The Perifoveal Display (see Figure 1) is a visualization display for complex, real-time, dynamic data such as stock market data, traffic or control room as well as virtual 3D environments. The system takes advantage of the unique properties of the human perceptive system, which is capable of perceiving a high degree of detail in the foveal area, but has a unique more subliminal type of perception of movement and brightness in the peripheral area. The Perifoveal Display varies how data is visualized based on the user's viewing direction. Data in the center of the user's focus is displayed in a lot of detail. Movement and change in brightness as well as amount of detail and size highlight important data changes that fall into the periphery. The results of our user study show that the system is able to support the user while observing complex data.

We present a novel bimanual body-directed travel technique, PenguFly (PF), and compare it with two standard travel-by-pointing techniques by conducting a between-subject experiment in a CAVE. In PF, the positions of the user's head and hands are projected onto the ground, and travel direction and speed are computed based on direction and magnitude of the vector from the midpoint of the projected hand positions to the projected head position. The two baseline conditions both use a single hand to control the direction, with speed controlled discretely by button pushes with the same hand in one case, and continuously by the distance between the hands in the other case. Users were asked to travel through a simple virtual world and collect virtual coins within a set time. We found no significant differences between travel conditions for reported presence or usability, but a significant increase in nausea with PF. Total travel distance was significantly higher for the baseline condition with discrete speed selection, whereas travel accuracy in terms of coin-to-distance ratio was higher with PF.

The knowledge of the propagation behavior of radio waves is a fundamental prerequisite for planning and optimizing mobile radio networks. Propagation effects are usually simulated numerically, since real-world measurement campaigns are time-consuming and expensive. Automatic planning algorithms can explore a vast amount of network configurations to find good deployment schemes. However, complex urban scenarios demand for a great emphasis on site-specific details in the propagation environment which are often not covered by automatic approaches. Therefore, we have combined the simulation of radio waves with an interactive exploration and modification of the propagation environment in a virtual reality prototype application. By coupling real-time simulation and manipulation tasks we can provide an uninterrupted user-centered workflow.

In this paper we present a GPU implementation to accurately select 3D objects based on their silhouettes by a pointing device with six degrees of freedom (6DOF) in a virtual environment (VE). We adapt a 2D picking metaphor to 3D selection in VE's by changing the projection and view matrices according to the position and orientation of a 6DOF pointing device and rendering a conic selection volume to an off-screen pixel buffer. This method works for triangulated as well as volume rendered objects, no explicit geometric representation is required.