NOVA LINCS researchers receive Best Paper Award at ICGI 2022
Nov 2022
Ana Rita Rebelo, PhD student at NOVA, and her supervisor, NOVA LINCS Multimodal Systems researcher Rui Nóbrega, were awarded the best paper award at the 2022 edition of the International Conference on Graphics and Interaction (ICGI 2022) for their paper entitled “Tangible Objects in Virtual Reality for Visuo-Haptic Feedback”.
Including tangible objects in Virtual Reality (VR) can improve the interaction and immersion in virtual experiences. Users' hands are freed to interact directly with physical objects and thus receive realistic haptic feedback that complements the primarily visual information offered by the Head-Mounted Display (HMD). The challenge in this area relies on tracking and mapping physical objects into the Virtual Environment (VE). Most methods require attaching sensors to the objects being tracked, usually resulting in object-oriented solutions, making the system inflexible to track different props.
The awarded paper proposes a marker-based approach that uses computer vision to make the system flexible to different objects, requiring few additional hardware resources. Using the developed prototype, the authors conducted a user study to analyse hand representation's impact on the performance of tangible object manipulation tasks.
