Open Access

Hochschulen für Angewandte Wissenschaften (HAW) übernehmen in Deutschland etwa die Hälfte der Informatikausbildung im Bereich Bachelor und Master. Neu ist, dass auch Doktortitel in Informatik an einigen HAW erworben werden können. Dies eröffnet für Informatik neue Perspektiven und wirft Fragestellungen auf. Neben den Charakteristika einer Promotion im Fach Informatik an einer HAW sind dies beispielsweise das Qualifikationsprofil von Promovierten und ihre Karriereperspektiven, Kooperationsformen mit externen Anwendungspartnern als auch die Frage, wie Potenziale im Sinne der Informatik gehoben werden können. Dieser Beitrag liefert Grundlagen zu dieser Diskussion. Der Hintergrund des eigenständigen Promotionsrechts von HAW wird besprochen, es werden verschiedene Modelle der Umsetzung anhand von Beispielen aus Hessen, Nordrhein-Westfalen und Rheinland-Pfalz vorgestellt sowie erste Erfahrungen mit dem eigenständigen Promotionsrecht berichtet.

Altering posture relative to the direction of gravity, or exposure to microgravity has been shown to affect many aspects of perception, including size perception. Our aims in this study were to investigate whether changes in posture and long-term exposure to microgravity bias the visual perception of object height and to test whether any such biases are accompanied by changes in precision. We also explored the possibility of sex/gender differences. Two cohorts of participants (12 astronauts and 20 controls, 50% women) varied the size of a virtual square in a simulated corridor until it was perceived to match a reference stick held in their hands. Astronauts performed the task before, twice during, and twice after an extended stay onboard the International Space Station. On Earth, they performed the task of sitting upright and lying supine. Earth-bound controls also completed the task five times with test sessions spaced similarly to the astronauts; to simulate the microgravity sessions on the ISS they lay supine. In contrast to earlier studies, we found no immediate effect of microgravity exposure on perceived object height. However, astronauts robustly underestimated the height of the square relative to the haptic reference and these estimates were significantly smaller 60 days or more after their return to Earth. No differences were found in the precision of the astronauts’ judgments. Controls underestimated the height of the square when supine relative to sitting in their first test session (simulating Pre-Flight) but not in later sessions. While these results are largely inconsistent with previous results in the literature, a posture-dependent effect of simulated eye height might provide a unifying explanation. We were unable to make any firm statements related to sex/gender differences. We conclude that no countermeasures are required to mitigate the acute effects of microgravity exposure on object height perception. However, space travelers should be warned about late-emerging and potentially long-lasting changes in this perceptual skill.

This research investigates the efficacy of multisensory cues for locating targets in Augmented Reality (AR). Sensory constraints can impair perception and attention in AR, leading to reduced performance due to factors such as conflicting visual cues or a restricted field of view. To address these limitations, the research proposes head-based multisensory guidance methods that leverage audio-tactile cues to direct users' attention towards target locations. The research findings demonstrate that this approach can effectively reduce the influence of sensory constraints, resulting in improved search performance in AR. Additionally, the thesis discusses the limitations of the proposed methods and provides recommendations for future research.

Neutral buoyancy has been used as an analog for microgravity from the earliest days of human spaceflight. Compared to other options on Earth, neutral buoyancy is relatively inexpensive and presents little danger to astronauts while simulating some aspects of microgravity. Neutral buoyancy removes somatosensory cues to the direction of gravity but leaves vestibular cues intact. Removal of both somatosensory and direction of gravity cues while floating in microgravity or using virtual reality to establish conflicts between them has been shown to affect the perception of distance traveled in response to visual motion (vection) and the perception of distance. Does removal of somatosensory cues alone by neutral buoyancy similarly impact these perceptions? During neutral buoyancy we found no significant difference in either perceived distance traveled nor perceived size relative to Earth-normal conditions. This contrasts with differences in linear vection reported between short- and long-duration microgravity and Earth-normal conditions. These results indicate that neutral buoyancy is not an effective analog for microgravity for these perceptual effects.

The visual and auditory quality of computer-mediated stimuli for virtual and extended reality (VR/XR) is rapidly improving. Still, it remains challenging to provide a fully embodied sensation and awareness of objects surrounding, approaching, or touching us in a 3D environment, though it can greatly aid task performance in a 3D user interface. For example, feedback can provide warning signals for potential collisions (e.g., bumping into an obstacle while navigating) or pinpointing areas where one’s attention should be directed to (e.g., points of interest or danger). These events inform our motor behaviour and are often associated with perception mechanisms associated with our so-called peripersonal and extrapersonal space models that relate our body to object distance, direction, and contact point/impact. We will discuss these references spaces to explain the role of different cues in our motor action responses that underlie 3D interaction tasks. However, providing proximity and collision cues can be challenging. Various full-body vibration systems have been developed that stimulate body parts other than the hands, but can have limitations in their applicability and feasibility due to their cost and effort to operate, as well as hygienic considerations associated with e.g., Covid-19. Informed by results of a prior study using low-frequencies for collision feedback, in this paper we look at an unobtrusive way to provide spatial, proximal and collision cues. Specifically, we assess the potential of foot sole stimulation to provide cues about object direction and relative distance, as well as collision direction and force of impact. Results indicate that in particular vibration-based stimuli could be useful within the frame of peripersonal and extrapersonal space perception that support 3DUI tasks. Current results favor the feedback combination of continuous vibrotactor cues for proximity, and bass-shaker cues for body collision. Results show that users could rather easily judge the different cues at a reasonably high granularity. This granularity may be sufficient to support common navigation tasks in a 3DUI.

The latest trends in inverse rendering techniques for reconstruction use neural networks to learn 3D representations as neural fields. NeRF-based techniques fit multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to a set of training images to estimate a radiance field which can then be rendered from any virtual camera by means of volume rendering algorithms. Major drawbacks of these representations are the lack of well-defined surfaces and non-interactive rendering times, as wide and deep MLPs must be queried millions of times per single frame. These limitations have recently been singularly overcome, but managing to accomplish this simultaneously opens up new use cases. We present KiloNeuS, a new neural object representation that can be rendered in path-traced scenes at interactive frame rates. KiloNeuS enables the simulation of realistic light interactions between neural and classic primitives in shared scenes, and it demonstrably performs in real-time with plenty of room for future optimizations and extensions.

Modern GPUs come with dedicated hardware to perform ray/triangle intersections and bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) traversal. While the primary use case for this hardware is photorealistic 3D computer graphics, with careful algorithm design scientists can also use this special-purpose hardware to accelerate general-purpose computations such as point containment queries. This article explains the principles behind these techniques and their application to vector field visualization of large simulation data using particle tracing.

When users in virtual reality cannot physically walk and self-motions are instead only visually simulated, spatial updating is often impaired. In this paper, we report on a study that investigated if HeadJoystick, an embodied leaning-based flying interface, could improve performance in a 3D navigational search task that relies on maintaining situational awareness and spatial updating in VR. We compared it to Gamepad, a standard flying interface. For both interfaces, participants were seated on a swivel chair and controlled simulated rotations by physically rotating. They either leaned (forward/backward, right/left, up/down) or used the Gamepad thumbsticks for simulated translation. In a gamified 3D navigational search task, participants had to find eight balls within 5 min. Those balls were hidden amongst 16 randomly positioned boxes in a dark environment devoid of any landmarks. Compared to the Gamepad, participants collected more balls using the HeadJoystick. It also minimized the distance travelled, motion sickness, and mental task demand. Moreover, the HeadJoystick was rated better in terms of ease of use, controllability, learnability, overall usability, and self-motion perception. However, participants rated HeadJoystick could be more physically fatiguing after a long use. Overall, participants felt more engaged with HeadJoystick, enjoyed it more, and preferred it. Together, this provides evidence that leaning-based interfaces like HeadJoystick can provide an affordable and effective alternative for flying in VR and potentially telepresence drones.