I have been a regular visitor of ACM TVX since it first became an ACM sponsored event in 2014 (previously known as EuroITV). This year, the conference will be held at MediaCityUK, Salford in early June. We’ll bring two pieces of early-stage research to Salford: understanding the user attention in VR using gaze-controlled games by Murtada Dohan (a newly started PhD candidate), and a demo of abstract painting in VR by a fine art artist Dr Alison Goodyear. You might have guessed that we have plans to bring these two together and experiment with new ways of content creation and audience engagement for both the arts and HCI communities.

Links to:

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Dohan, M. and Mu, M., Understanding User Attention In VR Using Gaze Controlled Games.
Abstract: Understanding user’s intent has a pivotal role in developing immersive and personalised media applications. This paper introduces our recent research and user experiments towards interpreting user attention in virtual reality (VR). We designed a gaze-controlled Unity VR game for this study and implemented additional libraries to bridge raw eye-tracking data with game elements and mechanics. The experimental data show distinctive patterns of fixation spans which are paired with user interviews to help us explore characteristics of user attention.

Goodyear, A. and Mu, M., Abstract Painting Practice: Expanding in a Virtual World
Abstract: This paper sets out to describe, through a demo for the TVX Conference, how virtual reality (VR) painting software is beginning to open up as a new medium for visual artists working in the field of abstract painting. The demo achieves this by describing how an artist who usually makes abstract paintings with paint and canvas in a studio, that is those existing as physical objects in the world, encounters and negotiates the process of making abstract paintings in VR using Tilt Brush software and Head-Mounted Displays (HMD). This paper also indicates potential future avenues for content creation in this emerging field and what this might mean not only for the artist and the viewer, but for art institutions trying to provide effective methods of delivery for innovative content in order to develop and grow new audiences.