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New AGOCG Virtual Reality Support Officer's Role

From 1 October 1996 the post of AGOCG Virtual Reality (VR) Support Officer has been in place. The post is based at the Advanced VR Research Centre (AVRRC) at Loughborough University. The requirement for this role came as a direct consequence of an AGOCG workshop "The Potential of Virtual Reality for UK Higher Education" and funding received through the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Technology Applications Programme. A key requirement of the Support Officer will be to assist AGOCG in meeting its deliverables under this Programme. To achieve this it is envisaged that the Support Officer will provide the following support:

Ensuring the VR community is informed by means of:

The Officer

The new Support Officer is Patrick Costello and he will be undertaking the role on a full time basis. His involvement in VR stems from a final year dissertation on the human factors issues of using immersive VR headsets. Following graduation from Loughborough in 1995 he was employed as a Research Assistant on a Health and Safety Executive (HSE) funded project to determine the possible visual side-effects of head-mounted displays. The results of this research have since been presented at conferences in the UK, Europe and the USA.

Present Projects

A mailing list has now been established using the Mailbase facility at the University of Newcastle. The mailing list title will be "agocg-vr" and the list description is as follows:

As a further point of contact a World Wide Web server has been set up at Loughborough. It is hosted on a Silicon Graphics machine based in the AVRRC Laboratory. This allows the VR Support Officer to maintain the site in an efficient manner. A number of hyperlinks to other useful sites are being established and it is envisaged that reports (such as the Model Databases report) will be published here along with other useful materials such as a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page which should be generated by discussion on the mailing list. The maintenance of this site is seen as an important and ongoing activity for the officer. Further to this Pat will be preparing a report on the availability of 3-D model databases and has attended the recent VRML 2.0 standards meeting in Leeds.

He also presented a brief talk on the post, a review of present projects and some indication of those that will be carried out in the future at the Computer Graphics and Visualisation 1996 Supporter's Event at the University of Manchester on 11 December.

Further Information

If you have any comments or require further information Pat can be contacted at:

Advanced VR Research Centre
Department of Human Sciences
Loughborough University
Loughborough
Leicester
LE11 3TU

Tel: +44 (0)1509 223037 x4266
Fax: +44 (0)1509 223940
p.j.costello@lboro.ac.uk
http://sgi-6.lut.ac.uk/~vrsupp

Mailing list homepage: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/agocg-vr/welcome.html or link via AGOCG WWW pages