Tina Iachini is Full Professor of General Psychology at the Department of Psychology, University of Campania Vanvitelli (Italy), where she teaches Human Cognition & Virtual Reality and Cognitive Sciences. She gained her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at the University of Bologna and conducted research at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) with R.H. Logie. She is head of the Lab of Cognitive Science & Immersive Virtual Reality, coordinator of the European Master's Degree in Cognitive Psychology & Psychophysiology, coordinator of the research group “Human-Environment Interaction & Multisensory Virtual Reality” (joining psychology, informatics, architecture…). She has been a member of several scientific committees, project evaluation committees and editorial boards of renowned scientific journals. Her current research uses a combination of methods (from behavioural to psychophysiological and neuroimaging) to study visuospatial cognition in real and virtual worlds with healthy and pathological populations. In particular, she aims to understand how sensorimotor and socio-emotional factors influence spatial regulation in interaction with virtual agents, in the ability to represent egocentric and allocentric spatial information, and in semantically complex virtual contexts.
Virtual Reality and Humanity Attribution: The Roots of the Feeling of Presence Virtual Reality experience lies at the intersection of high-level awareness and low-level sensorimotor mechanisms. Although we are aware that we are in a fictitious virtual environment, we cannot avoid sensorimotor reactivity and attribute a "human-like reality" to artificial humans. The state of consciousness that emerges from the perception of virtual stimuli is called presence and/or social presence. Here I propose an exploration of the roots of this state of consciousness through the study of the modulation of proxemic distances between real humans and virtual stimuli. Experimental evidence has shown that anthropomorphic virtual agents are treated differently from objects, that their emotional expressions and moral descriptions modulate the regulation of interpersonal distances and psychophysiological reactions. The whole findings reveal good ecological validity of Virtual Reality, to the extent that it is able to reflect fundamental evolutionary mechanisms. The importance of simulating the physical, behavioural and communicative characteristics of humans is also confirmed. The role of the "human body" in Virtual Reality is discussed from both a theoretical and applied perspective.
Qi Sun is an Assistant Professor at New York University. Before joining NYU, he was a research scientist at Adobe Research. He received his PhD at Stony Brook University. His research interests lie in VR/AR, perceptual computer graphics, display, and computational cognition. He is a recepient of the IEEE Virtual Reality Best Dissertation Award. With colleagues, his research has been recognized through several best paper and honorable mention awards at ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE ISMAR, IEEE VR, and IEEE VIS.
Toward Human-Centered XR: Bridging Cognition and Computation Virtual and augmented reality enable unprecedented possibilities for displaying virtual content, sensing physical surroundings, and tracking human behaviors with high fidelity. However, we still haven't created "superhumans" who can outperform what we are in physical reality, nor a "perfect" XR system that delivers infinite battery life or realistic sensation. In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent research on leveraging eye/muscular sensing and learning to model our perception, reaction, and sensation in virtual environments. Based on this knowledge, we create just-in-time visual content that jointly optimizes human (such as reaction to speed events) and system performance (such as reduced display power consumption) in XR.
