Computer Vision News - May 2022

19 Ana Serrano That’s a good question! I don’t think there’s a single point that you say, “ Oh! This is it! ” It’s hard to be the person that comes up with this one thing. It’s a constant effort, not just for myself but all the people I work with, also all the people I don’t work with. It’s a community effort, in this case, to bring virtual reality forward.  This is your moment to speak to the community about what you want to create!  That is a big question! Everything is good as it is. Recently, I was on a committee for a small workshop about virtual cinematic language. The community is doing good.We have a healthy community. Everyone wants to read others’ work and just keep pushing. One thing that would be good is to try to communicate more with practitioners, with people who may not be in research but doing the work every day, for example, cinematic companies that focus on virtual reality. There is already communication. Sometimes you see research works that answer the questions that we believe are interesting. It would be much more effective to communicate more with the come up with interesting questions and trying to come up with interesting studies. That is the most important thing for me. In the end, the users are going to consume this content. It’s a key part of my work to bringthepersonintheloop.Iusuallydon’tdo super engineering research. I’m interested in applications later down the road. Mostly, I’m interested in understanding howpeople perceive these things, if an experiment is not well designed. When I started working on perception, many years ago, I wondered, “ How hard can this be? ” You’re just asking people questions. Turns out, it’s pretty hard! [ laughs ] I remember one of my first experiments. It was about material appearance perceptions. You only have to ask people, “ How glossy is this material? ” I had to try the experiment like ten times. I was not asking the right questions. I was not getting in the mindset of a person who is not a researcher, who may not be very familiar with the technology. It’s really a hard task, and it’s a task that I enjoy a lot. What breakthrough finding would make you the Lumière Brothers of virtual reality? Graphics & Imaging Lab