Roger J. Hubbold

Position: Professor Emeritus

Picture of Roger Hubbold


School of Computer Science
University of Manchester

Click here for a short biography

I retired at the end of January 2010, and now I do a small amount of research for fun. Steve Pettifer has taken over from me as Research Group Leader for the Advanced Interfaces Group. Please note that I am no longer accepting  students for PhD study. Those wishing to join the Advanced Interfaces Group should contact one of my academic colleagues to discuss potential supervision.

Publications

You can access my recent publications, and retrieve copies of some of them, ordered by year, or by type (journal, conference etc).

Contacting me at work


Research Interests

My main research interest is the design of architectures, algorithms and interactive techniques for virtual environments. This includes massive model rendering, locomotion, navigation and interaction in virtual worlds, and interactive manipulation techniques for 3D interfaces. I have a particular interest in the application of virtual environment technologies to demanding real-world problems.

I have an on-going interest in reconstruction of real-world scenes from digital images. You can find details of a completed research project on this on the Daedalus project page. Here's an example of a Mayan monument at Chichen Itza in Mexico, reconstructed from photographs taken by my colleague Mashhuda Glencross. The reconstruction software, called Helios, was the work of Jun Liu, one of my former PhD students. I am continuing to experiment with this software and to add new features to it.
Image of reconstruction of Mayan site.

Together with my colleague Aphrodite Galata, I have become interested in using video cameras for tracking hands in order to build unencumbered interfaces for 3D interaction. My specific interest is in issues of usability, and also on mitigating the effects of latency in interaction loops, in order to make systems based on real-time tracking work better. Here's an example from real-time hand tracking. The 3D skeleton is fitted automatically to the hand, captured with a low-cost web-cam.
Picture of a hand being tracked in real time.

Earlier interests include parallel algorithms for rendering, scientific and medical visualization, and global illumination.

You can find details of projects that I was nvolved in, and more, by visiting the home pages of the Advanced Interfaces Group.