Immersive virtual environments technology offers the potential to enable people to experience a three-dimensional, computer-modeled space as if they were actually there.  As such, it has tremendous potential for a wide variety of applications in diverse fields from psychology to training to design and visualization.  A key concern in the use of virtual environments for design is ensuring that the spatial judgments people make about a computer model of a virtual place are equivalent to the judgments they would have made in reality.  A related concern is enabling people to derive an accurate spatial understanding of a large virtual space by actively exploring it.  

In this talk I will describe the valuable role that virtual environments technology can play in architectural design and education, and will review the efforts that my colleagues and I, in the Digital Design Consortium at the University of Minnesota, have been pursuing to more effectively harness the full potential of immersive virtual environments technology for architectural design and related applications.

Victoria Interrante is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota.  She received her PhD in 1996 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and worked from 1996-1998 as a staff scientist at ICASE, NASA Langley. Her research broadly focuses on the application of insights from visual perception to the design of more effective techniques for conveying information through computer-generated images.  She is a recipient of the 1999 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, is an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, was general chair of the first ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (2004), and continues to actively serve on the program committees of the leading conferences in virtual reality and visualization.