At the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality (IEEE VR) held in late March in Orlando, Florida, Dr. Fangcheng Zhong’s dissertation, Path from Photorealism to Perceptual Realism, received the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Best Dissertation Honorable Mention Award.

Dr. Zhong’s dissertation investigated the fundamental question of how a virtual scene in extended reality (XR) can achieve a level of realism comparable to that of the real world, and established the world’s first mixed-reality display system that successfully passed a visual Turing test. In over half of the experimental trials, naive observers failed to distinguish any difference between a physical 3D object and its virtually rendered counterpart produced by the system. Passing a visual Turing test is considered the holy grail of perceptually realistic XR. Dr. Zhong’s work represents a significant milestone in XR, integrating all aspects of graphics and vision to advance the goal of digitizing and visually reproducing physical 3D scenes.

The IEEE VR is the leading conference in the field of virtual and augmented reality. The IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Best Dissertation Award is presented each year to the author of the most outstanding Ph.D. dissertation, defended during the preceding two calendar years, in the broad areas of virtual and augmented reality. The award is presented at the IEEE VR Conference, where the winner is also invited to give a short talk about the dissertation work.