October and November were very busy for me! I was very happy to go to ISMAR ’22 in Singapore this year, and I met so many wonderful people. More on that in a second, but as soon as I got back to Virginia Tech I had to sprint to get ready for my Research Defense – a step right before the final defense to make sure that you’re on the same page with your PhD committee. I am happy to say that I passed this milestone and my committee was pleased with my progress. My final defense has been set for December 8th, and I’m working hard on my dissertation document.
But to go back to ISMAR, I’m extremely happy to announce that our paper, Exploring the Impact of Visual Information on Intermittent Typing in Virtual Reality, earned the honorable mention award for IEEE’s International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR ’22).
I particularly would like to congratulate my colleague (and lead author on the paper) Alexander Giovannelli for his work on this project. It is both his first paper and first conference, which makes the award even more meaningful for his early research career.
In all, this trip to Singapore has been meaningful for me to both make connections and see where our research field is going in the future. Despite the growing concerns of recession and private industry putting forth diminished effort into augmented and virtual reality work and laying thousands off, academia is doing a lot of work in this field. It was further fantastic to meet so many very talented people, and not just the likes of Mark Billinghurst, Greg Welch, Tobias Hollerer, and others, but the members of my own generation of academics. I want to particularly call out the research of Cassidy Nelson, Jerald Thomas, Matt Gottsacker, and Sasha Alexdottir – I enjoyed their talks and company immensely at the conference.
I hope to see you all in Sidney, Australia for ISMAR ’23 next year!