Mary C. Whitton
Research Associate Professor
  
Department of
Computer Science                            
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
256 Sitterson Hall , CB #3175
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175

(919) 962-1950 (Voice)
(919) 962-1799 (Fax)

 whitton_at_cs dot unc dot edu

 Curriculum Vitae

Vacationing after VR 2011

Cambodia 
March 28, 2011

Click image for full resolution version

Dawn at Angkor Wat on a cloudy day
(no tripod)

Effective Virtual Environments Research Team (with Fred Brooks)

• What makes virtual environments work?  How do technical factors influence their effectiveness?
  Recent and current work improves and compares means of locomotion in VEs
    -  Is walking-in-place better than using a joystick to move around in VEs?
    -  Can we make interfaces where you don't really walk be more realistic?
    -  Is it possible to make redirected-walking work without constraints?
  Other recent work: understanding perception of scene motion as applies to latency and to redirected walking.
• How do we show VEs are worthwhile?
  Can we show training transfer?  improved insight for immersive scientific visualization?
  Can we enable new types of interaction?

Fall 2008.  Jason Jerald performs psychophysics studies testing user's sensitivity to scene motion--motion that makes the virtual world appear unstable.

Tools for Serious Games and VE Applications

• Control and display application system for VE enhanced physical therapy for gait rehabilitation. 
  New collaboration with Physical Therapy with a force plate instrumented, dual-belted treadmill. The initial target population is patients with asymmetric gait due to stroke.
• Improving scenario/rehabilitation session generation tools for physical therapists
• How can we use logs from training simulators (and games) to evaluate trainee/player performance?
  -  Can we diagnose the cause of a trainee/player's poor performance from the logs?
  -  Can we use the measured performance to automatically drive the scenario/session generation tools?

Winter 2009.  Jeff Feasel walking on the dual-belt treadmill and viewing early prototype environment and display. Goal is hands-free user control of path and speed through the VE

Still interested, but don't work in this anymore....

• Computer graphics system architecture
  Programmable Graphics Processors--a previous time around the wheel of reincarnation
  Ikonas Graphics Systems (~1980)
  Application Accelerator:  GPGPUs a previous time around the wheel of reincarnation
  Trancept Systems (~1988)

4/3/09  Mock up of wrap-around display surface for physical therapy lab. 
Mike Lewek – Ta Da!

   More on Restoration of my new-old
Beach Sports Racer

    Other Car Photos   

September 21, 2007 at Apex Vintage, Inc. Almost ready to fire it up, but not quite.