Sebastian Friston

SebastianFriston Headshot small

Awarded VEIV EngD 

My name is Sebastian Friston and I am a research student in the Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualisation Group under Anthony Steed.

My interests are in high performance computing & communication systems, novel hardware, and all aspects of building high fidelity virtual worlds. My main research theme and topic of my EngD is low latency rendering for synthetic environments. During my EngD I constructed low latency graphics processors based on dataflow computing with our collaborator, Maxeler Technologies Ltd. I integrated these graphics processors into a bespoke virtual environment which achieved a latency lower than any other comparable system.

Currently I am also pursuing real-time physics simulation & collision detection projects. In the future I would like to study low-cost tracking systems, including markerless pose tracking, and believeability & co-presence for synthetic characters. I am very interested in applied research and hope that developments in these areas will be quickly adopted by industry to create more compelling virtual worlds and games.

I received a BEng in Electrical Engieering from the University of Plymouth in 2010 and began my doctoral training on the EngD programme in 2013. In 2016 I was offered a research associate position within the group.

Publications

Friston, S., Steed, A., Tilbury, S., & Gaydadjiev, G. (2016). Construction and Evaluation of an Ultra Low Latency Frameless Renderer for VR. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 22(4), 1377–1386.

Steed, A; Friston, S; Lopez, M; Drummond, J; Pan, Y; Swapp, D; (2016) An ‘In the Wild’ Experiment on Presence and Embodiment using Consumer Virtual Reality Equipment. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 22(4):1406-1414

Steed, A., Pawar, V., Friston, S., & Srinivasan, M. A. (2016). Ambient fields: representing potential sensory information. In 2016 IEEE 9th Workshop on Software Engineering and Architectures for Realtime Interactive Systems (SEARIS), 20 March 2016.

Scully, T., Friston, S., Fan, C., Doboš, J., & Steed, A. (2016). glTF streaming from 3D repo to X3DOM. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Web3D Technology – Web3D ’16 (pp. 7–15), 21 July 2016.

Ultra Low Latency Virtual Reality - given at Khronos UK Virtual Realities 2016

Friston, S., Karlstrom, P., & Steed, A. (2015). The Effects of Low Latency on Pointing and Steering Tasks. Transactions on Visualisation and Computer Graphics, 22(5):1605-1615.

Friston, S., Steed A., Tilbury S., Gaydadjiev G. (2015). Ultra Low Latency Dataflow Renderer. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications – FPL 2015. 128-131. 24 Aug 2015

Friston, S., & Steed, A. (2014). Measuring Latency in Virtual Environments. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings Virtual Reality 2014), 20(4).

Primary Supervisor: Anthony Steed

Industry Sponsor: Maxeler

High Performance Computing | Low Latency | Virtual Reality | Realtime Rendering