CCRI: Planning-C: Capturing and Logging Ecological Virtual Experiences and Reality (CLEVER)

Artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and machine learning have seen advances in research, driven in part by the creation and sharing of large datasets. These types of datasets do not exist for the virtual reality (VR) research communities. This planning grant forms a framework for the creation of large VR-related datasets. Experts in the VR community will create, capture, and share these needed VR datasets. This data will include head, hand, and eye tracking data. They will collect information on user behaviors and interactions while using VR systems. These datasets will advance VR software development, techniques, and applications. This will allow software advancements like observed in the VR hardware consumer markets. A primary goal of this planning grant is to design and create a large VR dataset infrastructure. This project will address an important gap in virtual reality research. A team of experts in VR will help capture multi-modal VR data (e.g., head tracking, eye gaze) and set up sharing of this data. They will also track interactions and behaviors with VR systems. VR experts will administer standardized questionnaires within most VR applications including consumer applications. It is expected that this will result in ecological validity of the datasets. The project plans to capture and publish a large dataset to help form the framework for use by the VR community. The project will provide an open-source toolkit for researchers to capture their own VR datasets. It is a goal that they will then contribute their datasets back to the VR research community. A key part of this project is to form an advisory board of computing experts to guide VR research directions. The project will organize a full-day workshop to engage the VR research community. This will help to identify community needs and priorities to advance research. The participants of this workshop will support the development of this important infrastructure. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.