I’m very pleased to announce that I’m co-chairing the first 3DUI Grand Prize !

Description

The 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) Conference (http://conferences.computer.org/3dui/3dui2010/) is running a new contest: the 3DUI Grand Prize. It is opened to anyone interested in 3D User Interfaces, from researchers, to students, enthusiasts, and professionals. The goal is to find innovative solutions to classic 3DUI problems (travel, selection, manipulation), so think outside the box, unleash your creativity and show your ideas to the 3DUI community! You can use whatever software and hardware you want (from simple mouse/keyboard, to spacemouse, haptics devices, multitouch tables, 3d trackers, a HMD, a CAVE etc) to achieve the task. See Note 1.
Organization and Special Dates:

• October 15th, 2009: Registration date for teams.
• January 11th, 2010: Submission date.
• February 1st, 2010: We will submit acceptance notes to finalists on this date
• March 20-21, 2010: Contest date

The contest chairs are:

• Pablo Figueroa, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
• Sebastien Kuntz, 3DVIA Virtools / Dassault Systèmes, France
• Yoshifumi Kitamura, Osaka University, Japan

For any question regarding the contest you can contact the contest chairs at 3DUI2010_contest (at) inria (dot) fr.

To subscribe to the contest mailing list, send a mail to 3DUIGrandPrize2010-subscribe (at) nowan (dot) fr.

The mailing list archives can be found here. The registration scheme will be indicated on the website of the contest later : http://conferences.computer.org/3dui/3dui2010/cfp/contest.html

Teams of any number of people could be registered. If your team cannot come to the 3DUI conference, which is highly recommended, we will also accept video-only submissions as a separate category. We will select the best solutions to be presented at 3DUI, in a special contest session. Participants of the video only category should submit their video with all the necessary information for the evaluation. Participants of the full 3DUI contest should provide the following material:

• A file AUTHORS with the authors of the solution
• A file INSTRUCTIONS with the instructions of use and requirements
• A video of the interface in action. It should show both the user and the display
• If possible/desired, a copy of the software/source code developed, plus a file INSTALL with the installation instructions

Questions will be answered on the contest mailing list and stored in a FAQ page of the contest webpage. Selected participants of the full 3DUI contest should bring all the necessary equipment for their solution (See Note 1). During this session, they will be asked to run their application with new data, and train some novice users. We will collect data of several runs, both with expert and novice users, and we will videotape these sessions. Finally, participants will have a space beside the poster’s exhibition where attendees will be able to see the different solutions and mark them.  Your solution should be run several times. It should provide at the end the following information: Time of execution, average frame rate, if the task was completed or aborted.

The judges of this contest will take into consideration the following issues in your solution:

• Average values for completed tasks (time of execution, frame rate)
• Fitness of your solution to the problem, but also genericity
• Ease of use of your solution
• How enjoyable is your solution
• Average public marks

Prizes

There will be prizes for the three best solutions. There will also be a prize for the best video-only submission. The winners will be announced at the reception.

Prizes include : Novint Falcon haptic devices, 3DVIA Virtools licenses and 3D Connexion SpacePilots. The authors of the winning solutions will also be given the opportunity to co-author an article about the event in the IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications (CG&A) journal.
Description of the Problem

The experimental environment looks like a supermarket where the racks are located in the 3D space. Starting at a given position inside the shop, your interaction should allow the user to travel inside the shop to a given destination without running into objects (no need for collision detection). Once arrived at this destination, the user will have to find (ie. select then manipulate) among a given set of objects, the one object that holds a particular mark and then place it at another given destination in a precise position/orientation (travel then manipulate).

The final environment and exact task will be provided later this summer.On the day of the contest, the entire scenario (i.e. cabinets, destinations, and choice of objects) will be changed.

Resources

Here are some resources :

• 3DUI Resources
• 3DUI in a Nutshell
• Contigra 3D Widgets classification

Note 1

If you require special equipment or you can´t bring yours to 3DUI, there is a slight possibility that we can ask people at the exhibition to lend some equipment for the contest. Let us know as soon as possible to see if we can arrange something, ideally before 3DUI´s registration. First come first served basis.

Sponsors