Four UALR undergraduates presented their findings at a premier international virtual reality conference, held this year from March 23 to 27.

The 22nd annual Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Virtual Reality Conference was held in Arles, France.

Dylan Johnson, Brent Blasingame, Alex Jaeger, and Connor Taffe are computer science majors who serve as research assistants to Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira, director of the George W. Donaghey Emerging Analytics Center at UALR.

“This conference is for professionals and seasoned researchers,” said Cruz-Neira. “So, to have four of our undergraduate students invited to present is a huge opportunity.”

The students delivered a full-day tutorial focused on augmented reality, or AR, in which a person’s current perception of reality is enhanced by technology.

The students demonstrated AR through the integration of Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) and Vuforia, a software brand for mobile devices.

The students say they have often combined the two since the Vuforia library is capable of projecting a 2D or 3D structure onto real-world objects and improves on the limitations of OpenCV.

At the end of the session, tutorial attendees had a completed game for a handheld tablet using OpenCV and Vuforia, according to Johnson.

Johnson came to UALR in fall 2014 after he worked as a software engineer intern for Ancestry.com. He and the other students are graduates of the Arkansas School for Math, Science, and Art in Hot Springs.

Cruz-Neira said the conference has a program for student volunteers designed to help offset the expense of the overseas trip.

A globally recognized international pioneer in the areas of virtual reality and interactive visualization, Cruz-Neira is also an Arkansas Research Alliance Scholar, the first such scholar from UALR, and also the Donaghey Distinguished Professor in Information Science.