Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (VR)

THE IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (VR) continues to be the leading venue for disseminating the latest in VR research, applications, technologies, and companies, and this special section presents significantly extended versions of the six best papers from the IEEE VR 2010 Proceedings. These papers highlight the wide span of active research areas in the VR field, including perceptual understanding, interfaces, rendering and visualization technologies, augmented reality, and audio and display technologies. IEEE VR 2010 had a record number of submissions (161) and each paper was reviewed by at least four experts in the field. An international program committee of 59 VR experts carefully invited reviewers, led discussions, and summarized a concensus review. An international program committee meeting was held where each paper was discussed and the overall acceptance rate of 25 percent is an indication of the significant effort expanded in selecting the best papers. The top 10 papers of the IEEE VR 2010 conference were identified from the conference review process and the conference Awards Committee. Next, each of these authors were asked to submit an extended version of their conference paper, with a clear focus of additional content that expanded and enhanced the scientific contribution of the original conference paper. A standard IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) reviewing cycle was initiated and all accepted papers required multiple revisions and reviews by each reviewer. Significant effort by many people was invested to ensure the quality of this special section, and we are very grateful. In their paper “Natural Interaction Metaphors for Functional Validations of Virtual Car Models,” Mathias Moehring and Bernd Froehlich provide an elegant solution to a major VR problem—how do you provide natural physical interfaces (e.g., gestures and finger tracking) to purely virtual objects? Further, if the goal is to validate the virtual models, for example, in car manufacturing, the requirements are significant. To address this issue, the authors examined grasping heuristics of users and developed “Normal Proxies,” a simplification of complex virtual objects to provide improved grasp detection and grasp stability. Expert review and user studies demonstrated that the approach did allow for an intuitive and reliable assessment required in model verification. Further, the efficacy of such an approach showed that overall task performance and usability are similar in CAVE and HMD environments. Although it has been common to use multiple projectors to build an immersive display environment, its calibration is still a tough problem. In their paper “Autocalibrating Tiled Projectors on Piecewise Smooth Vertically Extruded Surfaces,” Behzad Sajadi and Aditi Majumder have proposed a novel calibration approach for casually aligned projectors using a single camera. They assume the surface is a piecewise smooth vertically extruded surface (e.g., cylindrical displays and CAVEs) for which the aspect ratio of the rectangle formed by the four corners of the surface is known and the boundary is visible and segmentable. Using these priors, they can estimate the display’s 3D geometry and camera extrinsic parameters using a nonlinear optimization technique from a single image without any explicit display to camera correspondences, and recover the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of each projector quickly and robustly. In visual perception, change blindness describes the phenomenon that persons viewing a visual scene may apparently fail to detect significant changes in that scene. These phenomena have been observed in both computer generated imagery and real-world scenes. However, until now the influence of stereoscopic vision on change blindness has not been studied thoroughly. In their paper “Change Blindness Phenomena for Virtual Reality Display Systems,” Frank Steinicke, Gerd Bruder, Klaus Hinrichs, and Pete Willemsen have investigated change blindness techniques for stereoscopic virtual reality (VR) systems. In their study, they compared a few passive and active stereo display systems and found that change blindness phenomena occur with the same magnitude as in monoscopic viewing conditions. They have also presented and discussed the potential of the techniques for allowing abrupt, and yet significant changes in a VR environment. While a significant amount of VR research has focused on the visual and the haptic components of immersive environments, audio has had proportionally less study. However, recently there has been increasing interest in new methods to generate audio for virtual environments, and evaluating the impact of audio in VEs. In “Sound Synthesis and Evaluation of Interactive Footsteps and Environmental Sounds Rendering for Virtual Reality Applications,” Rolf Nordahl, Luca Turchet, and Stefania Serafin proposed new methods to generate audio IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS, VOL. 17, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011 1193