Tomer Weiss: Bridging the Gap between Physical and Virtual Reality

Virtual environments are prevalent and enjoy multiple applications. Novel virtual environment mediums, such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality (XR), can merge with our physical reality and have the power to revolutionize many fields, including communication, healthcare, and education. Regrettably, current approaches cannot accommodate this evolving front. Bridging this gap requires seamless large-scale virtual content creation and simulation. In this talk, I focus on two essential tasks in virtual environments: interior layout synthesis, and the simulation of crowds of agents. To accomplish these tasks, I introduce a novel, physics-inspired method. Each task is defined in terms of several positional constraints. Positional relationships between interior objects, or individuals in a crowd, are governed by such constraints; e.g. the table should lie at this distance from the chair. Optimizing the set of positions under such constraints allows interactive prototyping of large-scale layouts, which where previously intractable. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of agents can now be simulated in real-time with a laptop computer. These results can be easily integrated into current virtual environment engines, and are also generalizable to other domains. Lastly, I conclude my talk by discussing the wide range of research opportunities in this emerging area.