How do people explore virtual environments? Capturing and modeling visual behavior in VR

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) can dramatically change the way we create and consume content in areas of our everyday life, including entertainment, training, design, communication or advertising. Understanding how people explore immersive virtual environments is crucial for many applications in VR, such as designing content, developing new compression algorithms, or improving the interaction with virtual humans. In this talk, we will focus on how to capture and model visual behavior of users in virtual environments. I will start with our measurement and analysis of viewing behavior in immersive environments, and then move on to our work on generative models for scanpath prediction in 360º images. While primarily targeted to VR, our work ties in with a wide area of research in computer vision on modeling saliency and visual attention.

Brief Biography

Belen Masia is a tenured Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Universidad de Zaragoza, and a member of the Graphics and Imaging Lab. Before, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Her research focuses on the areas of computational imaging, applied perception, and virtual reality. Belen Masia is a Eurographics Junior Fellow. She is also the recipient of a Eurographics Young Researcher Award in 2017, a Eurographics PhD Award in 2015, an award to the top ten innovators below 35 in Spain from MIT Technology Review in 2014, and an NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship in 2012. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Graphics. She is the co-founder of the startup DIVE Medical.