On June 19th 2020, the demo paper “A Social VR Clinic for Knee Arthritis Patients with Haptics” authored by Tong Xue (CWI, BIT), Jie Li (CWI), Guo Chen (IBM Research, Beijing) and Pablo Cesar (CWI) was awarded the Best Demo Award at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experience (ACM IMX) 2020. The demo was presented remotely, through a social virtual reality (VR) platform called Mozilla Hubs.
Figure 1. Best Demo Award certificate
Social virtual reality (VR) invites multiple users to interact in a shared immersive environment, which can be potentially useful for remote personalized healthcare. This demo presents a social VR clinic that allows patients to consult a nurse represented as a virtual avatar. It offers a "walk-in" virtual surgery room, enables patients to interact with animated virtual 3D artifacts, and train the patient to use an injection tool while wearing a pair of mechanical VR gloves that provide haptic feedback (SenseGlove, https://www.senseglove.com). The demo shows the potential of social VR as a new tool to help patients receive remote personalized medical care.
Figure 2. Every demo presenter got a virtual dome to present the work virtually
This work is part of the H2020 VRTogether project (https://vrtogether.eu), which aims at improving remote media consumption and communication by innovating in volumetric video capture, delivery and rendering. The social VR clinic is one of the project exploitation activities targeting the healthcare domain.
The ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experience (ACM IMX) is the leading international conference for presentation and discussion of research into interactive media experiences. The conference brought together international researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines, ranging from human-computer interaction, multimedia engineering and design to media studies, media psychology and sociology.
Figure 3. The thumbnail of the demo presentation video
CWI’s Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) research group focuses on facilitating and improving the way people use interactive systems and how people communicate with each other. We combine data science with a strong human-centric, empirical approach to understand the experience of users. This enables us to design and develop next generation intelligent and empathic systems. We base our results on realistic testing grounds and data sets, and embrace areas such as ubiquitous computing, human-centered multimedia systems, and languages.
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