Giudice, Corey speak with Portland Monthly about VEMI Lab
Nicholas Giudice, a professor in the School of Computing and Information Science who directs the Virtual Environment and Multimodal Interaction (VEMI) Laboratory at the University of Maine, and Richard Corey, the lab’s director of operations, spoke about the lab with Portland Monthly for an article about the variety of innovation in Maine. VEMI is one of the few laboratories in the country — and the only lab in Maine — to research and study applications of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies with a multimodal focus, according to the article. “People are horrible at imagining things. What we do is allow people to get inside scenarios and actually experience them,” Giudice said. VEMI was created in 2008 to serve as a research resource, the article states. “The idea is how we use technology to understand how we interact with our environment. For example, navigation. How do you get from one place to another, and how can technology be used to better navigate a physical space?” Giudice said. Corey said the real-world applications of the research being done at VEMI are broad — from rendering a digital model of proposed wind turbines to assisting the visually impaired with navigating physical spaces.