UT Dallas CS Student Earns IEEE AIVR Best Presentation Award
Last Winter, UT Dallas Ph.D. Student Yu-Yen Chung was awarded the Best Presentation Award by the IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR) for his research paper titled “High-Quality First-Person Rendering Mixed Reality Gaming System for in Home Setting.” The paper was written by Yu-Yen Chung, Hung-Jui Guo, Hiranya Garbha Kumar, and UT Dallas CS Professor and director of the UT Dallas Multimedia Lab Dr. Balakrishnan Prabhakaran. The research presented in the paper aims to eventually be used for amputee patients’ treatment through virtual mirror therapy.
IEEE AIVR is a particularly unique event, involving researchers and industries that leverage AI for making better Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality systems and applications. The conference provides an international forum for exchanging ideas in those fields, presenting advances in state of the art, identifying emerging research topics, and defining the future of these exciting research domains. The selection of the best research presentation and paper is a high honor and a tribute to the fine research quality, presentation, and potential impact that the research has on the field. IEEE AIVR is particularly selective in accepting research papers, presentations, and demos, with each paper submitted to the conference having been rigorously peer-reviewed by multiple experts. IEEE AIVR has an average paper acceptance rate of 27.3%.
In the paper, titled “High-Quality First-Person Rendering Mixed Reality Gaming System for in Home Setting,” Yu-Yen Chung and his co-authors explore the problem of providing a first-person perspective (1PP) for mixed reality serious games played in homes. Their research proposes a real-time textured humanoid-avatar framework to provide a first-person perspective and address the challenges involved in setting up such a gaming system in homes. Click here to read the research paper in its entirety.
“Our research introduces a real-time textured humanoid avatar framework for mixed reality games in 1PP using a single 3D, RGB-D camera, especially for in-home deployment. The framework reduced the camera position’s effect through a skeleton-based virtual floor calibration. Our team employed a two-stage optimization strategy to update the 3D humanoid model pose with respect to the pose of the user. Texture transfer to the humanoid model was carried out by capturing a set of frames and incorporating the accumulated texture with a global atlas in real-time. In the case of serious games for managing phantom pain, the system could generate a vivid phantom limb by mirroring the joints, limb, and the associated texture, from the amputee’s in-tact limb. To increase the visible texture display” noted Yu-Yen Chung.
“In-home settings pose a lot of challenges for mixed reality games: there could be lack of space for equipment, lack of proper furniture to place laptop and 3D cameras, etc. In this research, we address these challenges by adapting the virtual environment rendering according to the equipment placement. Then, the system provides a first-person view for amputees, by recreating a virtual limb for the amputated limb and provide a mixed reality-based mirror therapy (as opposed to a real, physical mirror-based therapy, which has several disadvantages). We are in the process of testing the system for amputees through collaboration with Dallas Veterans Affairs,” noted Dr. Balakrishnan Prabhakaran.
Yu-Yen Chung is currently working towards his Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Balakrishnan Prabhakaran in the Multimedia Systems Laboratory at UT Dallas.
ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 3,630 bachelors-degree students, more than 800 master’s students, 160 Ph.D. students, 52 tenure-track faculty members, and 42 full-time senior lecturers, as of Fall 2019. With the University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.