A meeting of minds and disciplines UCF Themed Experience program collaborates with VR pioneer Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira by Peter Weishar
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ne of the most exciting and enjoyable aspects of working in a large research university is the myriad opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. I oversee a small Themed Experience graduate program at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. We must partner with industry and other academic disciplines in order to provide an educational experience that reflects the breadth of expertise and diversity of experience in themed entertainment. One of the most important interdisciplinary relationships we have is between Engineering and VR. Virtual reality (VR) has progressed to the point where the tools have become accessible, inexpensive and ubiquitous. The next generation of themed experience professionals will be using computer graphics (CG) and VR not only for previsualization but also as an integral component of the guest experience. At UCF, CG visualization is a required course in the Themed Experience program. We see it as an essential platform for the future of themed entertainment. The technology has reached a point where it can deliver upon its promise. In education, we prepare students for the future and we see a path with deepening relationships between these technologies and the themed experience. In 2020 UCF recruited two pioneers of VR and interactive visualization, Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira and Dirk Reiners. Dr. Cruz-Neira is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She created and deployed a variety of technologies that have become standard tools in industry, government and academia. Dr. Cruz-Neira is known world-wide for being the creator of the CAVE virtual reality system. She has over 100 publications as scientific articles, book chapters, and magazine editorials. She has also founded and led very successful virtual reality research centers, like the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University, the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise, and the Emerging Analytics Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She has been named one of the top innovators in virtual reality and one of the top three greatest women visionaries in virtual reality. Currently, Dr. Cruz-Neira is the Agere Chair in Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. Here, I share a discussion that Dr. Cruz-Neira and I had about academic research and the future of VR and themed entertainment, and its importance in academic pursuits. -- P.W.
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Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira
Prof. Peter Weishar: I remember my first exposure to the CAVE at SIGGRAPH - an exciting solution for a shared experience in a virtual environment. Please tell us about the development of the CAVE system and your pioneering work in projected virtual environments. Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira: My first experience with VR was in 1991 at the ACM SIGGRAPH 1991 conference. There was an exhibit called “Tomorrow’s Realities” where the main technology showcased was virtual reality. Most of the applications were entertainment applications, like surfing, catching floating objects to score points, or exploring beautiful imaginary spaces. Like most people, my first reaction was “wow!” but after that, I put my engineer hat on and started to think about what exactly I had experienced and what it could be helpful for. There were several aspects that I loved, like the ability to leave the real world and explore new worlds in ways not possible in reality - this opened creative opportunities limited only by our own imaginations. But I also noticed aspects that bothered me, in particular the fact that I was alone in the virtual space and that I lost my body. It was hard to share the experience with others, even in collaborative worlds as I could not see their social cues, such as facial expressions and body language. So when I had the opportunity to pursue a PhD in virtual reality my main motivation was to develop a technology that would allow for multiple participants to share the virtual space in the same
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