Virtual Human Touch

Right now, UC Irvine’s virtual reality lab sits empty, waiting for shipments of hardware and software, for the boxes of technical toys for associate professor Mike D’Zmura and his research team.

Thanks to a $530,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and a $260,000 match by the university, the lab will be outfitted to create virtual humans and other computer-generated props for the medical, education and entertainment fields.

D’Zmura said he hopes to turn raw data into animated props and other lifelike objects that offer new ways to learn. Take medical research. Instead of reading reams of paperwork and thousands of charts, D’Zmura hopes to create digital body parts that tell doctors what’s going on.

Other projects include creating virtual humans that mimic real human gestures, and virtual salesmen on the Internet.

While all this proposed “virtuality” sounds perfect for a Hollywood script, do real people need such artificial counterparts? D’Zmura insists we do.

“We’re hoping to focus on visual systems and perceptions,” he said. “At the very least, it means we’ll be pushing the edges of how people take in information.”

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P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com