Mission
Meteor Studio is first and foremost an educational environment, geared for training graduate and undergraduate students to become high-potential researchers, engineers, designers, and artists in immersive media computing. Our route to this is primarily through applied research and design projects. Meteor Studio’s mission is to grow students to become innovative leaders, equipped with forward-looking aptitude and scholarship, imagination and whimsy, professionalism and integrity, and resourcefulness and mindfulness.
Technical Mission
Our technical mission is to explore, study, and advance mobile computing technologies at the intersection of technical advancement and usefulness/practicality, especially as they relate to mobile AR/VR/vision computing systems, and their ability to help people tell their stories. To this end, Meteor Studio’s research and design projects span three arcs:
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Advanced visual capture and processing systems: Visual data allows computers to see the world around them, with practical application to continuous object/face recognition and pose estimation (augmented reality/virtual reality). Our projects aim to advance the potential of mobile/wearable/IoT visual computing systems through solutions to balance low power and task performance, and solutions to guarantee user privacy.
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Systems for hybrid virtual-physical immersion through augmentation of senses: Immersive systems mix the virtual and physical realities. Faithful representations are not only important for training and education, but also for giving the user a deeper sense of psychological presence with both the virtual and physical world. Our projects aim to immersively integrate virtual objects in physical worlds and/or physical objects in virtual worlds, e.g., through light estimation, smell, fluid haptics, etc.
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Design frameworks for data-driven augmented reality and virtual reality storytelling and sensemaking: AR/VR software development is highly technical and intricate, with a steep learning curve, especially for those who are not developers. We seek to broaden access to the potential of AR/VR systems by connecting to practical use cases and experiences, through design projects and/or by creating toolkits and frameworks for broad use. Our projects aim to help others educate/learn, communicate/disseminate, and understand through immersive computing.