Develop your business with Virtual reality organization

Driven by recent advances in the mobile computing hardware ecosystem, wearable Virtual Reality (VR) is experiencing a boom in popularity, with many offerings becoming available. Modern VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) fall into two device classes: (i) Tethered HMDs: HMDs tethered to powerful, expensive gaming desktops, such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Sony PlayStation VR; (ii) Mobile-rendered HMDs: self-contained, untethered HMDs that run on mobile phones slotted into head mounts, e.g., Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR.

Vision in real environments stabilizes balance compared to an eyes-closed condition. For virtual reality to be safe and fully effective in applications such as physical rehabilitation, vision in virtual reality should stabilize balance as much as vision in the real world. Older virtual reality technology was previously found to stabilize balance but by less than half as much as real-world vision. Recent advancements in display technology might allow for vision in virtual reality to be as stabilizing as vision in the real world. This study evaluated whether viewing a virtual environment through the HTC Vive—a new consumer-grade head-mounted display—stabilizes balance, and whether visual stabilization is similar to that provided by real-world vision. Participants viewed the real laboratory or a virtual replica of the laboratory and attempted to maintain an unstable stance with eyes open or closed while standing at one of two viewing distances. Vision was significantly stabilizing in all conditions, but the virtual environment provided less visual stabilization than did the real environment. Regardless of the environment, near viewing led to greater visual stabilization than did far viewing. The smaller stabilizing influence of viewing a virtual compared to real environment might lead to greater risk of falls in virtual reality and smaller gains in physical rehabilitation using virtual reality.

Commercial virtual reality (VR) systems have become increasingly popular, affordable, and accessible in recent years. Resultantly, recreational activities involving VR are providing new ways to engage in leisure experiences and innovative treatments in the health care arena. Little is known, however, regarding the usability of commercial VR systems for recreational therapists and their clients. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the usability of a popular commercial VR system, the HTC Vive, in terms of its potential use in recreational therapy practice. Using a cross-sectional design, data were collected from recreational therapy professionals (N = 8) working in diverse service settings. Following exposure to the HTC Vive equipment through a professional workshop that included didactic instruction and clinical role-play activities, participants evaluated the system’s usability for themselves as well as for the clients they serve. Data collected through both an online survey and a focus group discussion revealed strong agreement from the therapists that the HTC Vive is a usable commercial VR system for themselves as well as their clients. Specific comments related to the head-mounted display (HMD), controllers, sensors/base stations, positioning, and Steam software provide valuable insights on features viewed positively, possible adaptations for specific client groups, and unique considerations by service setting.

Virtual Reality (VR) applications are now widely applied in various scenarios and areas, such as tourism, education, manufacturing, and digital entertainment. Although there many different VR devices and platforms, e.g., HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and PS VR, the mobile VR based on smartphones and low-priced VR goggles are still the most popular VR platform for VR games and videos. However, many fundamental interaction techniques in mobile VR environment are still quite challenging. In this paper, we design and evaluate the usability of 3D selection technique in mobile VR environments. We evaluate the user performance on a selection task with different navigation speed settings and operation modes, and we then proposed a selection task performance model for 3D user interfaces in mobile VR environments based on Fitts' Law. The model indicates that the target distance from the 3D viewpoint has the most significant influence on selection time.

Virtual reality is rapidly expanding its capabilities and accessibility to consumers. The application of virtual reality in training for precision tasks has been limited to specialized equipment such as a haptic glove or a haptic stylus, but not studied for handheld controllers in consumer-grade systems such as the HTC Vive. A straight-line precision steadiness task was adopted in virtual reality to emulate basic linear movements in industrial operations and disability rehabilitation. This study collected the total time and the error time for the straight-line task in both virtual reality and a physical control experiment for 48 participants. The task was performed at four different gap widths, 4mm, 5mm, 6mm, and 7mm, to see the effects of virtual reality at different levels of precision. Average error ratios were then calculated and analyzed for strong associations to various factors. The results indicated that a combination of Environment x Gap Width factors significantly affected average error ratios, with a p-value of 0.000. This human factors study also collected participants’ ratings of user experience dimensions, such as difficulty, comfort, strain, reliability, and effectiveness, for both physical and virtual environments in a questionnaire. The results indicate that the ratings for difficulty, reliability, and effectiveness were significantly different, with virtual reality rating consistently rating worse than the physical environment. An analysis of questionnaire responses indicates a significant association of overall environment preference (physical or virtual) with performance data, with a p-value of 0.027. In general, virtual reality yielded higher error among participants. As the difficulty of the task increased, the performance in virtual reality degraded significantly. Virtual reality has great potential for a variety of precision applications, but the technology in consumer-grade hardware must improve significantly to enable these applications. Virtual reality is difficult to implement without previous experience or specialized knowledge in programming, which makes the technology currently inaccessible for many people. Future work is needed to investigate a larger variety of precision tasks and movements to expand the body of knowledge of virtual reality applications for training purposes.

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.

The computers nowadays are powerful enough to make the virtual reality technology more practical. Virtual reality is expected to have a bright future due to the rise of several virtual reality head mounted device such as low cost Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR, Oculus, HTC Vive and many others. Since virtual reality had been growing fast in this few years thus it is necessary to explore new approaches for user to interact with the virtual reality more naturally. It is an important research in HCI to make the interactions with computers to be as natural as the interaction between humans. One of the approaches is to allow user to interact with the virtual reality through gesture and speech input. This paper presents a virtual reality environment with multimodal interaction technique. It allows user to interact with the virtual reality system with the static and stroke hand gesture along with speech. This multimodal interaction technique is able to perform few functions such as select, move, scale, rotate, copy, mirror, delete, check the shape, check and change the colour of an object.

The recent development of virtual reality (VR) devices such as head mounted displays (HMDs) increases opportunities for applications at the confluence of physical activity and gaming. Recently, the fields of sport and fitness have turned to VR, including for locomotor activities, to enhance motor and energetic resources, as well as motivation and adherence. For example, VR can provide visual feedbacks during treadmill running, thereby reducing monotony and increasing the feeling of movement and engagement with the activity. However, the relevance of using VR tools during locomotion depends on the ability of these systems to provide natural immersive feelings, specifically a coherent perception of speed. The objective of this study is to estimate the error between actual and perceived locomotor speed in VE using an enactive approach, i.e. allowing an active control of the environment. Sixteen healthy individuals participated in the experiment, which consisted in walking and running on a motorized treadmill at speeds ranging from 3 to 11 km/h with 0.5 km/h increments, in a randomized order while wearing a HMD device (HTC Vive) displaying a virtual racetrack. Participants were instructed to match VE speed with what they perceived was their ac-tuallocomotion speed (LS), using a handheld Vive controller. They were able to modify the optic flow speed (OFS) with a 0.02 km/h increment/decrement accuracy. An optic flow multiplier (OFM) was computed based on the error between OFS and LS. It represents the gain that exists between the visually perceived speed and the real locomotion speed experienced by participants for each trial. For all conditions, the average of OFM was $1.00\pm.25$ to best match LS. This finding is at odds with previous works reporting an underestimation of speed perception in VR. It could be explained by the use of an enactive approach allowing an active and accurate matching of visually and proprioceptively perceived speeds by participants. But above all, our study showed that the perception of speed in VR is strongly individual, with some participants always overestimating and others constantly underestimating. Therefore, a general OFM should not be used to correct speed in VE to ensure congruence in speed perception, and we propose the use of individual models as recommendations for setting up locomotion-based VR applications.

Virtual reality (VR) systems can offer benefits of improved ergonomics, but their resolution may currently be limited for the detection of small features. For detection of lung nodules, we compared the performance of VR versus standard picture archiving and communication system (PACS) monitor. Four radiologists and 1 novice radiologist reviewed axial computed tomography (CTs) of the thorax using standard PACS monitors (SM) and a VR system (HTC Vive, HTC). In this study, 3 radiologists evaluated axial lung-window CT images of a Lungman phantom. One radiologist and the novice radiologist reviewed axial lung-window patient CT thoracic images (32 patients). This HIPAA-compliant study was approved by the institutional review board. Detection of 227 lung nodules on patient CTs did not result in different sensitivity with SM compared with VR. Detection of 23 simulated Lungman phantom lung nodules on CT with SM resulted in statistically greater sensitivity (78.3%) than with VR (52.2%, P = .041) for 1 of 3 radiologists. The trend was similar but not significant for the other radiologists. There was no significant difference in the time spent by readers reviewing CT images with VR versus SM. These findings indicate that performance of a commercially available VR system for detection of lung nodules may be similar to traditional radiology monitors for assessment of small lung nodules on CTs of the thorax for most radiologists. These results, along with the potential of improving ergonomics for radiologists, are promising for the future development of VR in diagnostic radiology.

An increasing number of consumer-oriented head-mounted displays (HMD) for augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) are capable of finger and hand tracking. We report on the accuracy of off-the-shelf VR and AR HMDs when used for touch-based tasks such as pointing or drawing. Specifically, we report on the finger tracking accuracy of the VR head-mounted displays Oculus Quest, Vive Pro and the Leap Motion controller, when attached to a VR HMD, as well as the finger tracking accuracy of the AR head-mounted displays Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap. We present the results of two experiments in which we compare the accuracy for absolute and relative pointing tasks using both human participants and a robot. The results suggest that HTC Vive has a lower spatial accuracy than the Oculus Quest and Leap Motion and that the Microsoft HoloLens 2 provides higher spatial accuracy than Magic Leap One. These findings can serve as decision support for researchers and practitioners in choosing which systems to use in the future.

The aim of this study is to focus on the concept and realization of Glide VR, an application to be developed as an ‘Education and Exploration VR’ in the domain of Aero Dynamics & Flight Simulator. Using modern Interfacing Technology like Oculus Quest 2 & HTC Vive along with high computer device using RTX GPU NVIDIA, Glide VR has the capabilities to deliver real-time VR simulations with dynamic interaction with the environment. Developed using Unity 3D game engine for implementation and Blender for asset creation with cloud technologies for real-time data management. It features real-time flight dynamics, cross-platform compatibility and cloud-based working. This paper aims to discuss the main idea of the application, its structure, its effectiveness in engaging the user and achieving learning outcomes as well as the possibility to radically change the methodical approaches to learning by involving the actual practice along with the theory. Thus, the iterative design and testing of Glide VR reveal positive enhancement in learning effectiveness, interaction, and feasibilities to enhance immersive learning systems.

AimsThe HTC VIVE virtual reality (VR) system is a potential tool for collecting kinematic data during inpatient and outpatient physical therapy (PT). When validated against research-grade systems, the VIVE has a reported translational error between 1.7 mm–2.0 cm. Our purpose was to portabilize the VIVE for room to room PT and validate the motion tracking software.MethodsThe VIVE was configured on a mobile cart. To validate the motion tracking software, the VIVE sensors (motion tracker, controller, headset) were mounted on a rigid linear track and driven through 10, one-meter translations in the X, Y, and Z axes.ResultsThe mean translational error for all three sensors was below 4.9 cm. While error is greater than that reported for research-grade systems, motion tracking software on the portable VIVE unit appears to be a valid means of tracking aggregate movement.ConclusionSome therapy may require more precise measurements, however, the advantages of portability and accessibility to patients may outweigh the limitation of reduced precision.

In virtual reality, due to factors such as light sources and surface materials of objects, the details of the scene exhibit extremely complex changes, making it difficult to capture environmental modeling relationships and reducing the quality of scene details. Therefore, a VR scene detail enhancement method based on deep reinforcement learning algorithm is proposed. Using the Total Variation (TV) denoising algorithm to decompose the VR scene, the VR scene is divided into two parts: noisy and non-noisy, to complete the noise removal. Based on the denoised VR scene, a Hessian matrix is constructed to extract VR scene features using the SURF algorithm. Using deep reinforcement learning algorithms to train and process the extracted VR visual features, introducing meta-learning within the gradient descent method, updating the parameters of the deep reinforcement learning Expose framework, and accelerating the training speed of the deep reinforcement learning Expose framework. By designing L1 loss, structural similarity loss, content perception loss, and sharpness loss functions, the enhancement effect of VR visual details can be improved. The experimental results show that the proposed method enhances the gray-scale values and distribution of VR scene detail images to be higher and more uniform. When the magnification is different, the studied method can effectively enhance the signal-to-noise ratio of VR scenes. Therefore, it indicates that the VR scene detail enhancement effect of the method proposed in this article is good.

Taking virtual reality out of the game and into healthcare.

Phobias are characterized as the excessive or irrational fear of an object or situation, and specific phobias affect about 10% of the world population. Blood-injection-injury phobia is a specific phobia that has a unique physical response to phobic stimuli, that is, a vasovagal syncope that causes the person to faint. Phobos is a serious game intended for blood phobia treatment that was created to be played in virtual reality with an HTC Vive that has photorealistic graphics to provide a greater immersion. We also developed a console application in C# for electrocardiography sensor connectivity and data acquisition, which gathers a 1 min baseline reading and then has continuous data acquisition during gameplay. Usability tests were conducted with self-reported questionnaires and with a case study population of 10 testers, which gave insight into the previous game experience of the tester for both digital games and virtual reality games, evaluating the discomfort for hardware on both the sensor and the virtual reality headset, as well as the game regarding usability, user experience, level of immersion, and the existence of motion sickness and its source. The results corroborate that the immersion of the game is good, which suggests that it will help with triggering the phobia.