Daniele Giunchi

I'm a Research Associate in the Virtual Environment and Computer Graphics (VECG) at the University College London(UCL). In 2021 I achieved my PhD in Computer Science from UCL, under the supervision of Profs. Anthony Steed and Niloy Mitra. My research spans in computer graphics, human computer interaction, machine learning, computer vision, large language models, searching for new paradigm of individual interaction or collaborative interaction in order to improve user experience in VR/AR/XR. My PhD project was funded by a Marie Curie Fellowship, granted by the European Commission. During my PhD I worked as research intern at Microsoft and I was a visitor researcher at Max Plank Institute for Informatics. Before joining UCL, I obtained a degree in Astronomy from the University of Bologna, and I had a long experience in industry.


Contact
4th Floor
Dept of Computer Science
169 Euston Road
University College London, UK

Publications

DreamCodeVR: Towards Democratizing Behavior Design in Virtual Reality with Speech-Driven Programming
Daniele Giunchi; Nels Numan; Elia Gatti; Anthony Steed
Proceedings of IEEE VR(2024)
Keywords: large language model, VR, rapid prototyping, low code programming, speech programming

STREAMSPACE: A Framework for Window Streaming in Collaborative Mixed Reality Environments
Giunchi, Daniele; Bovo, Riccardo; Numan, Nels; Steed, Anthony
Poster at IEEE VR(2024)
Keywords: virtual screen, virtual reality, collaborative interaction

AIsop: Exploring Immersive VR Storytelling Leveraging Generative AI
Gatti, Elia; Giunchi, Daniele; Numan,Nels; Steed, Anthony
Poster at IEEE VR(2024)
Keywords: large language model, VR, storytelling, generative AI

Fovea Prediction Model in VR
Giunchi, Daniele; Bovo, Riccardo; Bhatia, Nitesh; Heinis, Thomas; Steed, Anthony
Poster at IEEE VR(2024)
Keywords: neural networks, gaze prediction, visual attention

Extending the Open Source Social Virtual Reality Ecosystem to the Browser in Ubiq
Sebastian Friston, Ben Congdon, Nels Numan, Klara Brandstätter, Lisa Izzouzi, Felix Thiel, Jingyi Zhang, Daniele Giunchi, David Swapp, Anthony Steed
Proceedings of the 28th International ACM Conference on 3D Web Technology (2023)
Keywords: social-vr, interoperability, toolkits

Speech-Augmented Cone-of-Vision for Exploratory Data Analysis
Riccardo Bovo, Daniele Giunchi, Ludwig Sidenmark, Joshua Newn, Hans Gellersen, Enrico Costanza, Thomas Heinis
CHI'23
Keywords: Field of View, multi-modal visual attention cues, VR collaborative analytics, eye-tracking

Ubiq-Genie: Leveraging External Frameworks for Enhanced Social VR Experiences
Nels Numan, Daniele Giunchi, Benjamin Congdon, Anthony Steed
2023 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)
Keywords: social virtual reality, collaboration, open source, system architecture, generative artificial intelligence

Towards Outdoor Collaborative Mixed Reality: Lessons Learnt from a Prototype System
Nels Numan, Ziwen Lu, Benjamin Congdon, Daniele Giunchi, Alexandros Rotsidis, Andreas Lernis, Kyriakos Larmos, Tereza Kourra, Panayiotis Charalambous, Yiorgos Chrysanthou, Simon Julier, Anthony Steed
2023 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)
Keywords: mixed reality, augmented reality, virtual reality, collaboration, outdoor, city-scale, reconstruction, registration

Cone of Vision as a Behavioural Cue for VR Collaboration
Riccardo Bovo, Daniele Giunchi, Muna Alebri, Anthony Steed, Enrico Costanza, Thomas Heinis
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW2
Keywords: : Field of View frustum visualizations, visual attention cues, VR collaborative analytics

Explorative Study on Asymmetric Sketch Interactions for Object Retrieval in Virtual Reality
Daniele Giunchi, Stuart James, Riccardo Bovo, Donald Degraen, Anthony Steed
2022 International Conference on Interactive Media, Smart Systems and Emerging Technologies (IMET)
Keywords: Sketch, Virtual Reality, CNN, HCI

Mitigation strategies for participant non-attendance in VR remote collaborative experiments
Riccardo Bovo, Daniele Giunchi, Enrico Costanza, Anthony Steed, Thomas Heinis
Frontiers in Computer Science
Keywords: collaborative experiment, non-attendance, virtual reality (VR), cost function, recruitment procedures

Fast Blue-Noise Generation via Unsupervised Learning
Daniele Giunchi, Alejandro Sztrajman, Anthony Steed
2022 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)
Keywords: Neural networks, Image processing, Noise generators, Monte Carlo methods

Shall I describe it or shall I move closer? Verbal references and locomotion in VR collaborative search tasks
Riccardo Bovo, Daniele Giunchi, Enrico Costanza, Anthony Steed, Thomas Heinis
Proceedings of 20th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
Real-time head-based deep-learning model for gaze probability regions in collaborative VR
Riccardo Bovo, Daniele Giunchi, Ludwig Sidenmark, Hans Gellersen, Enrico Costanza, Thomas Heinis
2022 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA 2022)
Keywords: neural networks, gaze prediction, gaze inference, visual attention

MR-RIEW: An MR Toolkit for Designing Remote Immersive Experiment Workflows
Riccardo Bovo; Daniele Giunchi; Anthony Steed; Thomas Heinis
Poster 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)
Lessons Learned Running Distributed and Remote Mixed Reality Experiments
Anthony Steed, Daniel Archer, Klara Brandstätter, Ben James Congdon, Sebastian Friston, Priya Ganapathy, Daniele Giunchi, Lisa Izzouzi, Gun Woo Park, David Swapp, Felix Johannes Thiel
Frontiers in Computer Science (2022)
Keywords: virtual reality, mixed reality, distributed of experiments, avatars, social virtual environments

Ubiq-Exp: A Toolkit to Build and Run Remote and Distributed Mixed Reality Experiments
Anthony Steed, Lisa Izzouzi, Klara Brandstätter, Sebastian Friston, Benjamin James Congdon, Otto Olkkonen, Daniele Giunchi, Nels Numan, David Swapp
Frontiers in Virtual Reality (2022)
Keywords: virtual reality, 3D user interfaces, experiment design, distributed experiments, remote experiments

Perceived realism of pedestrian crowds trajectories in vr
Daniele Giunchi, Riccardo Bovo, Panayiotis Charalambous, Fotis Liarokapis, Alastair Shipman, Stuart James, Anthony Steed, Thomas Heinis
Proceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2021)
Keywords: crowd simulation, perception, virtual reality

Mixing Modalities of 3D Sketching and Speech for Interactive Model Retrieval in Virtual Reality
Daniele Giunchi, Alejandro Sztrajman, Stuart James, Anthony Steed
IMX 2021
Keywords: Sketch, Virtual Reality, CNN, HCI

VR Toolkit for Identifying Group Characteristics
Hugo Mayo, Alastair Shipman, Daniele Giunchi, Riccardo Bovo, Anthony Steed, Thomas Heinis
Collective Dynamics 2021
Keywords: VR·crowd behaviour·voronoi density·pedestrian

Real-time Collaboration Between Mixed Reality Users in Geo-referenced Virtual Environment
Shubham Singh, Zengou Ma, Daniele Giunchi, Anthony Steed
arXiv
Selecting texture resolution using a task‐specific visibility metric
Krzysztof Wolski, Daniele Giunchi, Shin-ichi Kinuwaki, Piotr Didyk, Karol Myszkowski, Anthony Steed, Rafal K Mantiuk
Computer Graphics Forum
Keywords: Perception; Image manipulation; Image processing

VisTexRes: Visibility thresholds for Texture Resolution
Krzysztof Wolski, Daniele Giunchi, Shinichi Kinuwaki, Piotr Didyk, Karol Myszkowski, Anthony Steed, Rafal Mantiuk
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Keywords: key, key.

Mixing realities for sketch retrieval in Virtual Reality
Daniele Giunchi, Stuart James, Donald Degraen, Anthony Steed
VRCAI 2019 Poster
Keywords: Sketch, Virtual Reality, CNN, HCI

Dataset and metrics for predicting local visible differences
Krzysztof Wolski, Daniele Giunchi, Nanyang Ye, Piotr Didyk, Karol Myszkowski, Radosław Mantiuk, Hans-Peter Seidel, Anthony Steed, Rafał K Mantiuk
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 2018
Keywords: Visual perception, visual difference predictor, visual metric, distortion visibility, image quality, data-driven metric, dataset, convolutional neural network

3D Sketching in Virtual Reality for immersive model search
Daniele Giunchi, Stuart James, Anthony Steed
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Expressive '18
Keywords: Sketch, Virtual Reality, CNN, HCI

Model Retrieval by 3D Sketching in Immersive Virtual Reality
Daniele Giunchi, Stuart James, Anthony Steed
IEEE VR 2018 Posters
Keywords: Sketch, Virtual Reality, CNN, HCI

Quantum Information

Towards Quantum Computer Generated Holography
Thesis for the II level Master of Optics and Quantum Information from La Sapienza University (Rome).
Thesis
Slides of the presentation

Teaching

2024 Induction to Python Programming for Computer Graphics and Virtual Environment UCL
2023 Computer Graphics UCL
2022 Image processing UCL
2020-2022 Virtual Environments UCL
2019 Advanced Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning DeepMind/UCL
2019 Machine Vision UCL
2018, 2020 System Engineering UCL
2017 Computational Photography UCL
2017 Robotic Programming UCL