The Joint Virtual Reality Conference (JVRC) 2011 took place on September 20-21 in Nottingham, UK.

This Joint Virtual Reality Conference of euroVR and EGVE is an international event which brings together people from industry, commerce, research including technology developers, suppliers and all those interested in virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and 3D user interfaces to exchange knowledge and share experiences of new results and applications, live demonstrations of current and emerging technologies and form collaborations for future work.

The conference included parallel scientific and industrial tracks, with technology demonstrations and exhibitions in between the presentation sessions. The REPAR contribution to the conference consisted of the paper entitled “User Centred Methods for Gathering VR Design Tool Requirements”.

The paper presents the VR case study carried out for the first company in sub project B. In a 25 minute presentation the audience was informed about the case study activities, such as the group workshops and tool demonstrations, and some conclusions about applying VR in design domains were discussed. It was an interesting ‘different’ presentation, because the audience (being part of the scientifi track) was primarily involved with relatively detailed topics, such as rendering techniques, communication protocols and physics engines. In this context the REPAR work is quite a high-level perspective on how to apply VR in design domains. After the presentation there was plenty of positive feedback on the presentation as well as the content/topic of the research.

3D display with head-tracking

In addition to the scientific presentations the industrial presentations were also quite interesting. In the session that was attended, Rolls Royce (engine design for jet planes) for instance gave an overview of their use of VR, which actually turned out to be quite limited. Especially the complexity of the products and the number of different engineers working on different parts makes it very difficult for the company to change anythingto the tool chain, let alone introduce new tools and/or methods. Furthermore, there were some interesting key-note talks; one outlining the use of VR in Volvo (by Dennis Saluäär) the other with a scientific perspective on “Body Representation” in immersive VR (by Mel Slater). Last but not least, the demonstrations and exhibition allowed everyone to try out state of the art head-mounted displays, tracking suits and various types of immersive displays.

Trying out head-mounted displays during the exhibition.