Modeling & Simulation research

statement on m&S

In 2023, I switched from studying Computer Science to Modeling & Simulation (M&S), a transdisciplinary graduate degree offered at the University of Central Florida. As an XR enthusiast and developer, I have always valued how art, human-centered design, engineering, and ethics intersect. I believe the best XR applications demonstrate equal appreciation for each of these areas. Thus, I joined the M&S program because I wanted a robust education couched in psychology, philosophy, math, and logic to hone my skills as a developer and researcher.

As a graduate student, I learned that M&S techniques and approaches can be applied to practically any discipline. Some application areas include predicting maintenance needs in factories and roller coasters via digital twins, creating immersive combat vehicle training simulators, and even designing intelligent tutoring systems for children in grade school. At its core, understanding how to both model a system (via diagramming, math formulas, or even 3D models) and to simulate that system (via predictions, visualizations, or state flows for example) are immensely useful skills for anyone designing things for human use and would like to know in advance what to expect from these systems. M&S has and will continue to be relevant in many aspects of our lives as people that wish to positively benefit from technology.

M&S Experiences

Since joining the VARLab and the M&S program, I've had tremendous fun working on projects and presenting my work at conferences and exhibitions. See some highlights in the below text description and image carousel:

In the VARLab
- Conducting user studies on VR cybersickness reduction techniques
- Designed study to compare effects of monoscopic vs. stereoscopic 360 videos
- Developing XR applications like Earth XR, Workspace VR, and vDen Retro Demo for SIGGRAPH
- Co-authoring paper on Human Digital Twins presented at I/ITSEC 2024
- Demoing software at I/ITSEC annual conference, UCF events, and academic conferences like ACM CSCW and IEEE VR
Extra-curricular activities:
- Serving as Student Volunteer for CSCW 2023 and IEEE VR 2024
- Volunteer speaker at IEEE Digital Twins Workshop 2023. Discussed VARLab Human Digital Twin project.
- Volunteer panelist at 2023 VR/AR Association Central Florida Immersive Technology Summit discussing Sensation and Perception as it relates to education and training
- Delivered Interact 2023 Workshop Presentation: Tools and Techniques for Accessibility in Virtual Reality
- 2nd Place Winner of Orlando Magic Innovation Challenge in January 2024 for AR Sports Highlights App proposal
- Volunteered with UCF VR Knights Club to introduce VR devices and game design concepts to Evans High School students

research publications

Jason A. Ortiz and Carolina Cruz-Neira. 2023. Workspace VR: A Social and Collaborative Telework Virtual Reality Application. In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 381–383. https://doi.org/10.1145/3584931.3607502

Abstract: COVID-19 lockdowns accelerated user adoption of remote collaboration technologies such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Despite the challenges of working remotely, many knowledge workers still desire the flexibility of hybrid work and its personal benefits allowing for more productive individual work. However, return-to-office (RTO) mandates suggest an inclination that in-office work allows for more productive teamwork. To resolve these conflicting desires, Workspace VR was created. Unlike other social telework virtual reality (VR) applications, Workspace VR enables uncoordinated, social, collaborative, and productive individual work and teamwork via virtual avatars, workspaces, and integration with user computers. Designed for Meta Quest devices, users can feel like they are working together with others without constraints in Workspace VR.

CSCW_2023_Extended_Abstract_Workspace_VR.pdf

J. A. Ortiz, J. A. Insley, J. Knowles, V. A. Mateevitsi, M. E. Papka and S. Rizzi, "Massive Data Visualization Techniques for use in Virtual Reality Devices," 2022 IEEE 12th Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV), Oklahoma City, OK, USA, 2022, pp. 1-2, doi: 10.1109/LDAV57265.2022.9966400.

Abstract: Scientific simulations executed on supercomputers produce massive amounts of data. Visualizing this data is essential to discovery and dissemination, but methods for transforming and displaying such large data visualizations for use in Extended Reality (XR) devices are not commonly supported. We investigated the viability of existing XR applications (i.e., ParaView VR, SummitVR, and Omniverse XR) to display large data visualizations. Our investigations led us to create a proof-of-concept Virtual Reality (VR) application with Unity using Universal Scene Description (USD) files exported from Houdini to display and interact with large time-varying scientific data visualizations. We present our investigations as a basis for future work to display and interact with scientific data visualizations in XR.

Final - LDAV 2022 Poster - Massive Data Visualization Techniques for use in Extended Reality Devices.pdf

Final - LDAV 2022 Summary - Massive Data Visualization Techniques for use in Extended Reality Devices.pdf

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