News

Andrea Bönsch presented a paper at the 21th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. Additionally, her student David Hashem submitted a GALA video showcasing the respective application of a virtual museum's curator who either guides the user or accompanies the user on his or free exploration. The video won the ACM IVA 2021 GALA Audience Award. Congratulations!

Jonathan Ehret presented joined work with the RWTH Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics and the Cologne IfL Phonetik on the Influence of Prosody and Embodiment on the Perceived Naturalness of a Conversational Agents’ Speech. During the peer-reviewing process, the paper was invited and accepted to the Journal Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP). Congratulations!

Andrea Bönsch presented a poster on Indirect User Guidance by Pedestrians in Virtual Environments during the International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence and Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments (ICAT-EGVE 2021).

Prof. Reinhard Windoffer of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Anatomy (MOCA) presented his group's research on Keratin intermediate filaments. Our group supported this work with an immersive visualization of the cytoskeletons.

Marcel Krüger gave a talk introducing "Insite - A Pipeline for the Interactive Analysis of Neuronal Network Simulations via NEST, TVB, and ARBOR" on the Med&BioVis Workshop of GI Fachgruppe Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine.

Our group was involved in three presentations at this year's DAGA, 47th Annual Conference on Acoustics. While Jonathan Ehret talked about "Speech Source Directivity for Embodied Conversational Agents", our colleagues from RWTH Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics presented joint work on "Prosodic and Visual Naturalness of Dialogs Presented by Conversational Virtual Agents" and our AUDICTIVE project on listening to, and remembering conversations between two talkers.

Today, our colleague Claudia Hänel successfully passed her Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for her thesis on "Methods for Immersive Visual Analysis of Structural Brain Data". Congratulations!

Sebastian Pape and Sevinc Eroglu just presented their research at IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces 2021, which will end tomorrow. Sebastian's poster deals with a Virtual Optical Bench as a VR learning tool for optical design, while Sevinc's paper on design and evaluation of a free-hand VR-based authoring environment for automated vehicle testing was even nominated for the Best Paper Award.

Today, our colleague Andrea Schnorr successfully passed her Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for her thesis on "Feature Tracking for Space-Filling Structures". Congratulations!

The current issue of the Science Magazine RWTH THEMEN (2/2020) presents various research conducted in the RWTH's profile area „Information & Communication Technology“. Together with Prof. Michael Vorländer and Prof. Janina Fels, both experts in the area of Virtual Acoustics, we provide insight into our research in the realm of Social Virtual Reality: To convincingly represent conversational interaction partners, VAs need to plausibly mimic visual and acoustic human behavior. In the article we focus on the realism of the acoustic reproduction which can be achieved by applying dynamic directivity as well as by taking the phoneme-dependent characteristics of the spoken word into account.

Read the complete article here, page 12-17.