Extended Sliding in Virtual Reality

Biophilic design aims to connect people to nature by incorporating natural elements such as plants in built environments. In immersive virtual reality (VR) environments, experiments have shown that, for instance, the presence of virtual plants in VR leads to higher cognitive performance and psychological well-being. However, it has not been investigated so far whether such effects extend to the performance of spatial interaction tasks such as path steering. In this paper, we explore the effects of the presence of virtual plants in an immersive virtual office environment on path steering performance in VR. For this purpose, we combined and replicated two previous studies in this field. The results of our study did not find an effect of the presence of virtual plants on steering time, as our participants performed all steering tasks in a similar amount of time in both biophilic and non-biophilic environments. We could, however, replicate one of the original studies on path steering in VR by Liu et al. and show that the steering time in our study also follows the extension of the steering law proposed in their work. Accordingly, we found not only a significant effect of the length (p<.001, effect size: partial eta squared =.93) and width (p<.001, effect size =.96) of the steering path, but also a significant effect of the path curvature (p=.003, effect size =.64) on the time needed for steering through the path. We also found significant effects of path latitude (p<.001, effect size =.57) and longitude (p=.01, effect size =.18) on steering time. Our findings challenge the previous research, which demonstrated the positive effects of biophilic design in VR on cognitive processes, and therefore, pave the path for future work to better understand the effects of biophilic design on users’ performance in VR.

Aims: Virtual reality (VR) is a new approach that gives users an immersive experience. VR applications frequently experience performance bottlenecks due to the high processing cost of displaying real-time animations multiple times (for both eyes) and the limited resources of wearable devices, performance optimization serves a significant part in VR application development. The goal of this paper is to investigate approaches and techniques available in Unity3D to improve the immersion of VR in virtual reality. This entails studying visuals and performance elements to design more fluid and engaging VR apps.&#x0D; Study Design: Quantitative analysis.&#x0D; Methodology: Systematic literature reviews, Consensus on the design space for VR-based education would greatly benefit future advances. To do this, we use a systematic mapping technique to the literature, extracting essential data from papers indexed in four academic online databases.&#x0D; Results: VR applications include extra aspects like graphics rendering and actual time animation, performance improvements for VR apps might differ significantly from those for standard software. Fully immersive virtual environments vary from standard virtual reality environments in that they can record entire body movements. This skill enables users to engage with other avatars, computer-controlled entities, and artifacts in the virtual world using their complete range of physical activities. VR performance optimization, in essence, relates to the methods, tactics, and procedures used to ensure that VR experiences function as smoothly as feasible.&#x0D; Conclusion: This optimization might be performed on different kinds of technology, particularly low-end devices, without sacrificing visual fidelity or immersive experience. VR is well-known for. It is critical to optimize visuals as well as performance in Unity3D VR apps to produce immersive and engaging experiences. Balancing great aesthetics with seamless performance necessitates a thorough grasp of Unity's features as well as a dedication to constant optimization.

Extended-Reality Technologies: An Overview of Emerging Applications in Medical Education and Clinical Care.

The effects of the presence of others during a rowing exercise in a virtual reality environment

Effects of line length, number of lines, line spacing, and font size on reading performance of Chinese text in virtual reality environment

Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging technology being utilized in educational and professional training in fields such as engineering, heavy industry, and the military. VR also has the potential to be utilized in pre-licensing nursing education; however, nursing programs have been slow to adopt VR as a simulation modality to train pre-licensed nurses in clinical skills. As such, there is a lack of research on the effectiveness of VR training in critical skills that nurses will utilize in clinical settings. This research is vital because utilizing VR as a training tool can reduce the time and cost of preparing nurses to enter clinical settings. This study examines the extent to which VR is effective in training nursing students in clinical skills via a randomized control design (post-test only). Data was collected from two cohorts of first-year nursing students who were randomly assigned to a VR intervention group (n = 41) or to a control group that did not have access to the VR platform (n = 42). Students in the intervention group accessed VR training for 20-minute sessions (over 1 week), at the end of which both the intervention and control group engaged in a live 30-minute simulation, assessed by the course instructor. The primary outcome is clinical skills, operationalized as performance on a live simulation (scored on a 36-point scale). Additionally, qualitative data were collected from the intervention group on how students felt about VR as an overall enhancement to their learning. Differences in performance scores were compared between the control and intervention groups as well as for subgroups by gender, race, and age. Additional analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between the intensity of VR use and performance outcomes. Findings suggest statistically significant differences by gender in the intervention group and a statistically significant relationship between intensity of VR use and performance outcomes, but not in the anticipated direction. Data from course evaluations indicated that students viewed VR as an enhancement to their learning, although in running a t-test, I found that the results were not statistically significant. Findings of the study provide insights into ways VR can be used within nursing education.

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.

ESRA19-0696 Non-pharmacological methods for comfort and pain management (virtual reality, musicotherapy, hypnosis,……)

How can we increase awareness and understanding of other cultures using interactive online digital visualizations of past civilizations? In order to answer the above question, this chapter first questions the success of current virtual environments and asks whether they are capable of producing a platform that supports the experience and understanding of place-inscribed culture. To answer this question, a typology of successful virtual environment applications is suggested. These include online communities, virtual realityVirtual environmentVirtual Reality (VR) travel websites, game engines, virtual reality used for training, and virtual reality used as part of therapeutic means to either relax or divert patients, or to cure phobiasPhobias. Impeding the success of virtual environments in terms of technological constraints, lack of evaluation techniques and results, and a lack of content-specific applications that best utilize desktop computing capabilities and respond to user needs. It suggests that much more work needs to be done on not just usable but also useful content. Specifically, there is a large gap in knowledge on what might constitute useful and appropriate virtual travel environments, and how contextual interaction may affect our cultural understanding in these environments.

This study proposes gaze-based hand interaction, which is helpful for improving the user’s immersion in the production process of virtual reality content for the mobile platform, and analyzes efficiency through an experiment using a questionnaire. First, three-dimensional interactive content is produced for use in the proposed interaction experiment while presenting an experiential environment that gives users a high sense of immersion in the mobile virtual reality environment. This is designed to induce the tension and concentration of users in line with the immersive virtual reality environment. Additionally, a hand interaction method based on gaze—which is mainly used for the entry of mobile virtual reality content—is proposed as a design method for immersive mobile virtual reality environment. The user satisfaction level of the immersive environment provided by the proposed gaze-based hand interaction is analyzed through experiments in comparison with the general method that uses gaze only. Furthermore, detailed analysis is conducted by dividing the effects of the proposed interaction method on user’s psychology into positive factors such as immersion and interest and negative factors such as virtual reality (VR) sickness and dizziness. In this process, a new direction is proposed for improving the immersion of users in the production of mobile platform virtual reality content.

Ultrasound mid-air haptic (UMH) devices are promising for tactile feedback in virtual reality (VR), as they do not require users to be tethered to, hold, or wear any device. This approach is less cumbersome, easy to set up, can simplify tracking, and leaves the hands free for concurrent interactions. This chapter explores work conducted at CNRS-IRISA dealing with the challenges arising from the integration of UMH interfaces in immersive VR through three main axes. These are discussed in the wider context of the state of the art on UMH for augmented and virtual reality, and illustrated through several VR use-cases. A first axis deals with device integration into the VR ecosystem. Interaction in immersive VR is based on the synergy between complex input devices allowing real-time tracking of the user and multimodal feedback devices delivering a coherent visual, auditory and haptic picture of a simulated virtual environment (VE). Using UMH in immersive VR therefore hinges on integrating UMH devices such that their operation does not interfere with other input and feedback devices. It is also critical to ensure that UMH feedback is adequately synchronized and co-located with respect to other stimuli, and delivered within a workspace that is compatible with that of VR interaction. Regarding this final point, we propose PUMAH, a robotic solution for increasing the usable workspace of UMH devices. The second and third axes, respectively, focus on stimulus perception and rendering of VE properties. Virtual object properties can be rendered in a variety of ways, through, e.g., amplitude modulation (AM) or spatiotemporal modulation (STM), with many parameters (modulation frequency, spatial sampling, etc.) coming into play, raising questions about the limits of the design space. To tackle this challenge, we begin by conducting psychophysical experimentation to understand the usable ranges for stimulus parameters and understand the perceptual implications of stimulus design choices. We propose an open-source software framework intended to facilitate UMH stimulus design and perceptual evaluation. These results in turn serve as the basis for the design and evaluation of rendering schemes for VR. Using amplitude variations along a focal point path in STM, we investigate the possibility of rendering geometric details and in a second step, sensations of stiffness in VR.

Most surveillance cameras have a wide-angle field of view and are situated unobtrusively at overhead positions. For this type of application, head pose estimation is very challenging because of the limitations of the quality and resolution of the incoming data. In addition, even though the absolute head pose is constant, the head pose in camera view changes depending upon the location of head with respect the camera. We present a solution to estimate absolute coarse head pose for wide-angle overhead cameras by integrating 3D head position and pose information. The work involves image-based learning, pose correction based on 3D position, and real-time multicamera integration of low-resolution imagery. The system can be applied to an active face catalogger to obtain the best view of the face for surveillance, to customer relationship management to record behavior in retail stores or to virtual reality as an input device.

A room-scale virtual reality (VR) configuration allows users to physically walk within an interactive area while reflecting their real-world motion in the virtual environment. Room-scale VR provides developers of serious games and virtual simulations the opportunity to develop more realistic applications that are highly interactive and engaging. Despite these benefits, room-scale VR hardware is generally more expensive due to motion tracking and headset costs, also requiring a potentially large open physical space for the player to walk around in. Here we provide a quantitative and qualitative comparison between the usability, performance, and engagement of traditional seated VR with a room-scale variation within the scope of a medical-based epidural preparation serious game. This is a first-step in examining the differences between the two configurations and determining whether the additional requirements and resources associated with a room-scale VR configuration are warranted. Although our quantitative results reveal limited differences, the room scale VR configuration led to higher immersion. Our qualitative results indicate that the hardware being used and the requirements imposed upon it by the desired fidelity of the simulation must be carefully considered; higher fidelity implies greater computational requirements that may not be readily available to the average computer user.

The Oil &amp; Gas industry has seen increasing costs of finding and extracting hydrocarbons, especially in remote locations, ultra-deep water reservoirs (400 m or deeper) or in hostile environments. Those new exploration frontiers have been increasing the production complexity and logistic costs. In such conditions, oil exploration feasibility depends on new technologies to optimize production efficiency. One possible solution to this challenge is to increase the degree of automation in production units. New design concepts also consider the use of robotic devices in such scenarios. In this paper we present a robotics framework, SimUEP-Robotics (Robotics Simulator for Stationary Production Units - Unidades Estacionárias de Produção or UEPs, in Portuguese), aimed to enable planning the offshore platform robotizing using virtual reality techniques. The SimUEP-Robotics is based on ROS (Robot Operating System), a middleware for exchanging messages between different devices and processes that cooperate to accomplish a robotics task. SimUEP-Robotics is designed concerning the offshore requirements and is a flexible framework that allows the inclusion of new robots and devices in a virtual operation scenario. This capability enables the robotization and automation of offshore facilities that gradually evolve, starting from a complete virtual scenario towards a complete robotic system operating on a real platform, progressively including real devices. SimUEP-Robotics has an integrated Virtual Reality Engine (VR-Engine) specially tailored to provide realistic visualization of large offshore scene models in an immersive environment. The monitoring and management of remote operations of Stationary Production Units (SPU) is an activity that can also benefit by the usage of virtual reality scenarios due to the potential to reduce the complexity and difficulty in visualizing and validating simulations of operations performed by robots on a real SPU. The framework supports simultaneous simulation of multiple robots equipped with sensors and actuators like cameras, laser range finders and robotic manipulators. SimUEP-Robotics has also some specialized visualization tools like trajectory visualizer, ghostview robot animation, point-to-point measurement and a scenario editor that allows the user customize the target scenario accordingly. Through the use of those visualization tools it is possible, for example, to better understand the quality of the planned robot trajectory and propose new algorithms that can be further evaluated in the virtual environment. In conclusion, we argue that the validation process in an immersive virtual environment reduces risks and costs of real operation tests scenarios. SimUEP-Robotics has also an integrated Robotics-Simulator which is responsible for taking care of task planning and execution based on the information of the virtual scenario provided by the VR-Engine. To illustrate the effectiveness of the framework, different robotics applications were developed. One is an underwater application that calculates the whole dynamics of an operated ROV to simulate and test complex ROV operations in deep waters, like the connection of a flowline to a Christmas tree. The other one represents a topside offshore platform scenario where different virtual robots, derived from real mechanisms like Motoman DIA10, Puma 560, Seekur and others, operates. Results obtained on a pick and place task demonstrate the benefits of the proposed robotics framework for offshore applications.

Gamepads and 3D controllers are the main controllers used in most Virtual Environments. Despite being simple to use, these input devices have a number of limitations as fixed layout and difficulty to remember the mapping between buttons and functions. Mobile devices present interesting characteristics that might be valuable in immersive environments: more flexible interfaces, touchscreen combined with onboard sensors that allow new interaction and easy acceptance since these devices are used daily by most users. The work described in this article proposes a solution that uses mobile devices to interact with Immersive Virtual Environments for selection and navigation tasks. The proposed solution uses the mobile device camera to track the Head-Mounted-Display position and present a virtual representation of the mobile device screen; it was tested using an Immersive Virtual Museum as use case. Based on this prototype, a study was performed to compare controller based and mobile based interaction for navigation and selection showing that using mobile devices is viable in this context and offers interesting interaction opportunities.