This week I had the pleasure to attend UIST 2023 as a sponsor and co-author of the work Don Samitha Elvitigala, Yunfan Wang, Yongquan Hu, and Aaron J Quigley. 2023. RadarFoot: Fine-grain Ground Surface Context Awareness for Smart Shoes. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 87, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3586183.3606738
This was a great opportunity to meet with colleagues from our US office, our industry partners and to showcase some of the great work from across Data61 at the demo reception.
I was delighted to meet the SunSwift team as it crossed the finishing line. In the CSIRO Cruiser Class field, Sunswift Racing claimed its first Cruiser Cup victory.
I joined a panel to discuss music, technology and the arts at SxSW Sydney this week.
Australians have a talent for ingenuity and creative thinking. From ancient times, Australians have used the materials around them to develop unique and practical tools to help them live and prosper. Among the huge variety of Australian inventions are the boomerang, cochlear implants, polymer banknotes, wi-fi technology and off course, the mighty hills hoist.
The lucky country; a land of economic opportunity and bountiful natural resources. A young, multicultural and open country with an ever-growing economy has avoided recessions like no other, has been a destination for tertiary education and built some of the world’s newest technology unicorns.
As Australia has the pandemic in its rear-view mirror, it’s a good time to assess where is Australia going. National and Global challenges have anything but diminished and what got us here, won’t get us there.
Has the mineral boom ended? Will our universities lead the way and continue to attract students? Is our growing service economy going to change anything? Will the Australian market ever be big enough for companies to grow here? What opportunities will the metaverse, blockchain and NFTs provide Australian businesses? Is Australia really the best place to live?
ISMAR 2023, the premier conference for Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Virtual Reality (VR), collectively referred to as eXtended Reality (XR), was held in Sydney from October 16-20, 2023 where I served as one of the honorary general chairs. CSIRO was one of the conference sponsors this year.
IEEE ISMAR is the premier conference for Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR) and Virtual Reality (VR), which attracts the world’s leading researchers from both academia and industry. ISMAR explores the advances in commercial and research activities related to AR, MR, and VR by continuing the expansion of its scope over the past several years. The conference is planned to include two days of workshops, tutorials, and contests, and three days of presentations of scientific papers, posters, and demonstrations. In addition, exhibitions will be arranged to promote the interactions and exchange between industry and academia.
My deepest thanks and congratulations to Barrett Ens, Denis Kalkofen, Gelareh Mohammadi, Frank Guan the General Chairs for IEEE ISMAR 2023.
After working with the SunSwift team from 2020 – 2023 I delighted to return to visit the Spacecube setup which monitored the car from Sydney as it raced from Darwin to Adelaide.
In my role as Head of School in UNSW I was pleased to bring in the redevelopment of the lower ground floor into our plans for a more entrepreneurial school and campus. With an Underground, Overground and High Line for different forms of industry engagement, spin ins and spinouts I look forward to seeing CSE develop and extend its impact in the years to come.
User engagement in Virtual Reality (VR) games is crucial for creating immersive and captivating gaming experiences that meet the expectations of players. However, understanding and measuring these levels in VR games presents a challenge for game designers, as current methods, such as self-reports, may be limited in capturing the full extent of user engagement. Additionally, approaches based on biological signals to measure engagement in VR games present complications and challenges, including signal complexity, interpretation difficulties, and ethical concerns. This study explores body movements, as a novel approach to measure user engagement in VR gaming. We employ E4, emteqPRO, and off-the-shelf IMUs to measure the body movements from diverse participants engaged in multiple VR games. Further, we examine the simultaneous occurrence of player motivation and physiological responses to explore potential associations with body movements. Our findings suggest that body movements hold promise as a reliable and objective indicator of user engagement, offering game designers valuable insights on generating more engaging and immersive experiences.
This year I was pleased to join my co-author Dr Rukshani Somarathna at VRST 2023 where she presented our paper entitled “Rukshani Somarathna, Don Samitha Elvitigala, Yijun Yan, Aaron J Quigley, and Gelareh Mohammadi. 2023. Exploring User Engagement in Immersive Virtual Reality Games through Multimodal Body Movements. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 3, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1145/3611659.3615687“
Along with Bhautik Joshi of Canva we submitted a Birds of a Feather session on stories of connecting R&D at Scale.
Stories from industry and applied research at scale. How is applied R&D undertaken to achieve impact at scale for use by millions or billions? Discuss lessons on how R&D is put into production with stories and discussions from leading industry figures. Following a general introduction and setting we will have a general discussion on what it takes to take industry, applied research and startups along the R&D journey to achieve impact at scale. Join us to discuss how to avoid the valley of death, the tar-pits of tech transfer onto a successful journey to scaling impact.
We were joined by Maggie Oh and Stella Solar as panelists on the day to discuss and answer questions.
