is a lecturer in the Department of
Computer Science, University College London. His research has focused upon
a number of issues to do with human performance within virtual
environments. This has developed from the start of his PhD from the
development of interaction techniques for 3D interaction devices, through
the studies ofthe usefulness
andproperties of immersive virtual reality systems, to work on
supporting groups of people meeting in a virtual environment.He is responsible for over-seeing the EQUATOR IRC project at UCL.
For
several years, Steed has been collaborating on the development of a theory
of the sense of presence. We define presence as “the sense of being in
an environment being presented by a computer”. Participants in an
immersive VE report themselves as feeling as if they are in the VE, and
they react to events in the virtual environment as they would in the real
world. An example is that participants in a virtual environment would duck
if a virtual object loomed close to their head, whereas they would not on
desktop systems. The design of interaction techniques must therefore be
informed by the factors that effect the sense of presence. An example is a
technique called the “virtual treadmill” that was implemented by the
author.
Steed’s
most recent work has been in the usage and evaluation of 3D environments
in distributed situations. We have recently been carrying out experiments
in a distributed setting that have looked at how immersed and non-immersed
people can collaborate in a shared space. These are the first experiments
of their type of which we are aware, and the initial results indicate that
immersed participants might have a social advantage compared to
non-immersed participants.
