Keynotes

Playing with tangibles in Virtual Reality

Wednesday 9th, October

9:00 – 10:00

The talk presents how tangible objects could be used in Virtual Reality to enhance the user’s perception and immersion. In Virtual Reality, the user wearing a Head Mounted Display is generally unable to directly see the tangible objects and ends up confronting the virtual objects he sees to the tangible ones he can feel. This situation often leads to breaks of immersion, thus degrading the user’s experience in virtual environments.

The talk presents some of our latest contributions to handle the use of tangible objects for improving our 3D interaction with virtual worlds. The talk will illustrate first how and to what extent a discrepancy between the tangible objects and the virtual objects can be introduced without breaking the user’s immersion through different algorithmic strategies. In a second part, the talk will present how we could improve the registration between the tangible and the virtual objects using new technological solutions combined with appropriate 3D interaction techniques. At the end, the talk aims at introducing some of the next challenges in Virtual Reality for handling haptic feedback through the use of tangible objects.

Biography

Maud Marchal is a Full Professor in Computer Science at Univ. Rennes, INSA. She is also a Junior Member of Institut Universitaire de France since 2018. She works on physics-based simulation since her PhD in 2006 at University Joseph Fourier, Grenoble. Since 2008 and her position at INSA, she has explored and contributed to novel VR applications, gathering her expertise on multi-sensory feedback, 3D interaction techniques and interactive physics-based simulations. She is the Principal Investigator of an ERC Consolidator Grant on multimodal haptics in Virtual Reality. She is involved in program committees of major conferences of computer graphics, virtual reality and haptics and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on Haptics, Computers & Graphics and ACM Transactions on Applied Perception.

She has notably been Program Chair of IEEE Virtual Reality Conference in 2018, 2020 and 2021, Program Chair of IEEE Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality in 2021 and 2023 and General Chair of ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation in 2018 and Eurohaptics in 2024.

Reimagining scholarly publishing to promote credible and trustworthy research

Friday 11th, October

15:30-16:30

The purpose of scholarly publishing is to facilitate the communication and interrogation of evidence and claims to advance knowledge production. The business of scholarly publishing interferes with this purpose. Research is inhibited by a scholarly publishing system that is slow, incomplete, opaque, and static, treats the paper as the only meaningful scholarly output, offers dysfunctional, simplistic rewards based on publication and journal status, and is calcified in legacy, commercial business models, and infrastructure. The Lifecycle Journal is an alternative approach to scholarly publishing intended to address these weaknesses and align the practice of scholarly publishing with its purpose.

Biography

Brian Nosek co-developed the Implicit Association Test, a method that advanced research and public interest in implicit bias. Nosek co-founded three non-profit organizations: Project Implicit to advance research and education about implicit bias (http://projectimplicit.net/), the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science to improve the research culture in his home discipline (http://improvingpsych.org/), and the Center for Open Science (COS; http://cos.io/) to improve rigor, transparency, integrity, and reproducibility across research disciplines. Nosek is Executive Director of COS and a professor at the University of Virginia. Nosek’s research and applied interests are to understand why people and systems produce behaviors that are contrary to intentions and values; to develop, implement, and evaluate solutions to align practices with values; and, to improve research credibility and cultures to accelerate progress.