Tumbling Room key tool for student research
TORONTO, June 2, 2008 -- Twenty-five students from Canada and around the world will attend a week-long vision science program at York University designed, in part, to recruit top graduate students to the school’s Centre for Vision Research (CVR).
Third-year undergraduate students from universities across Canada, Scotland, Germany, France and the U.S., including MIT and Cornell, will attend the all-expenses-paid summer school. They were chosen from more than 100 competitive applicants based on reference letters, transcripts and a written statement of interest.
“The students are coming here based on their own initiative and their interest in vision research, so they are extremely motivated,” said Laurence Harris, chair of psychology in York’s Faculty of Health. “It’s a great chance to show them what the Centre has to offer aspiring graduate students.”
The program curriculum reflects on-going research projects at the Centre, including studies on vision in humans, animals, and machines, as well as applied topics such as virtual reality, visual perception in low-gravity environments and clinical aspects of vision.
Students will be hands-on participants in CVR laboratories, studying a wide range of subjects, including which components of vision determine our perception of orientation, how we reach out for things, how we see in three dimensions, and how we perceive faces, said Harris.
“Your perception of orientation depends on different senses, primarily vision, but also the sense of gravity through the inner ear and physical placement of your body,” Harris said. “We’re interested in how those perceptual cues combine together to give you a sense of orientation. The Canadian Space Agency is very interested in our research concerning what happens when you take gravity away, for example.”
Many of the sessions will highlight research and technology that most undergraduate science students will not have been exposed to before, Harris said.
One such piece of equipment is York’s Tumbling Room. The Tumbling Room lab is an 8ft. cube resembling a typical room except that it can be rotated around a stationary subject or a subject can be rotated within the stationary room. By manipulating various visual and gravitational cues, students will be able to quantify subjects’ perceptions of their own orientation.
In the virtual reality lab, students will use the Immersive Visual Environment at York (IVY) to simulate landscapes, such as the Martian environment, and orient objects and the structure of the visual world in ways that are unfamiliar or impossible in the real world.
The Vision Science Summer School, in its second year, is already a success for the CVR and, in turn, for York’s new Faculty of Health. Seven new students chose York for graduate studies based on their experiences at last year’s event.
The Vision Science Summer School is funded by a training grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, several Vice Presidents' offices at York University and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
The Vision Science Summer School runs from Monday, June 2 to Friday, June 6 on York’s Keele campus at the Computer Science and Engineering Building (number 19 on the York U map). For a full schedule of events, please contact York media relations.
York University is the leading interdisciplinary research and teaching university in Canada. York offers a modern, academic experience at the undergraduate and graduate level in Toronto, Canada’s most international city. The third largest university in the country, York is host to a dynamic academic community of 50,000 students and 7,000 faculty and staff, as well as 190,000 alumni worldwide. York’s 11 faculties and 24 research centres conduct ambitious, groundbreaking research that is interdisciplinary, cutting across traditional academic boundaries. This distinctive and collaborative approach is preparing students for the future and bringing fresh insights and solutions to real-world challenges. York University is an autonomous, not-for-profit corporation.
-30-
Media contact:
Killeen Kelly, Media Relations, York University, 416 736 2100 x22938 / killeenk@yorku.ca
