An Interview With Daniel Thalmann [2]

渔夫之

<h3><font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Daniel Thalmann has over 30 years experience working on Vrtual Reality (VR). On Aug 15, Yiyu had an interview with Daniel. </font></h3> <h3><font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Yiyu: Hi, Daniel. Personally, I have long admired your work in Virtual Reality. Would you please share with us your early work on VR research?<br> <br>  <br>Daniel: Thank you very much, Yiyu. I am pleased to share my work.<br><br>I started Virtual Humans very early, in the eighties, when I was Professor in Montreal, Canada with my wife, Professor Nadia Magnenat Thalmann.<br><br>Then in 1988, I came back to Switzerland, in EPFL and started immediately in VR, developing with PhD students a VR toolkit (Virtuality Builder) using HMDs, DataGloves, and Spaceball.<br><br>My Lab was first named Computer Graphics Lab, then I changed the name to VRLab.</font></h3> <h3><font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Yiyu: Can you share more information about your VRLab at EPFL?<br>  <br>Daniel: VRLab is the Lab I created in EPFL. I had about 45 PhD students during my activities in VRLab (22 years). We have worked in many areas of VR. Just to mention a few ones:<br>1) Virtuality Builder 2 (VB2)<br>2) Virtual crowds in VR<br>3) Haptic feedback with two arms using a unique Haptic Workstation<br>4) Head-mounted Wind<br>5) Quantifying Effects of Exposure to the Third and First-Person Perspectives in VR-Based Training<br>6) Virtual Rehabilitation in Social Phobia<br>7) Vibrators for the Solar impulse pilot<br>8) Augmented Reality for Cultural Heritage<br>9) Interaction between real and synthetic worlds, etc.….</font></h3> <h3><font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Yiyu: What is your view on the current global trend of VR?<br> <br>  <br>Daniel: VR becomes more a consumer tool. The technology has not changed a lot; the new HMDs (e.g. Oculus Rift) are lighter, but not very different than the old ones. HMDs exist since 50 years.<br><br>But they still have problems (lack of resolution, lag times, motion sickness), but the price has decreased a lot and this is the main trend. Now, everybody can buy glasses and use them with cheap computers or even smartphones.<br><br>The other important development is TelePresence; in the future everybody will be able to be immersed with other people located in other parts of the world. The future is for a “5 stars Skype” with high resolution and immersion</font></h3> <h3><font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Yiyu: You are Editor-in-chief of the Journal Computer Animation and Virtual World. Will you please say something about the journal and your expectations of quality submissions to your journal?<br>  <br>Daniel: Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds is a journal published by Wiley since 1990. It was founded by Nadia Magnenat Thalmann and myself. The journal is dedicated to Computer Animation and VR.<br>There are 6 issues by year, but two of them are dedicated to the CASA conference. We also invite a few outstanding papers from VRCAI for an extended version in the journal.<br>We now receive more and more high quality papers for regular issues. We encourage submissions especially in VR and AR.</font></h3> <h3><font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">For more information about the VRCAI 2016 conference, please follow us by extracting the conference QR code above. Or visit us at http://www.vrcai.org<br><br><br><br><br><br></font></h3>