About

The Harrington Lab at UCF investigates Virtual Nature, using AR and VR as a technical artifact, to better understand perceptual phenomenon as it relates to human-computing-environment interactions that cause emotional, learning, and aesthetic outcomes. The lab is highly collaborative with several active multidisciplinary partnerships. Efforts focus on extending prior work in the development of Simulated Ecological Environments for Education (SEEE) used for research and art. The lab is under the direction of Dr. Harrington at the University of Central Florida.

Virtual Nature is the main technical thrust for the design and development of the research program. It is a digital media artifact represented of the real environment, both in quality and accuracy of visual information and data of the real plants. It solves the technical problem of fusing sparse information and data sets of high information accuracy to generate realistic and beautiful representations of nature. As such, virtual nature may be used to study the role of beauty in the human-computer-environment interaction dynamics as it impacts perception, emotion, learning, decisions and actions in humans. These models are constructed in real-time game engines capable of display in AR, VR, walls, and CAVE based installations, as well as integration with various input systems beyond the typical mouse and keyboards on PCs, making several lines of future research possible.