IEEE VR 2024 VGTC Virtual Reality Lifetime Achievement Award

The 2024 IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Hiroo Iwata of the University of Tsukuba, in recognition of his pioneering and lifelong achievements in the development of innovative and imaginative locomotion and haptic interfaces for virtual and augmented reality.Prof. Iwata began his work in VR-related projects in 1986 when he launched his own laboratory at the University of Tsukuba.Following his interest in designing mechanical devices which dates back to his childhood, Prof. Iwata has focused on mechanical user interface devices for virtual reality that provide haptic feedback and improve the user's feeling of movement in virtual environments.Knowing that academic papers do a poor job of conveying the effect of haptic feedback and motion cues on users, Prof. Iwata was motivated to introduce his work to the community through public demonstrations.The Emerging Technologies venue at the SIGGRAPH conference was the ideal place for Iwata to exhibit his research devices.He and his lab participated in E-Tech every year from 1994 to 2007.A series of Iwata's projects provided haptic feedback to a users' fingers and hands.In that context, the Desktop Force Display was demonstrated and documented in the visual proceedings of SIG-GRAPH '90.The next haptic display project was the Pen-based Haptic Virtual Environment, presented at VRAIS '93 with a demonstration of its use for interactive deformation of free-form surfaces.In the later FEELEX project, Prof. Iwata and colleagues developed a shape-changing interface, where actuators deformed a flexible screen so it matched the shapes in an image that was projected onto the screen.Users could then run their hands over the screen to feel the content of the image.Iwata's research products included not only haptic devices to stimulate fingers and hands, but also devices for walking-on-foot in virtual environments.Development of the locomotion interface Virtual Perambulator began in 1989, and ended with a final publication at VRAIS '96.Iwata and his team devised and built many types of locomotion interfaces including the Torus Treadmill, an omnidirectional moving floor, the Gait Master motion footpad which could simulate walking on uneven terrain, and the robot-tile-based CirculaFloor.These were published in IEEE VR '99, 2001, and 2005, respectively.Other areas of Iwata's research include projection VR and motion bases.He developed various shapes and sizes of immersive projection VR screens as alternatives to HMDs, some being spherical, others cuboid.The largest, Large Space, is 25 m  15 m  7 m and was shown at IEEE VR 2019.The projection VR systems were integrated with motion bases, enhancing the user experience of movement by engaging the proprioceptive sense.