Performance of Redirected Walking Algorithms in a Constrained Virtual World

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.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) has historically addressed the interaction of people with computer controlled physical worlds. More recently, there has been interest in their virtual counterparts, such as SecondLife in which humanoid avatars interact with each other and their worlds in ways that are analogous to our relationship with the physical world. Virtual and physical worlds can have complex relationships ranging from either each augmenting the other, to the provision of services, such as eLearning. Virtual-Reality extends eLearning environments (eg regular audio, video, and text,) by enabling abstract concepts and entities to be given tangible forms within the virtual world. Also, students and teachers take the form of avatars allowing them to employ avatars to establish their social presence in a wide variety of ways. This paper introduces two popular virtual reality tools, presents a comprehensive review of the literature related to social presence and describes our practical work in progress towards constructing a mixed reality iClassroom.Keywordssocial presencevirtual learning environmentsSecond Life

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

This brief article reports on the use of virtual reality and its effectiveness on improving and maintaining learners' intrinsic motivation or interest. Research suggests that interest contributes to learning. Therefore a study of the impact of interests is essential to an understanding of intrinsic motivation. Since the virtual environment provides a sense of presence, it may be possible to create scenarios to stimulate the learners' curiosity and interest. Eighteen students, 11 males and 7 females, between 21 and 32 years old, served as subjects for the study. The experiment consisted of the physical world environment using wooden blocks, and the virtual world using virtual blocks. Both worlds used color and shape as variables. The two variables consisted of three shapes (sphere, pyramid, and cube), and three colors (red, green, and blue). In both worlds, the wooden blocks and virtual blocks had to be manipulated and arranged in nine different patterns. The first experiment started with a two-block pattern. At each step the difficulty was increased by increasing the number of blocks. The subject's score was based on a ten-point scale instrument administered at the end of each experiment. The scores ranged from very weak to very strong. The results were used to identify a significant difference between the subjects' performance in the virtual world and in physical world with respect to curiosity, interest, and sense of control. The interest level comparison indicated that for all subjects scores in the virtual world were always higher than the scores in the physical world. The sense of control level comparison indicated that in the beginning scores in the virtualworld were not always higher than the scores in the physical world. However, after orientation to navigation through the virtual environment, the mean score gradually rose. This research demonstrates that the virtual world is more useful than the physical world (with respect of color and shape) in increasing the memory span of the learner.

Redirected Walking (RDW) algorithms aim to impose several types of gains on users immersed in Virtual Reality and distort their walking paths in the real world, thus enabling them to explore a larger space. Since collision with physical boundaries is inevitable, a reset strategy needs to be provided to allow users to reset when they hit the boundary. However, most reset strategies are based on simple heuristics by choosing a seemingly suitable solution, which may not perform well in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization-based reset algorithm adaptive to different RDW algorithms. Inspired by the approach of finite element analysis, our algorithm splits the boundary of the physical world by a set of endpoints. Each endpoint is assigned a reset vector to represent the optimized reset direction when hitting the boundary. The reset vectors on the edge will be determined by the interpolation between two neighbouring endpoints. We conduct simulation-based experiments for three RDW algorithms with commonly used reset algorithms to compare with. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the number of resets.

For many of us, obesity is the outcome of an energy imbalance: more energy input than expenditure. However, our waistlines are growing in spite of the huge amount of diets and fat-free/low-calorie products available to cope with this issue. Even when we are able to reduce our waistlines, maintaining the new size is very difficult: in the year after the end of a nutritional and/or behavioral treatment obese persons typically regain from 30% to 50% of their initial losses. A possible strategy for improving the treatment of obesity is the use of advanced information technologies. In the past, different technologies (internet, virtual reality, mobile phones) have shown promising effects in producing a healthy lifestyle in obese patients. Here we suggest that a new technological paradigm - Interreality – that integrates assessment and treatment within a hybrid experiential environment - including both virtual and real worlds - has the potential to improve the clinical outcome of obesity treatments. The potential advantages offered by this approach are: (a) an extended sense of presence: Interreality uses advanced simulations (virtual experiences) to transform health guidelines and provisions in experiences; (b) an extended sense of community: Interreality uses virtual communities to provide users with targeted – but also anonymous, if required - social support in both real and virtual worlds; (c) real-time feedback between physical and virtual worlds: Interreality uses bio and activity sensors and devices (smartphones) both to track in real time the behavior/health status of the user, and to provide targeted suggestions and guidelines. This paper describes in detail the different technologies involved in the Interreality vision. In order to illustrate the concept of Interreality in practice, a clinical scenario is also presented and discussed: Daniela, a 35-year-old fast-food worker with obesity problems.

An important security aspect of Virtual Worlds (in particular Virtual Worlds oriented towards commercial activities) is controlling participants’ adherence to the social norms (rules of behavior) and making them follow the acceptable interaction patterns. Rules of behavior in the physical world are usually enforced through a post factum punishment, while in computer-controlled environments like Virtual Worlds we can simply block the actions that are inconsistent with the rules and eliminate rule violations as such. In order to facilitate enforcing the rules in such automatic manner and allow for frequent rule changes, the rules have to be expressed in a formal way, so that the software can detect both the rules and the actions that can potentially violate them. In this chapter the authors introduce the concept of Virtual Institutions that are Virtual Worlds with normative regulation of interactions. For development of such systems the authors employ the Virtual Institutions Methodology that separates the development of Normative Virtual Worlds into two independent phases: formal specification of the institutional rules and design of the 3D interaction environment. The methodology is supplied with a set of graphical tools that support the development process on every level, from specification to deployment. The resulting system is capable of enforcing the social norms on the Virtual Worlds’ participants and ensuring the validity of their interactions.

The United States military is increasingly pursuing advanced live, virtual, and constructive (LVC) training systems for reduced cost, greater training flexibility, and decreased training times. Combining the advantages of realistic training environments and virtual worlds, mixed reality LVC training systems can enable live and virtual trainee interaction as if co-located. However, LVC interaction in these systems often requires constructing immersive environments, developing hardware for live-virtual interaction, tracking in occluded environments, and an architecture that supports real-time transfer of entity information across many systems. This paper discusses a system that overcomes these challenges to empower LVC interaction in a reconfigurable, mixed reality environment. This system was developed and tested in an immersive, reconfigurable, and mixed reality LVC training system for the dismounted warfighter at ISU, known as the Veldt, to overcome LVC interaction challenges and as a test bed for cuttingedge technology to meet future U.S. Army battlefield requirements. Trainees interact physically in the Veldt and virtually through commercial and developed game engines. Evaluation involving military trained personnel found this system to be effective, immersive, and useful for developing the critical decision-making skills necessary for the battlefield. Procedural terrain modeling, model-matching database techniques, and a central communication server process all live and virtual entity data from system components to create a cohesive virtual world across all distributed simulators and game engines in real-time. This system achieves rare LVC interaction within multiple physical and virtual immersive environments for training in real-time across many distributed systems.

Cyber-physical systems are a kind of emerging large-scale distributed systems that are integrations of computation, networking, and physical worlds. Cyber physical systems are increasing scale and complexity with the growing pervasiveness of ICT and the development of the smart worlds such as smart factory, smart robotics, smart grids, smart cities, smart vehicles, smart healthcare systems, and smart homes. The growing interconnection of physical and virtual worlds of complex cyber physical systems, and the development of increasingly sophisticated intelligence techniques, has given rise to the next generation of CPS, that is referred to as smart cyber-physical systems (sCPS) which can efficiently operate, manage and control physical world and virtual world, and offer broad range of novel applications and services. Thus, smart cyber physical systems are complex cyber physical systems endowed with intelligent abilities. The main characteristic of such a new generation of smart cyber physical systems is the ability to interact with the physical worlds and adapt to new working environments through distributed intelligent mechanisms that executing and operating at the unit (single device), cluster (groups of devices) and network level (the network of devices). The properties like uncertainties, safety, reliability, and performance requirement, spatial-temporal requirement, and adaptation ability are very important, modeling smart cyber-physical systems must face these challenges and satisfy these specific requiremnts. In order to specify and model such kind of systems, we propose a new paradigm for specifying and modeling smart cyber physical systems based on software defined approach using Modelicaml. Software defined approach is a new way that help abstract the real world and virtual world with software components, this approach can simplify system specification, modeling and design. The main aim of ModelicaML is to enable an efficient and effective way to use Modelica, UML and SysML models reusing notations that are also used for software modeling based on software defined approach. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated with a case study of Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork.

<p>Massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) attract millions of people every year and are now a major industry. Using the internet, these games connect players and give them goals to pursue within virtual worlds. This thesis examines the early life of one such game, the North American version of TERA, based on participant observation on a player vs. player server. TERA’s players met and interacted within a virtual game world controlled by the company which developed the game, and although players constructed their own social groups and factions within this world they were constrained by software that they could not change. Everything from the combat rules to the physics of the environment was designed, and players could only take actions that were accounted for and allowed by that design. However, TERA launched as one of many available MMORPGs which were competing for the attention of the same audience. Its players tended to be experienced and well-informed about the genre, and used their knowledge to evaluate and critique TERA both privately and in public forums. Aware that game companies’ chief concern was for profit, players exercised agency by embracing a consumer identity and pressuring developers in their own commercial terms. To retain players’ loyalty and continue receiving their fees, companies were obliged to appease their customers. This allowed players to see the game world develop and change in accordance with their desires despite the fact that they lacked the access or the expertise to change it themselves. I link this approach to agency to the rise of consumer movements in capitalist societies, and show how the virtual world of TERA can serve as an example for other situations in the physical world where contemporary technologies are used to both enable and constrain agency.</p>

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">The current approach for new Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) and Connected and Automated Driving (CAD) function development involves a significant amount of public road testing which is inefficient due to the number miles that need to be driven for rare and extreme events to take place, thereby being very costly also, and unsafe as the rest of the road users become involuntary test subjects. A new development, evaluation and demonstration method for safe, efficient, and repeatable development, demonstration and evaluation of ADAS and CAD functions called Vehicle-in-Virtual –Environment (VVE) was recently introduced as a solution to this problem. The vehicle is operated in a large, empty, and flat area during VVE while its localization and perception sensor data is fed from the virtual environment with other traffic and rare and extreme events being generated as needed. The virtual environment can be easily configured and modified to construct different testing scenarios on demand. This paper focuses on the VVE approach and introduces the coordinate transformations needed to sync pose (location and orientation) in the virtual and physical worlds and handling of localization and perception sensor data using the highly realistic 3D simulation model of a recent autonomous shuttle deployment site in Columbus, Ohio as the virtual world. As a further example that uses multiple actors, the use of VVE for Vehicle-to-VRU communication based Vulnerable Road User (VRU) safety is presented in the paper using VVE experiments and real pedestrian(s) in a safe and repeatable manner. VVE experiments are used to demonstrate the efficacy of the method.</div></div>

The Metaverse is a term used to describe a futuristic virtual world that goes beyond the limitations of current technological capabilities. The concept of the Metaverse has been popularized by science fiction and is now becoming a reality with the advent of virtual reality, augmented reality, and other immersive technologies. This chapter provides an overview of the Metaverse and explores its potential impact on society and culture. We examine the current state of Metaverse development, including existing virtual worlds, social networks, and gaming platforms. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities of building a true Metaverse, including technical, social, and ethical considerations. Finally, we explore the implications of the Metaverse on various industries, such as entertainment, education, and business, and discuss how it could transform the way we interact with each other and the world around us.

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.

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.

Steering behaviour can be modulated by different optic flows during walking