Speaker: Niall Williams (New York University)
Title: Seeing Is Deceiving: The Art of Optimizing Graphics for Better User Experiences
The seminar will be available for in-person and Zoom participation. To participate online, please email inquiry-cs@barnard.edu to receive the Zoom link.
A common requirement for interactive graphics systems is that they deliver an enjoyable and immersive experience for the user. However, due to computational constraints, graphics systems are usually forced to sacrifice some visual realism in order to maintain interactive frame rates for the user experience. Therefore, understanding which aspects of visual fidelity can be sacrificed without significantly impacting the user experience is a central problem for computer graphics research.
In this talk, I will discuss methods for achieving an optimal user experience in two areas of interactive computer graphics: (1) Exploration of large virtual worlds in immersive virtual reality and (2) Remote video teleconference systems like Zoom. In particular, I will show how knowledge of the human visual system and techniques from robotic motion planning can be leveraged to create enjoyable user experiences that ensure the user’s safety in virtual reality and preserve important social cues in social teleconference systems. This work highlights the importance of interdisciplinary research for improving user-facing computer graphics systems. I will conclude with a discussion of future directions and areas for collaboration on research in applied perception for computer graphics.
Dr. Niall Williams is a Faculty Fellow at New York University where he conducts research on computer graphics and applied visual perception. He completed his bachelor’s degree in computer science at Davidson College and his MS and PhD in computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding how humans interact with real-time computer graphics systems, building upon results from vision science, robotics, computational geometry, and statistical modeling to optimize graphics systems to improve the user experience. He has interned at Meta Reality Labs and NVIDIA and is the recipient of multiple best paper honorable mentions for his research on locomotion in virtual reality.