive and the generous support by its founder Derek (Jinlin) Chen, this work would not have been possible.
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