The 3DI Group happily congratulates newly minted Dr. Run Yu for completing his dissertation defense on July 17th, 2019. His work, entitled “Designing Coherent Interactions for Virtual Reality,” concentrated on interaction methods that leverage metaphors instead of real-world interactions. This was born of his work on Narrative Driven Redirected Walking, Force Push, and Physically Coherent Remote Manipulation.
Coherence describes the validity of the internal rules that drive the behaviors of a virtual environment (VE) in presenting a credible scenario. A VR system with a high level of coherence could lead to strong plausibility illusion, which is a key component of the sense of presence. There are few existing studies centered around coherence, and they tend to put the user in a passive role when experiencing the VE without emphasizing on their active participation in the interaction. Run’s dissertation makes up this gap by connecting the concept of coherence with fundamental 3D user interface design that focuses on the algorithms that map the user’s actions to the VE’s behaviors. Specifically, he inspects the design of coherent interactions for two complicated tasks, namely travel and object manipulation. For travel, he proposes a family of redirected walking techniques called “narrative driven cell-based redirection”, which lets the user traverse a VE that’s much larger than the physical space without breaking the coherence of the scenario. For object manipulation, he proposes the novel concept of physics coherence to capture whether an interface conforms to the rules of physics and design several novel techniques that try to balance between physics coherence and usability. Lastly, he provides some useful tools for designing coherent interactions and discusses how coherence affects user experience in VR interaction.
Dr. Yu will continue his career at Bloomberg in New York City.