Human-Computer Interaction expert specialized in UX/UI for Virtual Reality R&D, and design and evaluation methodology for Collaborative Virtual Environments. Teaches Human-Computer Interaction Methods, VR, Human Factors, Statistics, and Digital Humanities in the Computer Science Department for the HCI Master’s program. Facilitates and mentors Study Abroad programs at several VR labs in Spain and the Netherlands. Initiated and coordinates the SUNY Oswego VR First lab.

The recent advent of untethered mobile virtual reality devices requires a drastic reduction in the utilization of bus bandwidth as well as minimizing render time through optimized shader computation. The extremely low latency requirements to reduce motion to photon delays is putting added pressure on the GPU to be highly performant. Learn to better understand your underlying hardware to exploit the features in the core graphics APIs and their extensions for OpenGL ES and Vulkan.

Absolutely any experience with VR or AR, whether for work or leisure, depends on a good interactive narrative. The virtual or mixed reality must (1) make sense to the user based on who they are (2) respond to the user in a way that makes sense, (3 guide him or her though some process, like adventuring, building, socializing, etc., and (4) leave the user with a valuable take-away.  This can be done with any interactive media, but VR and AR have particular advantages and limitations, makin them a genuinely new media. They are also different segments of the same continuum of immersive media; we will look at the big picture there. Attendees of the talk will come away with a basic framework for thinking about how to build VR and AR to engage, entertain, and get work done.

Join us for an overview of the HoloLens developer device, 2D & 3D holographic apps, the basics of holographic development, getting started with holographic development in Unity, working with the HoloToolkit for Unity, deploying Holographic apps to a HoloLens device or emulator and holographic demos!

Our digital world is currently one that is of emotional intelligence.Affectiva’s goal is to bring that missing element to our devices in order to enrich our experiences and close the gap on how machines understand and respond humans. This talk will be centered around the SDKs and their capabilities so that hackathon recipients can get the most out of them.

Augmented reality has increasing become known with now three major hardware players underway and a number of software toolkits to facilitate application creation. Meanwhile surgical simulation has been increasingly incorporated into device and procedural training with a broadening of use areas as well as in the sophistication of the computational physics and haptic interaction devices used with these experiences. Surgical simulation, at times referred to less precisely as virtual reality, is already mandatory for surgical robotics training and is widely used in endoscopic and catheter procedure training. A few examples of combining AR with surgical simulation have been created and these will be increasingly deployed in multiple areas. I will talk about a couple of these type projects that I led including an interesting ear microsurgery simulator built for a medical device company and will sadly never see commercial use due to the demise of the product it was built to support. I’ll also discuss current and expected future developments in AR/VR relative to the expanding field of surgical robotics.

Thinking about creating a mixed reality application in the home decor space? Don't miss this workshop if you want to use the biggest collection of 3D models of home decor products available on Wayfair for your AR and VR apps! Get a sneak peek and beta access to Wayfair's 3D Model API and learn how to discover and use the models. We will go through basics of using the API, and walk through examples in Unity.

The rapid increase in numbers of 360 content coupled with the emerging WebVR standard opens the door for opportunity target VR with web content. Using familiar tools such as WebGL and Three.js developers can create interactive 3D and 360 experiences. With support of the web, these experiences can reach a wide audience across VR, mobile, and PC platforms. Samsung Internet for GearVR will be used to demonstrate how these new web based experiences are available to today on a mobile VR environment.

This talk will target both beginner and advanced Unity developers by providing an introduction to tools for Vive development including the SteamVR plugin, HTC's Unity plugins and additional HTC SDKs.

Google Tango is enabling technology for devices to understand their position relative to the world around them. Tango's computer vision platform empowers developers creating next-generation spatially aware application experiences. This workshop explains the Tango hardware and software platform, the technologies in use, how they work, and how to use them. The session will prepare developers to use Tango via the C, Java and Unity SDKs, and conclude with a worked example of building a Tango-enabled Augmented Reality application using Unity. A limited number of Tango Development Kit devices will be available for attendees use.

Mixed Reality experiences such as HoloLens operate by blending virtual objects with real world. It requires a new way of thinking about how developers and designers should create graphical, audio and typographic assets, develop interactive scenarios and gameplay, provide action feedback and generate object layouts based on real environment and device requirements. At this session we will talk about existing experiences made for HoloLens, ideas and decisions behind them. We will also take a look at general recommended approaches of creating HoloLens experiences and common mistakes people make when start developing for HoloLens.

Preparing 3D assets to be consumed by AR/VR devices can be a long and painful journey. Today there isn’t a simple content preparation pipeline available. And when it comes to industry specific content, you sometimes get completely stuck. Autodesk Forge provides tools that can help in this area, and in this workshop we’ll present and discuss the various options and potential workflows. Finally we’ll present what we’ve been doing with the Oculus Rift and the Hololens as well as a simple workflow for WebVR.