Dr Michael Rietzler, member of the research group human-computer interaction supervised by Prof. Dr Rukzio has succeeded in the disputation of his PhD thesis. The thesis was submitted as a cumulative dissertation based on the scientific publications generated during his work as research assistant at our institute.
A brief overview of his thesis: Virtual Reality (VR) has found its way into the households of end users as well as into many areas of industry. Current VR headsets as well as controllers are tracked by sensors in three-dimensional space and movements are transmitted into the virtual world in real-time. This way, users can move freely and interact naturally with the digital world. However, the interaction always takes place in both worlds. Every action the user takes in the virtual world also affects the real world. This leads to challenges in the areas of locomotion and haptics, since on the one hand a conceptually endless virtual world is to be explored within the physical boundaries of the real world and since virtual objects without corresponding hardware lose their physical properties.
In this dissertation a model of interaction in virtual worlds will be developed, which takes into account human perception as well as the real world. Furthermore, a continuum for input and output is derived, which considers five categories from real to virtual considering different levels of abstraction from reality. A special category is the abstract real, which is oriented towards reality, but deviates noticeably from it. Own works from the fields of locomotion and haptics, as well as an example of a purely virtual output modality are described under the aspects of the presented continuum.
The aim of this work is to demonstrate a decoupling of reality and virtuality as an elementary component of interaction in virtual worlds. The proposed continuum, as well as the presented abstract real interaction category should serve as an orientation aid to create interactions in VR.
We thank Michael Rietzler for his valuable research contributions, the fruitful cooperation with his colleagues at the institute for many years and his competent collaboration in teaching activities, especially his caring supervision of project students and bachelor or master theses.
We welcome his continued adherence to the institute and are looking forward to an animated exchange of ideas.
