Speaker and Poster Abstracts, CVR Conference 2022

The CVR conference 2022 connects the long history of picture perception with new display technologies that blur the differences between pictorial representations and the reality of the world that they attempt to depict. Controlled, principled visual stimulation is at the core of vision research. Techniques have evolved from painted or printed material, to computer screens that provide control and enable rapid changes of graphical contents that soon included moving pictures and stereoscopic displays, and further to today's high-fidelity VR/AR systems and the prospect of holographic displays.

Picture perception is interesting for two reasons. On the one hand, the ability to abstract the depicted contents from the physical object of the medium, as humans do, is a trait that only few other animals are capable of. There is a rich tradition within vision science that focusses on picture perception and connects vision research with arts history, the philosophy of perception, and cognitive science.

On the other hand, vision research has often used pictorial displays with the implicit assumption that they provide a valid surrogate for the visual stimulation experience in normal life. Consequently, the results obtained in the lab are expected to generalize into the real world. More recently, however, researchers began to challenge this assumption and started to compare picture perception and vision in the real world explicitly.

Virtual reality, augmented reality, and the prospect of light-field-based holographic displays provide excellent tools to that end. The defining feature, namely the ability to update the stereoscopic displays contingent with the user’s movement, is more than an incremental increase in representational fidelity. It transports passive observers who look at pictorial space into active agents that become part of that space. It establishes visual presence and employs the user's visual system in ways much more similar to the ones in which we process the “real” visual environment. An industry exhibition during the meeting will showcase exciting new developments in display techniques and their applications.

The topic of CVR 2022 lends itself to celebrate the achievements of CVR’s former director, Laurence Harris and recognize his decade of leadership of the centre. Reality constitutes itself in terms of consistencies between sensory modalities and the predictability of sensory stimulation in response to movement. Harris, while working on multisensory integration, space perception and self-perception in space, pioneered the emancipation from the picture domain. He started to work with real world stimuli, he adopted virtual reality for vision research long before others did, and he sends his participants into orbit to manipulate their sensory environment in ways that would not be possible anywhere on earth.