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Jason Jerald

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Jason Jerald (Jason J. Jerald) is a virtual reality researcher, consultant and author. He wrote The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality, published in the ACM Books series by the Association for Computing Machinery and Morgan & Claypool, and co-founded NextGen Interactions, a VR consulting and contracting firm founded in 2012.[1][2]

Jerald earned his doctorate in computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under Fred Brooks. His 2010 dissertation measured how much scene motion and latency users of head-mounted displays can tolerate without noticing; the minimum latency-difference threshold he measured, for the most sensitive subjects, was 3.2 ms.[3] Through NextGen Interactions he has worked as a consultant on VR projects, organized an early IEEE VR panel on consumer VR with Palmer Luckey, taught SIGGRAPH courses on VR interaction design, and won prizes for VR prototypes for first responders in challenges run by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).[4][5][6]

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Checked the dissertation PDF, Crossref and Semantic Scholar metadata for all cited papers (and the arXiv author affiliations of the 2023 paper), the NIST PSCR challenge, team and bio pages, the IEEE VR 2013 panel page, the SIGGRAPH History Archives person and course pages, ODBMS.org, UXmatters, AWE USA 2021, the Tom's Hardware and Voices of VR interviews, Road to VR, 3DVF and the Tomas Bata University library record. About review dates.

Early life and education

In a 2016 interview with Tom's Hardware, Jerald said he became interested in technology in the 1980s, when he "bribed his parents" to get him an Atari video game system, and that his first experiences with virtual reality came in 1995 or 1996. One of the first VR demos he saw was a LEGOLAND world made in partnership with LEGO, Silicon Graphics and MultiGen-Paradigm, in which users could scale themselves down to handle smaller bricks.[7] In a 2014 Voices of VR interview he said he first used a head-mounted display around 1996, during an internship at Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State.[8]

He received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Washington State University, with an emphasis in computer graphics and minors in mathematics and electrical engineering.[9][7] He then earned a master's degree and a doctorate in computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, focusing on the perception of motion and latency in VR.[9][2] His dissertation was approved in 2010 with Frederick P. Brooks Jr. as advisor, Mary C. Whitton and Bernard D. Adelstein as readers, and Stephen R. Ellis, Gary Bishop and Anselmo A. Lastra as committee members. Its acknowledgments describe eight years of doctoral work and list support from organizations including HRL Laboratories, the Naval Research Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center, the LINK Foundation, the North Carolina Space Grant and Digital ArtForms.[3]

Research

Latency and scene-motion perception

Jerald's doctoral research addressed a basic problem of head-tracked displays: when a system lags behind the user's head, scenes that should stay fixed in the world appear to move. His dissertation states that in HMDs, instability caused by latency is greater than all other causes of instability combined, and that it can lead to simulator sickness, degraded task performance and breaks in presence.[3] To study it he built a simulated HMD system with zero effective latency, using a projector, and then deliberately inserted scene motion to find how much could go unnoticed across five experiments. From this work he developed a mathematical model in which latency thresholds are an inverse function of peak head-yaw acceleration; his psychophysics experiments found that measured thresholds fit this inverse model better than a linear one.[3]

The dissertation reports that thresholds were greater when the scene moved with the direction of head yaw than against it, that thresholds rose with head motion, and that the minimum latency-difference threshold, for the most sensitive subjects, was 3.2 ms. From this he suggested that HMD latency requirements should be "in the 3 ms range", depending on conditions. He also noted implications for redirected walking: his results suggested that about twice as much scene motion can go unnoticed when it moves with a head turn as when it moves against it.[3]

Papers from this line of work include a 2007 SPIE paper on latency compensation by horizontal scanline selection for head-mounted displays,[10] a 2008 study of sensitivity to scene motion during different phases of head yaw,[11] and a 2009 IEEE VR paper with Mary Whitton that related scene-motion thresholds to latency thresholds. In that paper, measured latency thresholds for six subjects had points of subjective equality as low as 10 ms and just-noticeable differences as low as 3 ms.[12] A journal version with Whitton and Brooks appeared in ACM Transactions on Applied Perception in 2012.[13]

Other research

Jerald's earliest listed publication is "Eye gaze correction for videoconferencing", written with Mike Daily for the 2002 Eye Tracking Research and Applications symposium (ETRA).[14] The SIGGRAPH History Archives also list him as a contributor to the 2002 SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies exhibit "Physiological Reaction and Presence in Stressful Virtual Environments".[5] With Frank Steinicke and others he co-wrote 2008 papers on human sensitivity to redirected walking and on redirection techniques for passive haptic feedback.[15][16]

Later work with Regis Kopper and co-authors looked at simulator sickness and time perception. A 2018 IEEE VR paper by Zekun Cao, Jerald and Kopper studied reducing visually induced motion sickness with static and dynamic rest frames.[17] A 2023 IEEE VR workshop paper, with authors from UNC Greensboro and NextGen Interactions, compared a gas-monitoring training task using physical props and passive haptics with an all-virtual version and a real-world baseline; contrary to earlier reports of VR "time compression", the authors found a consistent time dilation effect in all conditions, including the real world.[18]

Career

Digital ArtForms

Jerald's dissertation thanks Paul Mlyniec and Digital ArtForms for "providing the final push to finish".[3] He and Arun Yoganandan presented iMedic, an immersive medical environment for distributed interactive consultation, at SIGGRAPH 2011 Real-Time Live!, an entry the SIGGRAPH archive's image caption credits to Digital ArtForms.[19][5] In the 2014 Voices of VR interview he described a study at Digital ArtForms that compared mouse and keyboard with one-handed and two-handed 3D interfaces; he said the two-handed interface was about 4.5 times as efficient for basic 3D tasks.[8] Author biographies from 2016 and 2017 list him as Chief Scientist at Digital ArtForms.[9][20]

NextGen Interactions

NextGen Interactions was founded in 2012, and NIST describes it as a VR consulting and contracting firm.[2] UXmatters gives Jerald's location as Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.[20] NIST's 2017 challenge page describes Jerald as the company's co-founder and principal consultant, and later NIST and AWE material lists him as CEO.[2][21][22]

At IEEE VR 2013 he organized the panel "The Future of Consumer Virtual Reality", whose speakers were Palmer Luckey of Oculus VR, Amir Rubin of Sixense, Sébastien Kuntz of i'm in VR, and David A. Smith of Lockheed Martin.[4] He was among the speakers announced for the first SVVR Conference and Expo in 2014.[23] In the Voices of VR interview he said he had given a copy of his dissertation to Oculus VR chief executive Brendan Iribe and that Oculus had taken an interest in his latency work; he also said he had been one of four chairs of that year's 3DUI contest and had put together a tutorial on using Unity for VR at IEEE VR. The episode description lists his consulting clients as including Oculus VR, Valve, Sixense Entertainment, NASA Ames Research Center, Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, the Naval Research Laboratory, HRL Laboratories, DARPA and NIH.[8] His 2016 author biography lists more than 60 VR-related projects with more than 30 organizations, naming Valve, Oculus, Virtuix, Sixense, NASA, General Motors, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin among them.[9] His biographies also state that his work has been featured on ABC's Shark Tank, on the Discovery Channel and in The New York Times.[9][22] In the 2014 interview he said he had built a game for the Virtuix Omni, part of which was shown on Shark Tank, with some elements such as blood effects removed for television.[8]

Looking back in the 2016 Tom's Hardware interview, Jerald recalled telling a chief executive around 2011 that head-mounted displays were not ready: "We can't even do this in a research lab, how are we supposed to do this in people's living rooms?" He added that it was not the research community but Palmer Luckey who brought VR back.[7]

He also contributed to Cure Fred, a VR experience shown in the SIGGRAPH 2015 VR Village, with Paul Mlyniec and others.[5]

Public safety projects

NextGen Interactions took first place, and a US$20,000 prize, in NIST's 2017 Virtual Public Safety Test Environment Challenge with FirstSimVR: Measuring Future Tools Using Today's VR; NIST lists Jerald, Nat Hoffmeier and Cullen Morris as the team.[6][2] NIST describes FirstSimVR as a reconfigurable VR platform for prototyping and evaluating future first-responder technologies, using physical spaces with low-fidelity furniture and obstacles matched to virtual maps, six tracked points per user (head, both hands, back and both feet) with the rest of the body estimated through inverse kinematics, one-to-one tracking, and a full-body avatar.[2]

In NIST's 2018 Virtual Reality Heads-Up-Display Navigation Challenge, team NextGen Interactions placed third with FireHUD, winning US$15,000.[24] NIST's team page says the company later received a multi-year NIST grant for simulating and evaluating future first-responder physical interfaces in VR, and describes RespondAR, a prototype augmented reality interface for delivering Internet of Things data to first responders, with an incident-command map and a heads-up display that shows prioritized alerts.[21] At AWE USA 2021 Jerald spoke on "Humans are Physical: VR Training with Real-World Props".[22]

Teaching and professional service

Biographies from 2016 and 2017 list Jerald as an adjunct visiting professor at the Waterford Institute of Technology and as coordinator of the Research Triangle Park VR Meetup, while NIST biographies from 2017 and 2018 list him as adjunct faculty at Duke University.[9][20][2][25] His biographies also state that he has served on ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE Virtual Reality and IEEE 3D user interface committees.[9]

The SIGGRAPH History Archives record him as Student Volunteers Chair for SIGGRAPH 2010, a Real-Time Live! program committee member in 2012 and 2015, and a Real-Time Live! jury member in 2017.[5] With Richard Marks he organized and presented the SIGGRAPH 2016 course "Human-Centered Design for VR Interactions", which covered human perception, adverse health effects, input device classes, reference frames, interaction patterns and an iterative define-make-learn design cycle.[26] He followed it with the SIGGRAPH 2017 course "VR Interactions" with Joseph J. LaViola and Richard Marks, and a tutorial on human-centered design for immersive interactions at IEEE VR 2017.[27][28] In 2018 he published two single-author articles in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, "A Taxonomy of Spatial Interaction Patterns and Techniques" and "Human-Centered VR Design: Five Essentials Every Engineer Needs to Know".[29][30]

The VR Book

The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality is number 8 in the ACM Books series, published by the Association for Computing Machinery with Morgan & Claypool. Library records give the first edition as 2016, with xxxiii + 599 pages and colour illustrations.[1] ODBMS.org's book listing gives a publication date of 4 November 2015 with a 2016 copyright, and lists PDF and hardcover editions.[9] The same listing says the book contains more than 600 applicable guidelines and over 300 additional references.[9]

According to the French site 3DVF, the book is organized in seven parts: Introduction and Background, Perception, Adverse Health Effects, Content Creation, Interaction, Iterative Design, and The Future Starts Now. 3DVF described its aim as covering what is needed to build VR applications that do not frustrate or nauseate users, for readers including managers, developers, artists, psychologists, engineers, students, teachers and user experience professionals.[31] Jerald describes the book's approach as human-centered design, "a design philosophy that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first", focusing on how users perceive and interact with VR, the causes of VR sickness, content creation and iterative design.[7] He told Tom's Hardware that it was written above all for content creators.[7]

Selected publications

Year Title Venue
2002 "Eye gaze correction for videoconferencing" (with Mike Daily) ETRA '02[14]
2007 "Latency compensation by horizontal scanline selection for head-mounted displays" (with A. Fuller, A. Lastra, M. Whitton, L. Kohli, F. Brooks) Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 6490[10]
2008 "Sensitivity to scene motion for phases of head yaws" (with T. Peck, F. Steinicke, M. Whitton) APGV 2008[11]
2009 "Relating Scene-Motion Thresholds to Latency Thresholds for Head-Mounted Displays" (with M. Whitton) IEEE Virtual Reality 2009[12]
2010 Scene-Motion- and Latency-Perception Thresholds for Head-Mounted Displays Doctoral dissertation, UNC Chapel Hill[3]
2012 "Scene-motion thresholds during head yaw for immersive virtual environments" (with M. Whitton, F. P. Brooks) ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, vol. 9, no. 1[13]
2016 The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality ACM Books #8[1]
2018 "A Taxonomy of Spatial Interaction Patterns and Techniques" IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 38, no. 1[29]
2018 "Human-Centered VR Design: Five Essentials Every Engineer Needs to Know" IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 38, no. 2[30]
2018 "Visually-Induced Motion Sickness Reduction via Static and Dynamic Rest Frames" (with Z. Cao, R. Kopper) IEEE VR 2018[17]
2023 "Does Adding Physical Realism to Virtual Reality Training Reduce Time Compression?" (with K. Lofca, D. Costa, R. Kopper) IEEE VRW 2023[18]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "The VR book: human-centered design for virtual reality". Tomas Bata University in Zlin Library catalog. https://vufind.katalog.k.utb.cz/Record/100334. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 "NextGen Interactions (FirstSimVR: Measuring Future Tools Using Today's VR)". National Institute of Standards and Technology, Public Safety Communications Research. 2017-08-24. https://www.nist.gov/communications-technology-laboratory-ctl/pscr/nextgen-interactions. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Jason J. Jerald (2010). "Scene-Motion- and Latency-Perception Thresholds for Head-Mounted Displays". Doctoral dissertation, Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (TR10-013). https://techreports.cs.unc.edu/papers/10-013.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "PN-002: The Future of Consumer Virtual Reality". IEEE Virtual Reality 2013. https://ieeevr.org/2013/consumer_vr.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 "Jason Jerald". ACM SIGGRAPH History Archives. ACM SIGGRAPH. https://history.siggraph.org/person/jason-jerald. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "2017 Virtual Public Safety Test Environment Challenge". National Institute of Standards and Technology, Public Safety Communications Research. 2017-08-09. https://www.nist.gov/node/1244821. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 Kevin Carbotte (2016-03-11). "VR Past, Present And Future: A Conversation With 'The VR Book' Author Jason Jerald". Tom's Hardware. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jason-jerald-vr-book-interview,31388.html. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Kent Bye (2014-05-18). "#4: Jason Jerald on VR latency, simulator sickness and presence, plus conference highlights from 3DUI, IEEE VR, Neurogaming and SIGGRAPH". Voices of VR. https://voicesofvr.com/jason-jerald-on-vr-latency-simulator-sickness-presence-conference-highlights-from-3dui-ieee-vr-neurogaming-siggraph/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 Roberto Zicari (2016-02-02). "The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality". ODBMS.org. https://www.odbms.org/?p=8307. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Jason Jerald, Andrew Fuller, Anselmo Lastra, Mary Whitton, Luv Kohli, Fred Brooks (2007-02-15). "Latency compensation by horizontal scanline selection for head-mounted displays". Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 6490, Stereoscopic Displays and Virtual Reality Systems XIV. SPIE. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.710749. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Jason Jerald, Tabitha Peck, Frank Steinicke, Mary Whitton (2008-08-09). "Sensitivity to scene motion for phases of head yaws". Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (APGV 2008). ACM. pp. 155-162. https://doi.org/10.1145/1394281.1394310. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Jason Jerald, Mary Whitton (2009-03). "Relating Scene-Motion Thresholds to Latency Thresholds for Head-Mounted Displays". 2009 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference. IEEE. pp. 211-218. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2009.4811025. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Jason Jerald, Mary Whitton, Frederick P. Brooks (2012-03). "Scene-motion thresholds during head yaw for immersive virtual environments". ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, vol. 9, no. 1. ACM. pp. 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1145/2134203.2134207. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Jason Jerald, Mike Daily (2002). "Eye gaze correction for videoconferencing". Proceedings of the Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA '02). ACM. pp. 77. https://doi.org/10.1145/507072.507088. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  15. ↑ Frank Steinicke, Gerd Bruder, Jason Jerald, Harald Frenz, Markus Lappe (2008-10-27). "Analyses of human sensitivity to redirected walking". Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST). ACM. pp. 149-156. https://doi.org/10.1145/1450579.1450611. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  16. ↑ Frank Steinicke, Gerd Bruder, Luv Kohli, Jason Jerald, Klaus Hinrichs (2008-09). "Taxonomy and Implementation of Redirection Techniques for Ubiquitous Passive Haptic Feedback". 2008 International Conference on Cyberworlds. IEEE. pp. 217-223. https://doi.org/10.1109/CW.2008.53. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Zekun Cao, Jason Jerald, Regis Kopper (2018-03). "Visually-Induced Motion Sickness Reduction via Static and Dynamic Rest Frames". 2018 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR). IEEE. pp. 105-112. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2018.8446210. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Kadir Lofca, Jason Jerald, Dalton Costa, Regis Kopper (2023-03). "Does Adding Physical Realism to Virtual Reality Training Reduce Time Compression?". 2023 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW). IEEE. pp. 61-66. https://doi.org/10.1109/VRW58643.2023.00017. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  19. ↑ Arun Yoganandan, Jason Jerald (2011-08-07). "iMedic". ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 Real-Time Live!. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2037957.2037962. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 "Jason Jerald". UXmatters. 2017-11. https://www.uxmatters.com/authors/archives/2017/11/jason_jerald.php. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 "Team NextGen Interactions". National Institute of Standards and Technology, Public Safety Communications Research. 2021-11-10. https://www.nist.gov/ctl/pscr/team-nextgen-interactions. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 "Jason Jerald". AWE USA 2021. https://awexr.com/usa-2021/speakers/2268. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  23. ↑ Paul James (2014-04-28). "The Faces of SVVR Conference & Expo 2014 - New Speakers and Panellists Announced!". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/faces-svvr-conference-expo-confirms-raft-new-speakers-panellists-exhibitors/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  24. ↑ "2018 Virtual Reality Heads-Up-Display Navigation Challenge". National Institute of Standards and Technology, Public Safety Communications Research. 2018-01-03. https://www.nist.gov/node/1305796. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  25. ↑ "NextGen Interactions (Virtual Reality Heads-Up Display)". National Institute of Standards and Technology, Public Safety Communications Research. 2018-07-10. https://www.nist.gov/node/1509556. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  26. ↑ "Human-Centered Design for VR Interactions". ACM SIGGRAPH History Archives. ACM SIGGRAPH. 2016. https://history.siggraph.org/?p=61153. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  27. ↑ Jason Jerald, Joseph J. LaViola, Richard Marks (2017-07-30). "VR interactions". ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Courses. ACM. pp. 1-105. https://doi.org/10.1145/3084873.3084900. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  28. ↑ Jason Jerald (2017). "Human-centered design for immersive interactions". 2017 IEEE Virtual Reality (VR). IEEE. pp. 431-432. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2017.7892361. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 Jason Jerald (2018-01). "A Taxonomy of Spatial Interaction Patterns and Techniques". IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 38, no. 1. IEEE. pp. 11-19. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2018.011461524. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 Jason Jerald (2018-03). "Human-Centered VR Design: Five Essentials Every Engineer Needs to Know". IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 38, no. 2. IEEE. pp. 15-21. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2018.021951628. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  31. ↑ "Livre : The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality". 3DVF. 2016-03-14. https://3dvf.com/actualite-16184-livre-the-vr-book-human-centered-design-for-virtual-reality-html/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
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