Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2011) - Index

Human-computer interaction for virtual-real fusion

Immersive environments have brought a great transformation in human–computer interaction by enabling realistic and interactive experiences within simulated or augmented spaces. In these immersive environments, virtual assets such as custom avatars, digital artwork, and virtual real estate play an important role, often holding a substantial value in both virtual and real worlds. However, this value also makes them attractive to fraudulent activities. As a result, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of virtual assets is of concern. This study proposes a cryptographic solution that leverages digital signatures and hash algorithms to secure virtual assets in immersive environments. The system employs RSA-2048 for signing and SHA-256 hashing for binding the digital signature to the asset’s data to prevent tampering and forgery. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that the signing process operates with remarkable efficiency; over ten trials, the signing time averaged 17.3 ms, with a narrow range of 16–19 ms and a standard deviation of 1.1 ms. Verification times were near-instantaneous (0–1 ms), ensuring real-time responsiveness. Moreover, the signing process incurred a minimal memory footprint of approximately 4 KB, highlighting the system’s suitability for resource-constrained VR applications. Simulations of tampering and forgery attacks further validated the system’s capability to detect unauthorized modifications, with a 100% detection rate observed across multiple trials. While the system currently employs RSA, which may be vulnerable to quantum computing in the future, its modular design ensures crypto-agility, allowing for the integration of quantum-resistant algorithms as needed. This work not only addresses immediate security challenges in immersive environments but also lays the groundwork for broader applications, including regulatory compliance for financial virtual assets.

Museums and the Web is an annual conference sponsored by Archives and Museum Informatics.The 99 conference provided us with an opportunity to reflect on how museums are being transformed by the Web as well as to understand the challenges that they are being presented with by the demand for parallel virtual programming

3D multi-user virtual environments (MUVE) bring new opportunities to foreign language teaching and learning as a platform for teaching practices. Due to immersive and interactive nature of 3D MUVE, these tools have gained popularity in the field of foreign language learning and teaching. The power of virtual learning environments lies in creating immersive 3-D spaces that give users a sense of learning by doing. Moreover, the environment is interactive and is much the same as real world interaction. MUVE provides strong support for synchronous collaborations, interactions, and immersive environments for experiential and constructivist learning settings. Some key features of the virtual worlds comprise the ability to construct 3D environments that simulate real world situations, as well as the ability to have a virtual identity to create a cross-cultural self and the ability to have participants from around the world acting virtually in designated roles that convey new types of learning within this environment.

With the rapid development of society, humans tend to live in an individualistic manner, with less connection to reality, and electronic devices have become necessities. Human entertainment methods are inseparable from the virtual world, and the development of human-computer interaction in the entertainment industry is imminent. However, technology, humanities, and other aspects still face many obstacles and challenges, as well as negative impacts such as privacy leaks, cyberbullying, and information overload from virtual network identities. This article analyzes the technical limitations, social and cultural constraints, and issues of connection between the virtual and real worlds that human-computer interaction faces in this field. Based on the analysis above, it is suggested that human-computer interaction technology should pay more attention to user experience, co-creation of content, personalized services, and user stickiness to meet challenges and fully utilize future opportunities. In the future, human-computer interaction technology will become more intelligent personalized, and people-centered to address the ever-evolving needs of users, providing safe, fun, and interactive entertainment experiences.

Technology has revolutionized the practice of medicine. X-rays were the gold standard of imaging for many decades, but in recent years 3D imaging technology has been developed to represent the exact anatomic, pathologic disease processes. In medical practice, 3D images can be obtained by a variety of methodologies, including 3D laser scanning, computerized tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Since 3D imaging technologies have been incorporated into the health field, it has made tremendous advancements in all aspects of medicine, including orthopedic surgery, neurovascular surgery, forensic pathology, pathology, and dentistry. 3D imaging can be used not only for diagnostic services but also as treatment modalities. In addition, 3D imaging has also made an impact on medical and allied health education. From the 3D scanners used to produce an optimal reconstruction of surgical pathology specimens to the fluoroscopic 3D imaging used to aid orthopedic surgeons in surgery strategies, the purpose of this review is to explore the current literature to illustrate the impact of 3D imaging on medical practice and to also discuss future applications.

Virtual reality (VR) is one of the building information modeling (BIM) use cases that can benefit a project from the early stages of design to the construction and operation phases. VR enables designers, contractors, and owners to experience interacting with a facility before it is constructed. Currently, interaction with VR environments takes place through controllers. The equipment helps users to navigate virtual facilities and interact with the surrounding objects. Although controllers address the need for creating an interactive virtual environment, they make the experience less realistic, since real-life interactions take place through body movements, not by/through pressing buttons. This paper reports a project in which vision-based artificial intelligence (AI) technology is used to create a contactless connection between users and virtual environments. In this project, a series of body movements and gestures are mapped to the input commands of a BIM-based VR software. The paper overviews the state of the art in remote human-computer interaction (HCI) technologies and discusses both the potential and challenges of applying HCI technologies to immersive VR environments. It then introduces the architecture of the developed, contactless virtual environment and reports a case study of using this technology in an immersive setting.

With the rapid advancement of virtual reality technologies, understanding how human-computer interaction (HCI) affects user performance and experience has become increasingly important. This study systematically explores the impact of human-computer interaction technology in virtual reality (VR) environments on user experience. Forty-five participants conducted virtual navigation experiments, object recognition and selection tasks, and information search tasks. By analyzing statistics of eye moving–related data and subjective questionnaires from the three experiments, the study clearly indicated that different human-computer interaction patterns had a significant impact on users' task efficiency, visual cognitive load, and depth of information processing. Based on the results of the experiments, this paper presents three optimization schemes, providing specific and feasible references for future design and research in VR human-computer interaction. These findings offer valuable insights for enhancing interactive system design and promoting more effective user engagement in immersive environments. Beyond immediate design implications, the study also contributes to a broader understanding of user cognition and behavior in virtual contexts, laying the groundwork for future interdisciplinary research in education, healthcare, entertainment, and beyond.

Virtual world and other 3D Web content has been treated as a separate domain from the traditional 2D Web, but is increasingly being integrated with broader web content. However, search engines do not have the ability to crawl virtual world content directly, making it difficult for users to find relevant content. We present an intelligent agent crawler designed to collect user-generated content in the Second Life and related virtual worlds. The agents navigate autonomously through the world to discover regions, parcels of land within regions, user-created objects, and other users. The agents also interact with objects through movement or ‘touch’ to trigger scripts that present dynamic content in the form of note cards, chat text, landmark links, and web URLs. The collection service includes a focused HTML crawler for collecting linked web content. The experiments we performed are the first which focus on the content of a large virtual world. Our results show that virtual worlds can be effectively crawled using autonomous agent crawlers that emulate normal user behavior. Additionally, we find that the collection of interactive content enhances our ability to identify dynamic, immersive environments within the world.

Immersive environments such as virtual worlds and virtual reality platforms are being increasingly used for educational purposes. Possibilities of these environments are huge, but also are the technical challenges that have to be overcome in order for these platforms to become more usable. One of the main problems that educators have to face when designing an educational experience for virtual worlds has to do with the orchestration of the learning sequence. In this paper, we present a novel approach to support the deployment and execution of Units of Learning (UoLs), described with an Educational Modeling Language such as IMS-LD [1], into a virtual world, with the aim to facilitate the creation of well defined learning sequences for these platforms.

A virtual world is a computer-based simulated environment, usually modeled after the real world, accessed through an online interface, and inhabited by users in the form of avatars. The purpose of this chapter is to explore how these interactive, immersive environments are being used by a variety of organizations. Although various kinds of virtual worlds are introduced, this chapter focuses on the interactive 3-D virtual world of Second Life, describing its demographics and its features. Ways in which Second Life has been used by businesses, educational organizations, and political entities are then discussed. Legal issues associated with virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular are raised. The chapter concludes with some ways this technology is expected to evolve in the future.

Virtual worlds (VWs) offer alternative learning environments for geoscience education and give students a feeling of “being there.” In fact, VWs are also immersive environments that enable situated learning and constructivist learning in accordance with the Vygotsky theory, because the learner is inside an “imaginary” world context. In this environment, many activities and experiences can take place as scaffolding, cooperative learning, peer-to-peer and peer evaluation, coaching, scientific inquiry. Therefore, VWs can be a new technology to motivate students and provide the educational opportunities to learn in a socially interactive learning community. In the literature already, some studies report experiences carried out to investigate the effectiveness of virtual worlds in education. In the world, there are virtual worlds used for education such as Opensim and Samsara. Minecraft (https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/) is a virtual world used by new generations specially.

BackgroundSince their inception, virtual patients have provided health care educators with a way to engage learners in an experience simulating the clinician’s environment without danger to learners and patients. This has led this learning modality to be accepted as an essential component of medical education. With the advent of the visually and audio-rich 3-dimensional multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), a new deployment platform has emerged for educational content. Immersive, highly interactive, multimedia-rich, MUVEs that seamlessly foster collaboration provide a new hotbed for the deployment of medical education content.ObjectiveThis work aims to assess the suitability of the Second Life MUVE as a virtual patient deployment platform for undergraduate dental education, and to explore the requirements and specifications needed to meaningfully repurpose Web-based virtual patients in MUVEs.MethodsThrough the scripting capabilities and available art assets in Second Life, we repurposed an existing Web-based periodontology virtual patient into Second Life. Through a series of point-and-click interactions and multiple-choice queries, the user experienced a specific periodontology case and was asked to provide the optimal responses for each of the challenges of the case. A focus group of 9 undergraduate dentistry students experienced both the Web-based and the Second Life version of this virtual patient. The group convened 3 times and discussed relevant issues such as the group’s computer literacy, the assessment of Second Life as a virtual patient deployment platform, and compared the Web-based and MUVE-deployed virtual patients.ResultsA comparison between the Web-based and the Second Life virtual patient revealed the inherent advantages of the more experiential and immersive Second Life virtual environment. However, several challenges for the successful repurposing of virtual patients from the Web to the MUVE were identified. The identified challenges for repurposing of Web virtual patients to the MUVE platform from the focus group study were (1) increased case complexity to facilitate the user’s gaming preconception in a MUVE, (2) necessity to decrease textual narration and provide the pertinent information in a more immersive sensory way, and (3) requirement to allow the user to actuate the solutions of problems instead of describing them through narration.ConclusionsFor a successful systematic repurposing effort of virtual patients to MUVEs such as Second Life, the best practices of experiential and immersive game design should be organically incorporated in the repurposing workflow (automated or not). These findings are pivotal in an era in which open educational content is transferred to and shared among users, learners, and educators of various open repositories/environments.

In a world that is highly dependent on digital connectivity, technology use is becoming unavoidable, intense, and possibly harmful. The pervasiveness of technology which has been in tandem with the increasing number of reported cases of harmful usage styles, with some exhibiting symptoms of behavioural addiction, raised concerns around users’ psychological health and well-being. Digital Wellbeing is a new facet of human well-being that has recently emerged. While the term is yet to have a commonly agreed definition, it typically denotes a technology that promotes positivity, personal growth, and a usage that is balanced and healthy. In this paper, we aim to examine the extent, range, and nature of Digital Wellbeing research activity in human-computer interaction- (HCI-) related literature. We conducted a scoping review analysing 87 articles that researched Digital Wellbeing and its interrelation with technology design. Our analysis identified different meanings and constructs of the Digital Wellbeing concept, research trends, and a gap related to incorporating it in the design process. Accordingly, we recommend that an agreed-on definition for Digital Wellbeing and validated tools and frameworks are needed to ensure its integration in the digital design process. We also recommend that a wider research direction for HCI researchers and practitioners interested in Digital Wellbeing is needed to include the role of designers and societal institutions in the digital design process to ensure a design that is inclusive and well-being sensitive.

Interacting with the Web of Things