Presentation Technology – Enriching the Client Experience in a Physical and Virtual World

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Steering behaviour can be modulated by different optic flows during walking

Redirected walking algorithms imperceptibly rotate a virtual scene about users of immersive virtual environment systems in order to guide them away from tracking area boundaries. Ideally, these distortions permit users to explore large unbounded virtual worlds while walking naturally within a physically limited space. Many potential virtual worlds are composed of corridors, passageways, or aisles. Assuming users are not expected to walk through walls or other objects within the virtual world, these constrained worlds limit the directions of travel and as well as the number of opportunities to change direction. The resulting differences in user movement characteristics within the physical world have an impact on redirected walking algorithm performance. This work presents a comparison of generalized RDW algorithm performance within a constrained virtual world. In contrast to previous studies involving unconstrained virtual worlds, experimental results indicate that the steer-to-orbit keeps users in a smaller area than the steer-to-center algorithm. Moreover, in comparison to steer-to-center, steer-to-orbit is shown to reduce potential wall contacts by over 29%.

Read newspapers and professional educational journals, attend a national or state conference, or review the offerings of a university catalog, and you soon encounter statistics like 92 percent of children ages 2–17 play video and computer games (Beck & Wade, 2004); 60 percent of Americans play interactive games on a regular basis (Kirriemuir, 2002); 78 percent of American families have video game equipment in their homes (Simpson, 2005). You will also read that 78 percent of 18–29 year olds use the Internet in their daily lives (Ramaley & Zia, 2005), yet only 38 percent of college students report using the Internet in their classes (Ramaley & Zia, 2005). Outside the classroom, students are creating a new shared culture, showing us new ways to learn and communicate and make sense of physical and virtual identities and worlds. They are showing us that what happens in virtual worlds is often just as meaningful as what happens offline (Taylor, 2006). They work autonomously or with others—playing with others online who may protect and advise them or playing next to others who play the same game. They know where to obtain helpful resources. However, these mainly young gamers do not just play games and consult resources; they create game guides, answers to FAQs, maps, overviews, strategies, fanfic (fanfiction—stories about the gaming characters or settings written by game fans rather than by game creators), and character-planning guides. All of this adds up to a different kind of play and developmental environment, which influences a different developmental process and way of seeing the world and thinking than experienced by generations before.

CPS is complex distributed systems, which contain computing, communications, and control. CPS is a product of the combination of physical world and the cyber world. The cyber world needs a lot of physical equipment to deal with perception and communication, then collect and transfer the information in the real environment, and by computation to forecast what might happen in future real environment, at last through the control strategy to achieve the optimal solution. In short, cyber physical system is the complex systems combination with computation system, sensory system and control system. Cyber physical system through more extensive connection, the physical world more thorough cognition, more effectively control the physical world, make the information world and the physical world closer integration, realize coordination awareness and control of the physical world. The paper through the analysis of the human perception system, build a cyber-physical fusion system based on human perception architecture.

This paper proposes a framework for the analysis of artworks created in virtual worlds by extending Lichty's four modalities of art in virtual worlds, identified as transmediated, cybrid, client/browser, and ever gent. A selection of artworks from the Kritical Work in SL exhibitions undertaken in 2008 and 2009 are analysed for the qualities of imaginative experience and the articulation of a new set of movements of the imagination from (and between) physical and virtual world spaces indicates a potency of virtual worlds for the investigation and creation of artistic practice.

This article compares and contrasts the economic geography of the physical world with that of virtual worlds, with an analytical focus on the spatial (and aspatial) characteristics of Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo II (released in 2000) and its massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft (released in 2004). The purpose of this article is to show that although virtual worlds are not immune to aspatial economic laws, geographic constraints on economic interaction in virtual worlds are optional inclusions. Virtual world designers can manage the inclusion, disinclusion, and degree of emphasis on space and place in order to carefully craft a specific user experience. Hence, even though virtual worlds may provide the illusion of operating in a spatially bounded environment, the underlying mechanics of the world may not have spatial constraints.Nevertheless, the article concludes that there still remains a role for geographic analysis in virtual worlds, especially because, though space may be deemphasized, virtual world designers still may go to great effort to emphasize place to create the users’ experiences. Further, the study of the economics of virtual worlds may provide insight into possible future economic situations of the physical world as increasingly more physical goods become digital.

Several new and broader views on computation in Nature and by Nature, and on its limitations and barriers are presented and analysed briefly. Quantum information precessing, global network information processing and cosmology-based information processing theories are seen as three extreme, but well-founded approaches to computation by Nature. It is also emphasized that a search for barriers and limitations in information processing as well as attempts to overcome their barriers or to shift limitations, can have deep impacts on science, especially if they are accompanied by a search for limitations and barriers also in communication and security. It is demonstrated that a search for barriers in communications brings a lot of interesting and deep outcomes. Computational and communication complexity is shown to play an important role in evaluating various approaches to get through barriers that current physical theories impose. It is also argued that a search for barriers and limitations concerning feasibility in information processing and physical worlds are of equal or maybe even of larger importance than those to overcome the Church-Turing barrier and some communication barriers. It is also emphasized that relations between information processing in the real and virtual worlds, or between physical and information worlds, are likely very deep and more complex than realized. All that has even broader sense than usually realized because we are witnessing a radical shift in the main characterization of the current science in general. A shift from so called Galilean science dominated by mathematics, to the Informatics (based) science - an informatics methodology based science and technology.