Staff and students from the HCI Group and Computational Media Innovation Centre (CMIC) at Victoria University of Wellington, Empathic Computing Lab at University of Auckland, and HITLabNZ at University of Canterbury are organizing the International XR Workshop in Wellington, New Zealand from 18-21 February 2020 at NEC House, Level 3, 40 Taranaki St, Wellington, New Zealand.

The XR Workshop will combine taught lectures with hands-on project work with XR technology and HMDs (e.g. HTC Vive, Occulus Rift/Quest, Magic Leap, Hololens) and a variety of physiological sensors and input devices. Attendees will work in small groups to each complete an example project by the end of the week. This is a unique opportunity to learn how to develop XR applications from world leading experts in the field.

The XR workshop Theme for 2020 is:

Designing XR Applications for Entertainment and Games.

What will you learn?

• An introduction to Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality and XR technology

• How to design good XR experiences

• How to use the Unity game engine

• How to program for different XR HMDs using Unity

• Evaluation of XR experiences

• XR research directions

Registration

Deadline:  31 January 2020 (CLOSED)

Form:  https://tinyurl.com/xrworkshop2020

Cost: 

• Free for students. There is some funding available for travel and accommodation for students. 

• $300 NZD for non-students

• Joaquim Jorge, University of Lisbon, Portugal

• Karan Singh, University of Toronto, Canada

• Gerard Jounghyun Kim, University of Korea, Korea

• Mark Billinghurst, University of Auckland, New Zealand / University of South Australia

• Miriam Ross, Victoria University of Wellington

• Byron Mallett, Victoria University of Wellington 

• Daniel Medeiros, CMIC, Victoria University of Wellington

• Rafael dos Anjos, CMIC, Victoria University of Wellington

• Lukas Stoecklein. CMIC, Victoria University of Wellington

• James Everett, Weta Workshop

• Terry Miller, Eight360

• Jessica Manins, Beyond Studio

• Kat Lintott and Jeff Jones, Wrestler

• Phil Lamb, Mozilla

Schedule 

• 17 February (Monday): travel to Wellington

• 18 February (Tuesday): 

  • Invited Speaker #1: Approaches and Challenges to Virtual and Augmented Reality in Health Care and Rehabilitation (Joaquim Jorge)

  • Developing XR applications with Unity and MagicLeap

  • Project work

• 19 February (Wednesday): 

  • Invited Speaker #2: Requirements for Usable Mobile XR (Gerard Kim)

  • UX Design for XR

  • Project work

• 20 February (Thursday): 

  • Invited Speaker #3:  Creative interaction in XR (Karan Singh) 

  • Evaluating XR applications

  • Project work

• 21 February (Friday): 

  • Invited Speaker #4: The Future of Tech Interaction: Empathic Computing  (Mark Billinghurst)

  • Project work

  • Industry Presentations

  • Project Presentations and Demos

  • Travel home

Workshop Organizers:

• Craig Anslow - Victoria University of Wellington (Contact)

• Mark Billinghurst - University of Auckland 

• Rob Lindeman - University of Canterbury

• Joaquim Jorge - University of Lisbon

• Siyun Thompson - Victoria University of Wellington

Extended Reality (XR)

Extended reality (XR) is a term referring to all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearables. It includes representative forms such as augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR) and the areas overlapping. XR is a superset which includes the entire spectrum from "the complete real" to "the complete virtual" in the concept of reality–virtuality continuum.

Research Labs

• Computation Media Innovation Centre (CMIC), VUW

• Human Computer Interaction Group, VUW 

• Human Interface Technology Lab (HitLabNZ), Canterbury

• Empathic Computing Lab, Auckland