HCI@University of Otago

HCI lab team members have 4 papers conditionally accepted for the ACM CHI conference 2024. We will also present our recent ACM ToCHI paper on Visual Noise and Jacob has another CHI paper accepted that resulted from his work at Victoria University of Wellington so we are looking forward to a successful CHI conference in May.

Our paper titled "Neural Bokeh: Learning Lens Blur for Computational Videography and Out-of-Focus Mixed Reality" has been accepted for the IEEE Virtual Reality conference where we will present it in Orlando, Florida in March this year. This is the result from a long-term collaboration with Denis Kalkofen's research group (Graz University of Technology/Flinders University) and Evan Peng (Hong Kong University).

We welcome our new team member Jacob Young who just started as a PostDoctoral Fellow working on the MBIE funded research project "He karapitipitinga mariko – Immersive regenerative tourism experiences in Aotearoa". Welcome Jacob!

We recently explore visual discomfort and visual noise together with opportunities in wearable technology and vision augmentations to address these effects. A summary of our research has just been accepted for ACM Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (ACM ToCHI) titled "Visual Noise Cancellation: Exploring Visual Discomfort and Opportunities for Vision Augmentations"

Several team members are heading to Wellington to attend the OzCHI conference where we present findings emerging from the Atea project. Say hello if you also attend OzCHI.

We are sailing to attend CHI 2023 in Hamburg for presenting our paper "Eye-Perspective View Management for Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays" which is the result of a great collaboration with the group of Markus Tatzgern from Salzburg University of Applied Sciences.

We just welcomed our most recent visitor Assoc. Prof. Yuta Itoh. Yuta is joining us for an extended research visit from University of Tokyo where he is working in the Rekimoto lab Yuta's lab page.

Well deserved congratulations to Dr (!!) Jonathan Sutton who just successfully defended his PhD titled “Computational Glasses: Repurposing Augmented Reality Glasses for Vision Assistance”. Big thanks to the examiners and NSC SFTI for funding his work.

Join us at ACM UIST in Bend, Oregon, where we present our research on real-world saliency modulation using optical see-through head-mounted displays.

Jonathan Sutton just presented our ACM ToCHI paper on "Addressing Colour Vision Deficiency with Vision Augmentations" at ACM CHI 2022. If you are into Vision Augmentations and missed it, here is his recorded talk

A few years ago we published a paper on the concept of "Pervasive Augmented Reality" describing a continious and omnipresent augmentation of the environment. We now published a follow up paper, outlining key technologies and the ethical challenges when realising the concept of Pervasive Augmented Reality which is accepted for IEEE Pervasive Computing.

We co-organised the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User interfaces, the world largest academic conference on Virtual and Augmented Reality. We celebrated Turing Award winner Ivan Sutherland and other pioneers in our field with the new VR Academy, had inspiring keynotes by Tim Dwyer (Monash), Aliesha Staples (StaplesVR), and Paul Debevec (Director of Research Netflix, USC), and great presentation of latest research in VR and AR.

We have received the Best Conference Paper Award at IEEE Symposium for Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) for our paper titled "Neural Cameras: Learning Camera Characteristics for Coherent Mixed Reality Rendering". Congratulations to the whole team!

Our paper titled "Neural Cameras: Learning Camera Characteristics for Coherent Mixed Reality Rendering" a collaboration with Denis Kalkofen's group at Graz University of Technology was accepted at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (IEEE ISMAR). Congratulations in particular to David Mandl who is the main author of this work!

We are part of the CoDE VR+Games were our student Hugh is the VR Centre manager. Among several other demos you can also explore the 4th dimension with our hypercube demonstration.

We are part of the New Zealand International Science Festival and will present several of our recent projects at the Science Expo at the University of Otago on the 11-12.07.2021. See here for the detailed program and locations.

Our paper titled "Expertise and Experience in VR-supported learning: Achieving a deep non-verbal comprehension of four-dimensional space" that explores the role of expertise and experience in Virtual Reality based learning has just been accepted into Elsevier International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. Congratulations to Jonny Collins who worked with us on that topic as part of his PhD studies. See here for preprit and citation details.

Our paper capturing the current state and future directions on optival-see through HMDs titled "Towards Indistinguishable Augmented Reality: A Survey on Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays" has just been accepted into ACM Computing Surveys. Congratulations to Yuta Itoh who (Tokyo Tech) who worked with us on that topic. See here for preprit and citation details.

Jacob Young just successfully defended his PhD thesis titled "Removing spatial boundaries in immersive mobile communications” where he prototypically developed novel mobile telepresence solutions. We are very proud that his thesis was put on the deans list of 2020 exceptional theses. Jacob just made his next-career move by accepting a post-doc position at the Computational Media Innovation Centre at Victoria University in Wellington. We are looking forward to the great stuff he will do there and wish him all the best. CMIC

We just started with our ARIVE lecture series that features lectures on XR (Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Virtual Reality) that are given by leading experts from New Zealand and Australia that partnered within the ARIVE consortium (Australasian Researchers in Interactive Virtual Environments). You can find the recorded presentations here: ARIVE lecture series

Hour work on nomadic telepresence using mobile devices was accepted for ACM was just accepted for ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies / ACM UbiqComp. Congratulations to our PhD student Jacob Young who is the main author. If you want to know more check our research page where we also added a video

We are honoured to welcome Prof. Hans Gellersen to our group. Hans was awarded a William Evans Fellowship of the University of Otago and will stay at our group for the next months to share his knowledge on gaze for interaction, HCI and ubiqitious computing.

Our HCI group has won the Award of "Best research collaboration/Best research group" within the Division. Thanks to everyone who is involved in our work in particular students and colleagues. Very much appreciated!

Our work on "Mixed Reality Light Fields for Interactive Remote Assistance", a collaboration with Denis Kalkofen's group at Graz University of Technology was just accepted for the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI 2020, 3126 submissions, 760 accepted, or ~24.31%). The work show a practical approach for creating and interacting with light fields on mobile devices allowing visual realistic remote assistance systems even for complex environments.

We welcome Alexander Plopski who joins our groups as a postdoctor fellow. Alex previously worked at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) and was a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. We are looking forward to the exciting works ahead.

We welcome our guest Assist. Prof. Yuta Itoh. Yuta is an Assistant Professor at the Tokyo Institute for Technology (Tokyo Tech) and leads there the Augmented Vision Lab Yuta's lab page.

Our joined work on "Computational Phase-Modulated Eyeglasses" was just accepted for IEEE Transactions on Visualisation on Computer Graphics. In this work we discuss eyeglasses that can be controlled at runtime and go beyond what traditional glasses can achieve by utilising interactive phase modulation.

Our work titled "ARSpectator: Exploring Augmented Reality for Sport Events" presenting first insights on integrating Augmented Reality to enhance live sport events will presented as technical brief at Siggraph Asia in Brisbane in November.

Our former PhD student Abdulaziz Alshaer just got his last paper from his PhD accepted at Human Factors, The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Well done Abdul! So if you are interested in observation techniques in VR or in wheelchair training and assessment in VR make sure to check his work

Jonny Collins just successfully defended his PhD thesis. He started in the HCI lab as a summer intern in 2011 and is currently our longest serving lab member. Congratulations Jonny and all the best for your next steps.

Our paper titled "Measuring Cognitive Load and Insight: A Methodology Exemplified in a Virtual Reality Learning Context" is accepted for the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (IEEE ISMAR) and will be presented in Beijing in October.

We are hiring and are currently looking for a PostDoc and a PhD candidate. So if you are passionate in Human-Computer Interaction and Visual Computing and want to work in a beautiful environment such as New Zealand please get in contact with us. For the Post-Doc position please apply here: For the PhD position please contact Tobias Langlotz and send your application via email. The current application deadline is 23.06.2019.

Our paper on the effects of moving in VR using cycling was accepted for Interact 2019. We will present the paper in Cyprus during the actual conference. Well done Tanh and Holger.

Congrats to Jonathan Sutton who was one of the main winners of the NSC Science for Technology and Innovation's "Pitch your research" competition. Despite only in his first year of PhD he received a price of 10,000NZD to support his research. Well done Jonathan!

We are very honoured to have Prof. Anthony Steed from the Department of Computer Science, University College London as a guest for a few days. He will also give a talk titled "Being There Together" on Friday 10 May, Owheo building room G34.

Our paper on using Voxel as primitives for Mixed and Augmented Reality was accepted for the Virtual Reality section of the journal Frontiers of ICT.

Our two accepted journal track papers for IEEE VR 2019 published at IEEE Transactions on Visualisations and Computer Graphics have both been nominated for the Best Paper Award. Congratulations to all involved and in particular to Jacob Young as it was his first paper ever.

We have two conditionally accepted full papers at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI 2019) in Glasgow (705 accepted papers out of 2960 submissions, ~23.8% acceptance rate). More details soon.

We have received a Catalyst Seed grant that supports our collaboration with Tokyo Institute of Technology and in particular with the Augmented Vision Laboratory led by Ass. Prof. Yuta Itoh.

We have two papers conditionally accepted for the journal track of IEEE VR 2019 in Osaka, Japan published at IEEE Transactions on Visualisations and Computer Graphics (IEEE TVCG, 32 accepted out of 142 submissions, ca. 22% acceptance rate) . More details soon.

Tobias will give an talk on "Amplifying Human Vision using Computational Glasses" at the International Workshop on Computational Augmented Reality Displays co-located with ACM ISS'18 in Tokyo .

We are happy to announce that our research on Computational Glasses received a Marsden Grant from the Royal Society which will support our research for the next three years. This work is a collaboration with the Augmented Vision Lab at Tokyo Institue of Technology and receives further advise from the Department of Psychology .

We welcome our newest PhD student Stu to the team. Stu was already working with us and now decided to do a PhD with us on "Voxel-based Mixed Reality" supervised by Holger and Tobias. We are happy to have him in the lab for the years to come and we hope that we all improve our surf skills by joining him in the waves. Welcome on board Stu .

We recently put out a short news article of our work on using virtual reality for helping prison inmates improving their literacy skills .

Holger was voted by students as one of the finalists for the Supervisor of the Year 2018 .

The Samoan Prime Minister Susuga Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi has visited the HCI lab and tested some of our research prototypes. We are honoured by his visit and hope he it enjoyed it as much as we did .

Tobias is one of the attendees of the Shonan meeting (Japanese equivalent of the well known Dagstuhl Seminar) on "Augmented Reality in Human-Computer Interaction" and is one of the panelists for the discussion on the future of head-mounted displays .

On 31st of May, Tobias gives an invited guest lecture titled "Augmented Realities: From Augmented Paintings to Augmented Perceptions" at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan covering our current research in Augmented Reality and Human Augmentations.

Holger and Tobias attend the senior program committee meeting for the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan .

Tobias and his research on Computational Glasses are featured in the latest He Kitenga 2017, the 2017 University of Otago research highlights. Please see here for the online He Kitenga article on Tobias' work .

Great news! Our accepted ACM CHI 2018 submission "ChromaGlasses: Computational Glasses for Compensating Colour Blindness" has been awarded an Honourable Mention Award for CHI 2018, which means that it is ranked among the top 5% of all submissions to the SIGCHI 2018 conference, one of the top conference in HCI and computing in general. We congratulate Jonathan Sutton who worked with us on this project while being a 3rd year student. Well done Jonathan!

We are very happy to announce that Mohammed and Abdul, two of our PhD students, recently graduated after successfully defending their PhD. During his PhD Mohammed was focusing on stress resilience training using Virtual Reality while Abdul focused on investigating the use of Virtual Reality for power wheelchair assessment and training. We are proud of what they have achieved with Mohammed's thesis also being recommended for the Dean’s exceptional thesis list and we wish them both all the best for their future.

Together with Stefanie Zollmann and Steven Mills, we have been awarded a MBIE Smart Ideas project grant on "Situated visualisation to enrich sports experience for on-site spectators" that will support our research on providing live sports spectators a similar experience to people watching from home on their TV by integrating relevant live data via an Augmented Reality interface. This project us supported with 1 Mill NZD over 3 years. Please see here for more details on all accepted projects.

Tobias was awarded an SEED project grant from the National Science Challenge on "Science for Technological Innovation" funding his research on "Computational Glasses" for the upcoming years with 200K NZD. See for more details on the challenge and other funded projects.

Tobias was awarded the "Early Career Awards for Distinction in Research" from the University of Otago. Early Career Awards for Distinction in Research recognize outstanding research achievements by early career staff and come with an award of 5000NZD. Congratulations Tobias! More details

We will have the program committee meeting for the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality here at the University of Otago. It is the first time in Australasia and we are looking forward to welcome our guests from Asia.

Research Professor Albert "Skip" Rizzo is a Visiting William Evans Fellow at our group and the University of Otago. Skip conducts research on the design, development and evaluation of virtual reality (VR) systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment rehabilitation and resilience. Skip, we are looking forward to learn and work with you.

Mohammed and Holger just got their work titled: "Mild Stress Stimuli built into a Non-Immersive Virtual Environment can elicit actual Stress Responses" accepted for publication in Behaviour & Information Technology. Congratulations Mohammed!

Holger's work is covered in the He Kitenga: 2016 University of Otago research highlights. Check here for the overview on Holger's work and here for other research highlights at the University of Otago.

Tobias work on Augmented Reality is covered in the most recent Otago Magazin. Check here for an online version of the article.

Tobias was among the finalists for the 2016 OUSA Supervisor of the Year award. There were about 160 nominations from around the university and Tobias is one of 12 finalists selected to receive an award for outstanding supervision.

Jonny won the best presentation award for his presentation on "Presence and Embodied Learning in Virtual Reality" at this years Information Science Postgraduate Day.

Our international Master students Katrin and Arne successfully defended their Master thesis supervised by us at the University of Koblenz. They worked here for 6 months on the Mixed Reality Embodiment Platform and were supervised by Holger and Tobias. Congratulations Katrin and Arne, well deserved!

Holger's Inaugural Professorial Lecture entitled “Seeing is Believing – Exploring Computer-Mediated Reality” now online, click here

Tomorrow, Tuesday 14 June, Holger will present his Inaugural Professorial Lecture entitled “Seeing is Believing – Exploring Computer-Mediated Reality”. Holger’s IPL is at 5.30pm in Moot Court, level 10, Richardson Building.

Good news! Our submission to the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (IEEE ISMAR) is conditionally accepted into the special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) on ISMAR 2016 (9% acceptance rate). Congratulations to Matthew Cook who worked on this topic during his Honours thesis.

Our paper titled: "Towards Pervasive Augmented Reality: Context-Awareness in Augmented Reality" was accepted for the journal IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE TVCG). Congratulations to Jens Grubert from the University of Passau and Stefanie Zollmann from Animation Research Limited who work with us on that topic.

After making great work experience in industry, Jonny Collins started with us as a new PhD student working on "Embodied Learning using Virtual environments". Welcome back Jonny!

Our paper on Pervasive Telepresence was accepted as full paper for IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication (IEEE PerCom 2016) despite the low acceptance rate of less than 15%. Yay!

We are involved in organising the 15th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (IEEE ISMAR) in Merida, Mexico. Please consider to submit to the premier event for Augmented Reality research.

Chris Heinrich will start as a new PhD student working on "Home- and community-based neurorehabilitation with mobile augmented reflection technology" funded by a Brain Research New Zealand PhD scholarship. Welcome on board Chris!

The HCI group organised a writing retreat together with department of surveying bringing 22 students and staff for an extended weekend to Stewart Island to work on their thesis or publications.

Holger Regenbrecht was selected as one of the 12 finalists for the OUSA supervisor of the year award.

We presented three papers at OzCHI2014, December 2nd - 5th, Sydney. More

We have two papers accepted for IEEE Virtual Reality with one going to the special issue in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. The overall acceptance rate was below 24% (including short papers). More

Holger Regenbrecht has won the commerce division OUSA supervisor of the year award after being selected as one of the 12 finalists from nearly 200 nominations. More