This week, the University of Minnesota’s REU program began. Though I am not a participant in the program, I am invited to the events since I am doing research in the department. It was interesting to learn about the research that other faculty in the department are doing, and I’m looking forward to meeting the other students that will be working with my mentor soon.

One of the goals of the project is to be able to reduce cybersickness while still maintaining a good sense of space. An alternative way to prevent cybersickness is by “teleporting” from room to room rather than walking, but user will most likely be more disoriented and not know their way around the space. We hope that our approach of using non photorealistic filters will reduce cybersickness, but the user will still be able to walk around and learn how to navigate the space.

In order to test this, we needed to find a building with an interior that had a lot of spaces and looked as photorealistic as possible. I started this week looking online for models to use for the project. I eventually found a hospital building model, but it only had a few rooms, so I expanded it in Unity by adding more rooms and a longer hallway so that navigating the space is more complicated.

We also wanted a model that put the user in motion, since movement often causes cybersickness, so I also found a rollercoaster model.