Brown CS PhD Alum Johannes Novotny And David Laidlaw Receive An IEEE VR Best Paper Award
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on March 18, 2024
Held in Orlando, Florida, this week, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Virtual Reality conference (IEEE VR) is widely considered the premier international venue for the presentation of research results in the broad area of virtual reality (VR). The event’s Best Paper Awards are given to approximately the top 1% of total submissions, and new work, “Evaluating Text Reading Speed in VR Scenes and 3D Particle Visualizations”, from Brown CS alum Johannes Novotny and faculty member David Laidlaw, his doctoral advisor, is one of just six winners.
The work reports on the effects of text size and display parameters on reading speed and legibility in three state-of-the-art VR displays. Two of them are head-mounted displays, and one is Brown’s Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE)-like Yurt Ultimate Reality Theatre (YURT).
“Our two perception experiments,” Johannes and David say, “uncover limits where reading speed declines as the text size approaches the so-called critical print sizes (CPS) of individual displays. We observe an inverse correlation between display resolution and CPS, revealing hardware-specific limitations on legibility beyond display resolution, making CPS an effective benchmark for VR devices. Additionally, we report on the effects of text panel placement, orientation, and occlusion-reducing rendering methods on reading speeds in volumetric particle visualization.”
David’s research centers around applications of visualization, computational modeling, computer graphics, and computer science to other scientific disciplines. His particular interests include visualization of multivalued multidimensional imaging data, comparisons of virtual and non-virtual environments for scientific tasks, and applications of art, perception, and cognition to visualization.
Johannes is currently a Senior Research Engineer at the VRVis Zentrum für Virtual Reality und Visualisierung Forschungs-GmbH, one of Austria’s 25 Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies (COMET). As part of the Biomedical Image Informatics group, he’s following his research interests in the improvement of medical image analysis through a fusion of novel rendering styles with machine-learning methods and immersive output devices.
A list of all award winners from the conference is available here.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.
