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Welcome


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Welcome to the Virtual Reality & Immersive Visualization Group
at RWTH Aachen University!

The Virtual Reality and Immersive Visualization Group started in 1998 as a service team in the RWTH IT Center. Since 2015, we are a research group (Lehr- und Forschungsgebiet) at i12 within the Computer Science Department. Moreover, the Group is a member of the Visual Computing Institute and continues to be an integral part of the RWTH IT Center.

In a unique combination of research, teaching, services, and infrastructure, we provide Virtual Reality technologies and the underlying methodology as a powerful tool for scientific-technological applications.

In terms of basic research, we develop advanced methods and algorithms for multimodal 3D user interfaces and explorative analyses in virtual environments. Furthermore, we focus on application-driven, interdisciplinary research in collaboration with RWTH Aachen institutes, Forschungszentrum Jülich, research institutions worldwide, and partners from business and industry, covering fields like simulation science, production technology, neuroscience, and medicine.

To this end, we are members of / associated with the following institutes and facilities:

Our offices are located in the RWTH IT Center, where we operate one of the largest Virtual Reality labs worldwide. The aixCAVE, a 30 sqm visualization chamber, makes it possible to interactively explore virtual worlds, is open to use by any RWTH Aachen research group.

News

29th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2023)

Together with Dr. Daniel Zielasko from the University of Trier our colleague Dr. Tim Weißker presented his paper entitled "Stay Vigilant: The Threat of a Replication Crisis in VR Locomotion Research" at the 29th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2023). Their work was awarded with the Best Paper Award. Congratulations!

Oct. 12, 2023

23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA23)

Jonathan Ehret presented his paper entitled "Who's next? Integrating Non-Verbal Turn-Taking Cues for Embodied Conversational Agents" at the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. Furthermore, Andrea Bönsch presented two posters in the realm of virtual agents supporting scene exploration, either as conversing groups or as method for constrained navigation.

Sept. 19, 2023

The SPP AUDICTIVE converence took place and we contributed to the programm with two project presentations.

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June 30, 2023

Christian Nowke receives doctoral degree from University of Trier

Today, our colleague Christian Nowke successfully passed his Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from the University of Trier for his thesis on "Semantic-Aware Coordinated Multiple Views for the Interactive Analysis of Neural Activity Data". Congratulations!

May 22, 2023

Industry Meets aixCAVE

On Friday, May 5th, about twenty delegates from renowned companies across Germany visited us to experience the aixCAVE. This event triggered many intriguing thoughts and stimulating discussions between our researchers and guests.

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May 5, 2023

Cover on the German GI Informatik Spektrum

The cover of the current issue of Informatik Spektrum of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI) presents results of a project between the EON Energy Research Center and us on an important issue. The use of air filters in classrooms to fight the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been and continues to be a much-discussed topic. The cover shows a visualization in our aixCAVE, enabling an analysis of the temporal and spatial dynamics of aerosol concentration for each person in the respective room. Virtual reality is proving to be an effective tool for scientists here. It demonstrates the potential risk of aerosol dispersion in enclosed spaces with many people, which can be intuitively experienced even by laypersons.

Additional information on this project is provided in the IT Center Annual Report 2020/2021, page 58f (german only).

Dec. 16, 2022

Recent Publications

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Wayfinding in Immersive Virtual Environments as Social Activity Supported by Virtual Agents

Frontiers in Virtual Reality, Section Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour

Effective navigation and interaction within immersive virtual environments rely on thorough scene exploration. Therefore, wayfinding is essential, assisting users in comprehending their surroundings, planning routes, and making informed decisions. Based on real-life observations, wayfinding is, thereby, not only a cognitive process but also a social activity profoundly influenced by the presence and behaviors of others. In virtual environments, these 'others' are virtual agents (VAs), defined as anthropomorphic computer-controlled characters, who enliven the environment and can serve as background characters or direct interaction partners. However, little research has been done to explore how to efficiently use VAs as social wayfinding support. In this paper, we aim to assess and contrast user experience, user comfort, and the acquisition of scene knowledge through a between-subjects study involving n = 60 participants across three distinct wayfinding conditions in one slightly populated urban environment: (i) unsupported wayfinding, (ii) strong social wayfinding using a virtual supporter who incorporates guiding and accompanying elements while directly impacting the participants' wayfinding decisions, and (iii) weak social wayfinding using flows of VAs that subtly influence the participants' wayfinding decisions by their locomotion behavior. Our work is the first to compare the impact of VAs' behavior in virtual reality on users' scene exploration, including spatial awareness, scene comprehension, and comfort. The results show the general utility of social wayfinding support, while underscoring the superiority of the strong type. Nevertheless, further exploration of weak social wayfinding as a promising technique is needed. Thus, our work contributes to the enhancement of VAs as advanced user interfaces, increasing user acceptance and usability.

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On the Computation of User Placements for Virtual Formation Adjustments during Group Navigation

2024 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)

Several group navigation techniques enable a single navigator to control travel for all group members simultaneously in social virtual reality. A key aspect of this process is the ability to rearrange the group into a new formation to facilitate the joint observation of the scene or to avoid obstacles on the way. However, the question of how users should be distributed within the new formation to create an intuitive transition that minimizes disruptions of ongoing social activities is currently not explored. In this paper, we begin to close this gap by introducing four user placement strategies based on mathematical considerations, discussing their benefits and drawbacks, and sketching further novel ideas to approach this topic from different angles in future work. Our work, therefore, contributes to the overarching goal of making group interactions in social virtual reality more intuitive and comfortable for the involved users.

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Try This for Size: Multi-Scale Teleportation in Immersive Virtual Reality

2024 IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

The ability of a user to adjust their own scale while traveling through virtual environments enables them to inspect tiny features being ant-sized and to gain an overview of the surroundings as a giant. While prior work has almost exclusively focused on steering-based interfaces for multi-scale travel, we present three novel teleportation-based techniques that avoid continuous motion flow to reduce the risk of cybersickness. Our approaches build on the extension of known teleportation workflows and suggest specifying scale adjustments either simultaneously with, as a connected second step after, or separately from the user’s new horizontal position. The results of a two-part user study with 30 participants indicate that the simultaneous and connected specification paradigms are both suitable candidates for effective and comfortable multi-scale teleportation with nuanced individual benefits. Scale specification as a separate mode, on the other hand, was considered less beneficial. We compare our findings to prior research and publish the executable of our user study to facilitate replication and further analyses.

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