An Extensible Open Source Software Designed for Virtual Reality-Based Testing and Treatment of Vision Disorders

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies allow children to experience a multitude of environments and interactions; however, little is known regarding the extent to which moderate and sustained VR use impacts aspects of children’s physical and cognitive functioning. In the present research, we examine the extent to which 60-min VR play sessions over the course of 4 days impact 10- to 12-year-olds’ visual functioning (e.g., acuity, stereoacuity), visuomotor coordination (e.g., hand-eye coordination), postural stability, inhibitory control, and subjective visual and musculoskeletal discomfort (e.g., symptoms of visually-induced motion sickness). Measures of visual, physical, and cognitive functioning were administered before any VR use (day 1), after 4 days of daily VR use (day 4), and after a break from VR use (day 5). Results from this 5-day study demonstrate that moderate and daily VR usage did not negatively affect children’s visual, physical, and cognitive functioning. Overall, the present study provides novel insights into the growing body of evidence regarding the health and safety considerations surrounding VR use by children.

BackgroundAnti-modified protein antibodies (AMPA) are an important hallmark of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and the fact that they have consistently been found to develop years before disease onset, has provided important...

In order to determine the relationship between visual functions and neonatal cerebral ultrasound, neurological examinations and cognitive development, a prospective longitudinal study was conducted in 69 high-risk very-low-birthweight children. Visual development was studied at 1 and 2.6 years of corrected age by assessment of visual acuity, binocular visual fields, optokinetic nystagmus and strabismus. Visual impairments were found in 33% at age 1 and in 28% at age 2.6. Visual impairments were related to intraparenchymal damage, as detected by neonatal cerebral ultrasound, as well as to abnormal neurological examinations and lower mean developmental indices. A stepwise multiple regression analysis with neonatal cerebral ultrasound as the dependent variable and visual functions at ages 1 and 2.6 and neurological examinations at ages 1 and 2 as independent variables, however, demonstrated that standardized neurological examinations were better markers of neonatal cerebral damage than visual functions. In cognitive development at ages 1 and 2, the neurological examination at age 1 was the most important variable. In cognitive development at age 3.6, visual functions at age 2.6 were more important. Early visual impairments might thus influence later cognitive development. The effectiveness of appropriate early intervention strategies to stimulate visual and cognitive development in infants with less severe visual impairments should be subject to further study.

Worldwide, more than 80% of people with cancer will require surgery during their disease course, but less than 25% have access to safe, affordable and timely surgery. Among the barriers to increasing surgical capacity are the time and costs required to train novices. Virtual reality (VR) surgical simulations can reduce the time required for novices to reach surgical proficiency, though their costs may exceed USD $100,000. The goal of this study was to determine if a low-cost system, using commercially available technology designed for in-home computer gaming, could be used to create a realistic VR surgical oncology simulation. Standard commercially available VR software and Oculus Rift hardware have been used to provide high-quality visuals and believable surgeon hand interactions. Near identical VR reproduction of an operating room using 1:1 scale matching of real-world elements, including equipment, instruments, supplies and sounds, maintaining frame rate greater than 60 fps to maintain visual fidelity has been created. Internal anatomy was designed as VR replica of human female pelvic anatomy, including organs, veins and other vessels, peritoneum and connective tissue. Internal anatomy was designed to run at 120 fps and to allow for a realistic abdominal radical hysterectomy simulation. Surgical hands were modelled to scale for those with large and small hands. Multiple hand positions were simulated using Oculus touch hardware. Reconstructing the virtual environment to simulate reality as accurately as possible was done to immerse users in the simulator so that they focus on learning and practise without distractions. Training modules were co-designed by experts in learning sciences, human behaviour, VR and gynaecologic oncology. We have successfully created a low-cost VR simulation to help prepare novice surgeons to perform a radical abdominal hysterectomy surgery procedure. The simulation can be used with commercially available computer gaming hardware that currently costs less than USD $1,500. Low-cost VR simulation has the potential to reduce the time and cost to train surgeons to perform surgical oncology procedures, as well as both improve and audit quality. If effective in real-world clinical trials, such simulations have relevance to multiple surgical procedures and applicability in both resource-limited and high-income settings.

Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging technique that provides immersive experience for users. Due to the high computation cost of rendering real-time animation twice (for both eyes) and the resource limitation of wearable devices, VR applications often face performance bottlenecks and performanceoptimization plays an important role in VR software develop-ment. Performance optimizations of VR applications can be very different from those in traditional software as VR involves more elements such as graphics rendering and real-time animation. In this paper, we present the first empirical study on 183 real-world performance optimizations from 45 VR software projects. In particular, we manually categorized the optimizations in to 11 categories, and applied static analysis to identify how they affect different life-cycle phases of VR applications. Furthermore, we studied the complexity and design / behavior effects of performance optimizations, and how optimizations are different between large organizational software projects and smaller personal software projects. Our major findings include: (1) graphics simplification (24.0%), rendering optimization (16.9%), language / API optimization (15.3%), heap avoidance (14.8%), and valuecaching (12.0%) are the most common categories of performance optimization in VR applications; (2) game logic updates (30.4%) and before-scene initialization (20.0%) are the most common life-cycle phases affected by performance issues; (3) 45.9% of the optimizations have behavior and design effects and 39.3% of the optimizations are systematic changes; (4) the distributionsof optimization classes are very different between organizational VR projects and personal VR projects.

The ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST) has become one of the major scientific events in the area of Virtual Reality since its debut in 1994. VRST 2010, held during 22-24 November, 2010, is the seventeenth VRST conference. We are very pleased to have VRST 2010 return to Hong Kong (since 1996, 2002 and 2004). The VRST technical program consists of high quality technical papers that are carefully reviewed and selected by an International Program Committee. Each paper in the program was reviewed by three to four members of the committee. This year, we received a total of 103 submissions (71 full papers and 32 short papers) from 50 countries. The International Program Committee was made up of 60 experts and researchers in virtual reality and related areas. The committee accepted a total of 18 full papers (representing an acceptance rate of 25.3%). In addition, it also recommended accepting 15 short papers and 10 posters/demonstrations.

The early 20th century saw the coalescence of several representation technologies: moving-image photography, audio recording, stereoscopy, and color imaging. Many technologists, particularly filmmakers, imagined these technologies would one day provide an exact replica of the world as we experience it. This possibility was articulated in Henry Weinbaum’s 1932 short story Pygmalion’s Spectacles that accurately predicted later virtual reality (VR) headsets through his description of goggles that transport the user to another world. A few decades later, in the 1960s, Ivan Sutherland and Morton Heilig produced working head-mounted displays that immersed users in, albeit primitive, computer-generated environments. Experiments in the following decades provided numerous industrial applications from medical imaging and military training to flight simulation and automobile design. At the same time, this technology became more widely known in the public imagination through cyberpunk novels such as Neuromancer (1980) and feature films such as The Lawnmower Man (1992). Although VR was most closely associated with immersive headsets, other hardware such as CAVE displays produced VR environments. In 1987 John Larnier popularized the term “virtual reality” to best describe both the emerging hardware and wider assumptions around virtual world building. Widespread press and academic publications appeared throughout the late 1980s and 1990s as interest in this area grew. However, the 1980s/1990s VR boom never reached full public acceptance and experiments with this technology remained peripheral throughout the first decade and a half of the 21st century. This changed in 2016 when a range of consumer-ready headsets came to market, and new applications for VR as well as industrial and consumer markets sprung up. For the first time, 360-degree film and video became commonly available for consumer headsets and were categorized as a VR application. Since then, there has been renewed academic attention, leading to a range of publications that address current VR systems as well as their past manifestations and future possibilities. VR has such far-reaching applications that it is difficult to condense the wide variety of scholarship connected to this technology. Indeed, the study and application of VR systems crosses many subject disciplines, with VR emerging as a subdiscipline in numerous subjects such as computer engineering, creative and performing arts, architecture, cultural studies, and design. Nonetheless, certain themes have been repeated such as VR’s ability to transport users to different worlds and its interaction with other media formats. The focus here is not on the numerous technical articles and papers related to the particularities of VR hardware and software but rather the books, chapters, and articles that describe and interrogate the holistic function of VR, how VR has shifted over recent decades, and the social-cultural and philosophical debates that surround this technology.

Virtual reality (VR) is a valuable tool for the treatment and prevention of psychiatric disorders and dysfunctional behaviors. Although VR software is mainly developed following a disorder-specific approach, this randomized controlled trial (RCT) will test the efficacy of a new transdiagnostic VR application (H.O.M.E. VR-based psychological intervention) in improving dysfunctional behaviors, three transdiagnostic factors concurrently (emotion regulation, experiential avoidance, and psychological flexibility), and stress. Three groups screened as at-risk for nicotine dependence, alcohol abuse, and eating disorders will be assigned to the H.O.M.E. VR intervention and compared to a waiting-list (WL) condition. Participants will be assessed before and after the H.O.M.E. intervention/WL and at the 3- and 6-month follow-ups in the levels of the displayed dysfunctional behavior, the three transdiagnostic factors, and stress. Changes in dysfunctional behaviors, transdiagnostic factors, and stress in each population VR group and differences in such improvements between each population of the VR and WL groups will be evaluated using mixed-model repeated measure analyses of variance. It is expected that, after the H.O.M.E. intervention and at follow-ups, participants will display improvements in physical and psychological health compared to controls. The H.O.M.E. protocol is expected to result in a cost-effective option to tackle cognitive–behavioral factors shared among several psychopathologies and dysfunctional behaviors.

Taking virtual reality out of the game and into healthcare.

The immersive and interactive nature of virtual reality (VR) renders it a potential pedagogical approach for nursing education. A bottleneck for exploiting VR advantages has been the complexity of creating new experiences; however, recent advances with VR hardware and software enable novice users to create compelling experiences. A case study describes an undergraduate nursing student with minimal technical skills using off-the-shelf VR software to create a pain management VR experience. Using off-the-shelf hardware and software platforms eliminates the need to work with computer code. The team created a virtual environment and the objects in it through easy manipulation with click-and-drag techniques and by toggling simple settings. The insights gained from this case suggest nurse educators can create simple yet powerful VR experiences themselves, which can greatly enhance existing tools for nursing education. [J Nurs Educ. 2024;63(4):261-264.].

Vision researchers often rely on visual display technology to present observers with controlled stimuli, usually by means of a calibrated computer screen. Virtual Reality (VR) may allow a similar level of control, together with higher realism of the stimulation and a visual field larger than what is achievable on a standard computer monitor. To produce the desired luminance and color of the stimuli, accurate characterization of the spectral properties of the display is necessary. However, this process might not be trivial on VR displays, because 1) the Head Mounted Displays (HMD) used in VR are typically designed to be light-weight and low energy consuming, thus they might not meet some of the standard assumptions in display calibration, 2) the VR software might affect the color and luminance signal in a complex way, further complicating the calibration process. Here we show that 1) a common, off-the-shelf display used in our experiments behaves similarly to a standard OLED monitor, 2) the VR gaming engine we tested (Unreal Engine 4) introduces a complex behavior, 3) which can be disabled. This allows to accurately control colors and luminance emitted by the display, thus enabling its use for perceptual experiments.

Virtual Reality Approaches for Immersive Design

BackgroundEarly detection of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a transitional stage between normal aging and Alzheimer disease, is crucial for preventing the progression of dementia. Virtual reality (VR) biomarkers have proven to be effective in capturing behaviors associated with subtle deficits in instrumental activities of daily living, such as challenges in using a food-ordering kiosk, for early detection of MCI. On the other hand, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) biomarkers have demonstrated their efficacy in quantifying observable structural brain changes that can aid in early MCI detection. Nevertheless, the relationship between VR-derived and MRI biomarkers remains an open question. In this context, we explored the integration of VR-derived and MRI biomarkers to enhance early MCI detection through a multimodal learning approach.ObjectiveWe aimed to evaluate and compare the efficacy of VR-derived and MRI biomarkers in the classification of MCI while also examining the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Furthermore, we focused on improving early MCI detection by leveraging multimodal learning to integrate VR-derived and MRI biomarkers.MethodsThe study encompassed a total of 54 participants, comprising 22 (41%) healthy controls and 32 (59%) patients with MCI. Participants completed a virtual kiosk test to collect 4 VR-derived biomarkers (hand movement speed, scanpath length, time to completion, and the number of errors), and T1-weighted MRI scans were performed to collect 22 MRI biomarkers from both hemispheres. Analyses of covariance were used to compare these biomarkers between healthy controls and patients with MCI, with age considered as a covariate. Subsequently, the biomarkers that exhibited significant differences between the 2 groups were used to train and validate a multimodal learning model aimed at early screening for patients with MCI among healthy controls.ResultsThe support vector machine (SVM) using only VR-derived biomarkers achieved a sensitivity of 87.5% and specificity of 90%, whereas the MRI biomarkers showed a sensitivity of 90.9% and specificity of 71.4%. Moreover, a correlation analysis revealed a significant association between MRI-observed brain atrophy and impaired performance in instrumental activities of daily living in the VR environment. Notably, the integration of both VR-derived and MRI biomarkers into a multimodal SVM model yielded superior results compared to unimodal SVM models, achieving higher accuracy (94.4%), sensitivity (100%), specificity (90.9%), precision (87.5%), and F1-score (93.3%).ConclusionsThe results indicate that VR-derived biomarkers, characterized by their high specificity, can be valuable as a robust, early screening tool for MCI in a broader older adult population. On the other hand, MRI biomarkers, known for their high sensitivity, excel at confirming the presence of MCI. Moreover, the multimodal learning approach introduced in our study provides valuable insights into the improvement of early MCI detection by integrating a diverse set of biomarkers.

This work provides an immersive visualization of oil & gas relevant systems and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes at the nanoscale by coupling molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with gamming virtual reality (VR) technologies. The main objective is to understand oil/brine/rock interfaces at molecular level and identify the underlying EOR mechanisms at the atomic scale. Within this immersive experience, the user can directly interact and enhance its perception of atomic environment for EOR applications. The experiences cover nano-EOR, nano-IOR and low-salt processes at nanoscale based on MD calculations of nanoparticles at oil-brine interfaces, oil-brine at silica nanopores and calcite-brine-oil interfaces, respectively. The MD simulations are performed with the Lammps package. The visualizations were done with an HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets with the Nomad VR and Unitymol software. For the Nomad VR, the trajectories are previously saved from a Lammps molecular dynamics simulation, whereas, for the Unitymol, the simulation with Lammps is performed on-the-fly through the iMD (interactive MD) plugin. The user can visualize and navigate through the trajectories using the Nomad VR. Furthermore, the Unitymol also allows the user apply forces on selected molecules on real time during the VR experience. As means of comparison, the visualization was also performed with cell-phone based VR headsets with the Nomad VR application. Our demonstrations show that VR combined with molecular simulations can be an interesting and attractive way to improve the perception of the nanoscale for the general public. Additionally, it is an emergent tool to characterize, improve the understanding and provide molecular insights about nanosystems and the EOR methods, and also to be integrated with on-going digitalization processes within the oil & gas industry.

Post-stroke patients usually undergo therapy that focuses on general gross-motor movements such as walking, balancing, involving lower limbs; or general arm movements, leaving them with fine-dexterity and eye-hand coordination problems at their chronic stage. In this paper, we discuss the possibility to come up with assessment metrics for eye-hand coordination therapy, using a mapping between a robotic haptic device to a virtual environment and a training algorithm based on Complex Valued Neural Networks that will determine how close a determined movement pattern is in relationship with that traced by a healthy individual. Most of the current robotic systems' therapy relies on the patient's performance on standardized clinical tests such as the functional independence measure (FIM), motor power score, and the upper limb subsection of the Fugl-Meyer (FM) scales. These systems don't have other standardized metrics for assessment purposes. There is a need to establish a more intelligent and tailored therapy that could be implemented for patients to use at home in between therapy sessions, or in the long term. This therapy should be based on performance data gathered by the robotic/computer system that will provide an assessment procedure with improved objectivity and precision. This paper presents a preliminary design and simulation results of virtual environment tasks that interface with a haptic robotic device, as well as the training of a complex valued based neural network using patterns traced by healthy individuals. The idea is to use this trained algorithm, to identify in the future, how close the patients' fine motor movements are to the healthy subject's fine coordination movements; and determine a form of metrics that can be used for assessment and future therapy decisions.