Immersive Virtual Environments Laboratory https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality research in Department of Computer Science at UCL Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:48:29 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.10 XR at UCL https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/xr-at-ucl/ Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:48:02 +0000 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/?p=3184 A report on a recent event at UCL showcasing a range of XR work at UCL from different departments. Ranging from a variety of teaching cases through to David and I talking about our recent research.

]]> UCL at IEEE VR 2026 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-at-ieee-vr-2026/ Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:27:28 +0000 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/?p=3131 Now all the proceedings for IEEE VR 2026 are available online, here are links to all our contributions in Daegu, Korea this year

  • Anthony, Nels, Jingyi and Phoenix presented a tutorial on Ubiq and Ubiq-Genie
  • Anthony presented Klara’s paper Record Replay Repeat: Improving Interactivity Between Non-Player Characters with Additive Record and Replay, Klara Brandstätter: University College London; Benjamin J. Congdon: Planar Interactive; Anthony Steed: University College London
  • Phoenix presented our paper Supporting Bi-Directional Collaboration with Unmodified Immersive Applications Using AccompliceVR Ruijun Sun: University College London; Anthony Steed: University College London
  • Telmo presented a paper he developed when visiting our lab A Comparative Study of Using Augmented vs Virtual Reality in Collaborative Tasks Telmo Zarraonandia: University Carlos III of Madrid; Alvaro Montero Montes: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Roberto Cuervo Rosillo: University Carlos III of Madrid; Paloma Diaz: University Carlos III of Madrid; Anthony Steed: University College London; Nels Numan: University College London
  • Anthony presented Tuning Immersion and Performance with Adaptive Generative Music in VR Jiayuan Wen: University college London; Daniele Giunchi: University of Birmingham; Pasquale Cascarano: University of Bologna; Riccardo Bovo: Imperial College London; Eyal Ofek: Microsoft Research; Anthony Steed: University College London (this paper won an honourable mention for best paper)
  • Anthony gave one of the keynote speeches at GenAI-XR : Generative Artificial Intelligence meets Extended Reality workshop
  • Anthony was on the panel of Future Conference Formats: Balancing Knowledge Dissemination, Socialising and Environmental Impacts

]]> UCL at IEEE VR 2025 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-at-ieee-vr-2025/ Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:58:00 +0000 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/?p=3138 Several of the group were in St Malo for IEEE Virtual Reality 2025

  • Anthony, Ben and Jingyi presented a tutorial on Building Social Extended Realities with Ubiq
  • Siddhant presented our paper Blind Augmentation: Calibration-free Camera Distortion Model Estimation for Real-time Mixed-reality Consistency Siddhant Prakash, University College London; David R Walton, Birmingham City University; Rafael Kuffner dos Anjos, University of Leeds; Anthony Steed, University College London; Tobias Ritschel, University College London
  • Jingyi presented our paper Single Actor Controlling Multiple Avatars for Social Virtual Realities Jingyi Zhang, University College London; Anthony Steed, University College London
  • Daniele presented our poster PaintBranch: Asynchronous Collaborative Art in Virtual Reality Ana David, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon; Daniele Giunchi, University College London; Stuart James, University College London (UCL); Anthony Steed, University College London; Augusto Esteves, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon

]]> UCL at IEEE VR 2024 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-at-ieee-vr-2024/ Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:59:02 +0000 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/?p=3074 Now all the proceedings for IEEE VR 2024 are available online, here are links to all our contributions in Florida this year

]]> UCL VR Lab Team at IEEE VR2023 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-vr-lab-team-at-ieee-vr2023/ Fri, 24 Mar 2023 15:45:14 +0000 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/?p=3044 UCL will be involved in the following activities at IEEE VR 2023 (in the rough order they appear):

]]> UCL at IEEE VR 2022 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-at-ieee-vr-2022/ Fri, 11 Mar 2022 20:10:31 +0000 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/?p=2976 UCL we be involved in the following activities at IEEE VR 2022:

]]> Movebox https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/movebox/ Thu, 07 Jan 2021 16:35:25 +0000 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/?p=2405 Following on from RocketBox, we were pleased to contribute to the MoveBox effort coordinated by Microsoft which provides tools to animate avatars. See:

https://github.com/microsoft/MoveBox-for-Microsoft-Rocketbox

The following paper was published at IEEE AIVR 2020 to coincide with the release of this toolbox,and gives more details of the features included:

Mar Gonzalez-Franco, Zelia Egan, Matthew Peachey, Angus Antley, Tanmay Randhavane, Payod Panda, Yaying Zhang, Cheng Yao Wang, Derek F. Reilly, Tabitha C Peck, Andrea Stevenson Won, Anthony Steed and Eyal Ofek (2020) “MoveBox: Democratizing MoCap for the Microsoft Rocketbox Avatar Library”. IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR)

See also the publication page at Microsoft.

We will be using both tools in our upcoming work on social virtual reality and character animation.

]]> Microsoft Rocketbox https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/microsoft-rocketbox/ Fri, 14 Aug 2020 11:50:48 +0000 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/?p=2387 We have used the Rocketbox avatars is several of our demos over the years. They are well structured, easy to animate and not too complex. We have spent a lot of time over the years building alternative avatars, but always come back to using these. However, we relied on a purchase we had made several years before, and there didn’t seem to be a way of purchasing the avatars again for external partners.

An example of our use of the Rocketbox avatars in the paper The impact of self-avatars on trust and collaboration in shared virtual environments

Rocketbox was part of Havok which was bought by Microsoft in 2015. When I was at Microsoft Research on sabbatical in the second half of 2018/early 2019, the idea of making the avatars available came up, and in March 2020, Microsoft made the Rocketbox avatars available for research free of charge. You can just check out the avatars from github. I had a small hand in setting this up, by contributing a script to automatically fix up the avatars when loaded as .fbx files into recent versions of Unity.

More tools will be coming, and hopefully we will now be able to share open source versions of some of our experiments to facilitate reproduction and extension of our work.

Anthony

]]> AR/VR Research in the COVID-19 Lockdown https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/ar-vr-research-in-the-covid-19-lockdown/ Wed, 24 Jun 2020 14:50:35 +0000 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/?p=2315 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

]]> UCL at IEEE VR 2020 https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-at-ieee-vr-2020/ Tue, 07 Apr 2020 12:42:55 +0000 http://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/?p=2275 UCL was involved in several papers and talks at IEEE VR2020. Anthony was one of the Journal Programme Chairs and one of the coordinators of the Virtual Conferencing Workshop (VR in VR). That workshop became very important as the whole conference moved online. Other contributions:

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