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    Optimising Underwater Environments for Mobile VR
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Cenydd, Llyr ap; Headleand, Christopher; Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.
    Mobile Virtual Reality (VR) has advanced considerably in the last few years, driven by advances in smartphone technology. There are now a number of commercial offerings available, from smartphone powered headsets to standalone units with full positional tracking. Similarly best practices in VR have matured quickly, facilitating comfortable and immersive VR experiences. There remains however many optimisation challenges when working with these devices, as while the need to render at high frame rates is universal, the hardware is limited by both computational power and battery capacity. There is also often a requirement that apps run smoothly across a wide variety of headsets. In this paper, we describe lessons learned in rendering and optimising underwater environments for mobile VR, based on our experience developing the popular aquatic safari application 'Ocean Rift'. We start by analyzing essential best practices for mobile app development, before describing low-cost techniques for creating immersive underwater environments. While some techniques discussed are universal to modern mobile VR development, we also consider issues that are unique to underwater applications.
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    Evaluating Models for Virtual Forestry Generation and Tree Placement in Games
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Williams, Benjamin; Ritsos, Panagiotis; Headleand, Christopher; Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.
    A handful of approaches have been previously proposed to generate procedurally virtual forestry for virtual worlds and computer games, including plant growth models and point distribution methods. However, there has been no evaluation to date which assesses how effective these algorithms are at modelling real-world phenomena. In this paper we tackle this issue by evaluating three algorithms used in the generation of virtual forests - a randomly uniform point distribution method (control), a plant competition model, and an iterative random point distribution technique. Our results show that a plant competition model generated more believable content when viewed from an aerial perspective. We also found that a randomly uniform point distribution method produced forest visualisations which were rated highest in playability and photorealism, when viewed from a first-person perspective. Our results indicate that when it comes to believability, the relationship between viewing perspective and procedural generation algorithm is more important than previously thought.
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    A Somatic Approach to Combating Cybersickness Utilising Airflow Feedback
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Harrington, Jake; Williams, Benjamin; Headleand, Christopher; Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.
    Abstract This paper presents a novel somatosensory approach towards reducing the risk of cybersickness during virtual reality locomotion in a 3D environment. We start by presenting theories regarding the cause of cybersickness which led to the proposal and construction of a prototype airflow-based feedback system. The solution proposed by this paper builds on the concept of sensory misalignment, where the body struggles understand its state due to conflicting sensory feedback and consequently generates negative health symptoms and discomfort. To evaluate the work an experiment was carried out where 40 participants drive a simulated car around a virtual environment. In one condition the participants had additional somatosensory feedback regarding their motion, provided by a fan synchronised to their speed in the virtual world. In the second condition there was no additional feedback. We evaluated both conditions for cybersickness and presence, and showed a statistically significant improvement for both in the condition using airflow feedback. We conclude with a discussion of the results, and present a direction for possible future research.