Virtual Reality: the present and the future

The University of Birmingham’s Human Interface Technologies (HIT) team, based within the School of Electronic, Electrical & Systems Engineering (EESE) has been pioneering the development and uptake of serious games, interactive media and telerobotic technologies in the UK since 2003. This builds on more than 28 years of experience in the domain of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality, Simulation and Telerobotics/Telepresence. 

The team’s participation within the UK’s Human Factors Integration Defence Technology Centre (HFI DTC) between 2003 and 2012, with Dstl, and, more recently similar collaborative initiatives in maritime defence and unmanned systems, provided a number of opportunities to work closely with stakeholders and end users in the development of methodologies supporting human-centred design for “serious games”– based part-task trainers and novel human interface concepts for telerobotic systems. Human Factors is the study of the relationship between the human and his or her working environment. It makes no difference if the working environment is real or virtual. 

The HIT Team says its award-winning research is helping to avoid the technology push failures evident in the Advanced Robotics and VR ‘eras’ of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, by developing and evaluating demonstrators that emphasise the importance of exploiting human factors knowledge when specifying issues such as task and context fidelity, learning content, evaluation metrics and appropriate interactive technologies.