Category: Blogs

Professors Nurhayat Bilge and Ines Maria Marino presented a paper on using VR to examine perceptions of race and geography in Argentina this month. The project included the work of more than a dozen students in the Mobile Virtual Reality Lab. The project was led by Bilge, Marino, Robert (Ted) Gutsche, Jr. (all at FIU) and Lanier Holt at Ohio State University.

The students involved in this paper include: Continue reading “Presenting VR Research”

The Mobile Virtual Reality Lab has been pivotal in helping to launch the Miami Emerging Technologies Association, or META. Take a look at what’s coming next, including plans for a 2018 VR Expo, of which VirtualEYES is a part!

The Mobile Virtual Reality Lab has been a model for building another production studio at FIU — iDEEP, a $304,000 Inter-disciplinary Educational E-immersive Production Studio. Read more about the project here.

The Mobile Virtual Reality Lab contributed to the success of Miami’s first Unbound event this week. More than 3,000 people attended the two-day event.

Industry professionals met at the Mobile Virtual Reality Lab today to discuss forming a South Florida consortium of VR, AR, MR, and AI producers, students, and educators.

Pictured here are (from left) Demetrio Wazar, Michelle McKoy, Rodolfo Peraza, Robert (Ted) Gutsche, Jr., and Joel Mena. Not pictured (by phone), Fabien Bourdon.

Summer campers between the ages of 7 and 12 from FIU’s College of Arts, Sciences, and Education will get a chance on July 31 to experience virtual reality through interactions with Oculus Rift and college-student VR projects within the Mobile Virtual Reality Lab.

Led by Lab interns and collaborators, campers will also visit a landlocked mangrove forest on FIU’s campus and then experience the same space in VR video shot and edited by college students to experience issues of verisimilitude, interactivity, production, and environmental storytelling.

College students will mentor students and provide the younger students’ with hands-on experience with the hardware and software needed to make virtual reality products.

Work related to the VirtualEYES project received an award this summer from the Images and Voices of Hope (IVOH) organization related to engagement in storytelling of climate change.

The project also led to an Honorable Mention for a Best Practices in Service Learning in Journalism and Mass Communication award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which will be awarded end of summer.

Undergraduates through the Mobile Virtual Reality Lab have collected data from 248 participants to discuss how the medium can be used to study issues of racial and geographic perceptions.

An early version of the paper will be presented in November:

Marino, M. I., Bilge, N., Gutsche, Jr., R. E., & Holt, L. (2017). Creating (and examining) immersive environments in virtual reality. Accepted for presentation at Medios y Sociedad Conference, Buenos Aires, Argentina, November 3.

Continue reading “Student-faculty Research Project Goes Global”