I am a PhD student at City University and as part of my PhD studies, I presented our work on hand orientation based interaction with augmented objects at the First Conference on Augmented and Virtual Reality (AVR). As is the case with most conferences, AVR was held in the culturally rich and historic city of Lecce, Italy. Lecce is located right on the ‘heel’ of the Italy’s boot map and is commonly nicknamed as “The Florence of the South” (and now I know why!).
AVR Conference was held at the historical museum of Lecce on 17th- 20th September 2014 and the talks mainly focused on the use of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AVR) in a range of different areas including; but not limited to:
- Education
- Medicine
- Cultural heritage
- Visualization and 3D Modelling
- Advancements in Virtual and Augmented Reality Technology itself
The technical session started off with keynote speeches, presenting inspiring ideas and key advancements in the AVR field. In particular, I was inspired by the use of Augmented Reality in medicine, where it was used to assist in medical surgeries.
The event continued with poster and oral presentation sessions by fellow researchers. The use of virtual reality devices and advanced depth cameras such as Microsoft Kinect, Google Glass and CAVE environments was significantly highlighted with latest research. Full list of publications can be found here, which will be available soon on Springer LNCS servers.
This conference was a great experience for me to get myself up-to-date with latest research in my field. It gave me the opportunity to network, get inspiration and most importantly show off what I have been doing for the past year. I presented our work at City University on Hand Orientation Regression for Augmented Reality, which received an overwhelming response from the audience. In this work we proposed a method which can extract the orientations of hand using an image from a regular color camera. Below are the short demo applications that were a part of my presentation: