Keynote for VS Games 2013, Professor Anthony Steed

The VS Games 2013 conference I have posted in the past about will have two keynotes; one is from Anthony Steed, Professor of Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics, University College London, UK. This keynote is titled "What Will Virtual Reality Do For Games?". 

The abstract, taken from the website of the conference is the following; "In the 1990s, the vision of virtual reality was that in the next generation of human-computer interaction, users would see, hear and touch computer-generated sensory information. It was argued that key to virtual reality was that users were immersed into the virtual world, and that the virtual world surround them. The vision required the use of head-mounted displays or CAVE systems, surround audio and a range of user sensing systems. Needless to say, this vision didn't radically change most users' experience of HCI: the technology was too expensive, too cumbersome and just not easy to access. The use of virtual reality has been confined to a small number of niche high-value applications. Having said that, over the past couple of years, all the component parts for a virtual reality system have become available in consumer form: position tracking technologies, fast stereo projectors, new head-mounted displays, etc. New opportunities for all forms of HCI, including games, will emerge. In this talk I will present an argument for how understanding the impact of immersion can inform the design of content for this upcoming wave of virtual reality systems. I will explain some of the recent advances in our understanding about why virtual reality works, and some interesting system decision choices that we have investigated."
 

More information about VS Games 2013, which takes place between the 11th and the 13th of September in Bournemouth, UK, can be found here here.