AR/VR Research in the COVID-19 Lockdown

Like many aca­d­e­mics, we have now been away from our main lab­o­ra­to­ries for three months now. How­ev­er, our work has tak­en on new dimen­sions that respond the cri­sis. There have also been research com­mu­ni­ty respons­es to the sit­u­a­tion, from ear­ly exper­i­ments in run­ning con­fer­ences com­plete­ly online (see post about IEEE VR 2020) to dis­cus­sions about how to improve gen­er­al expe­ri­ence for remote workers.

One of our con­tri­bu­tions has been help­ing to lead an effort to share best prac­tice around run­ning exper­i­ments remote­ly as well as fos­ter­ing a com­mu­ni­ty of poten­tial col­lab­o­ra­tors to run each oth­ers’ exper­i­ments to get some ini­tial feed­back on work. There is a Slack com­mu­ni­ty that is shar­ing expe­ri­ence, and some of us wrote up some of the dis­cus­sion in an arti­cle for Inter­ac­tions Magazine

We also con­tributed to a pan­el dis­cus­sion in the Fron­tiers in VR sem­i­nar series “XR for bring­ing peo­ple togeth­er in times of lock­down and post-COVID”

Final­ly Antho­ny was a con­trib­u­tor to the ACM’s Vir­tu­al Con­fer­ences, A Guide to Best Prac­tices A com­mu­ni­ty resource from the ACM Pres­i­den­tial Task Force on What Con­fer­ences Can Do to Replace Face-to-Face Meetings