The first time I put on a VR headset a few years ago was the first time I truly understood that seeing is believing. An entire new world opened up in my living room, and I perceived the virtual objects and boundaries as real, physical things. But even though my brain wanted to accept the virtual world in front of me, I couldn’t touch what I saw. This disconnect had led me to ponder these questions: was the virtual world in front of me real? What makes something real?

The Open Education Resources (OER) Working Group of the River Campus Libraries (RCL) is working toward its fourth year of an Open Education grant program and has identified more low-cost/increased-access champions across campus. This year, we are proud to announce 8 new Zero-Cost Heroes.

Sanjeel Parekh is a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs Research. His research primarily focuses on building machine learning tools for problems involving audio-visual data such as source separation, event detection, and speech enhancement. 

He earned his PhD in computer science at Technicolor and Telecom University of Paris-Saclay in 2019. His thesis was on learning representations for robust audio-visual scene analysis. Other areas he finds interesting and engaging are multimedia and ML research, music, philosophy, math, and machines. 

Dr. Synatra Smith is a cultural anthropologist exploring extended reality (XR) and other digital tools to enhance special collections and archival records featuring African American art, history, and culture with the specific intention of documenting workflows that can be shared with students, cultural heritage workers, and scholars interested in building digital projects without relying on a large budget or team. She sits at the intersection of researcher; gallery, library, archives, and museum (GLAM) professional; and digital humanities practitioner.

Lisa Maria Wurzinger began as a performance artist in a theatre in 2004, then worked as an art reporter and presenter in the TV industry. In 2009, she became a production manager for GO! Pictures and later co-founded "GO! Pictures KG" and its XR studio label "GO!insideVR" together with director Gero A.E. Egger in 2017. They specialize in narrative VR/360° experiences and immersive storytelling.

Qi Sun is an assistant professor at New York University. Before joining NYU, he was a research scientist at Adobe Research. He received his PhD at Stony Brook University. His research interests lie in VR/AR, perceptual computer graphics, display, and computational cognition.

Shiri Azenkot is an Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech who does not like bloated bios. So here are the basics: Shiri researches accessibility, with a focus on emerging platforms like augmented and virtual reality. She publishes at the typical top venues for accessibility and HCI and has received the typical awards for someone at this stage in her career. She directs the XR Access Initiative. For more information talk to her at the 2024 XR Access Symposium.

With the advent of very high-resolution three-dimensional models via photogrammetric techniques as a primary method of archaeological documentation, the construction of immersive, high-fidelity simulacra is imminently within reach. This talk considers how the scale at which the human body interacts with immersive digital models are especially important for understanding the affordances and ergonomics of past things and places.

One way a person at the University of Rochester earns consideration for the Martin E. Messinger Libraries Recognition Award is through cumulative contributions to the educational mission of the library and service to students and faculty that goes above and beyond what is expected of all library staff.

Five days after the Battle of Antietam—considered a turning point in favor of the Union during the American Civil War—United States President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It states that as of January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves” in states that seceded from the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”