Marc Erich Latoschik

University of Wuerzburg | JMU · Department of Computer Science

The alignment of virtual to physical surfaces is essential to improve symbolic input and selection in XR. Previous techniques optimized for efficiency can lead to inaccuracies. We investigate regression-based refinement techniques and introduce a surface accuracy evaluation. The results revealed that refinement techniques can highly improve surface...

The goal of the present paper is to develop and validate a questionnaire to assess AI literacy. In particular, the questionnaire should be deeply grounded in the existing literature on AI literacy, should be modular (i.e., including different facets that can be used independently of each other) to be flexibly applicable in professional life dependi...

Recently emerged solutions demonstrate that the movements of users interacting with extended reality (XR) applications carry identifying information and can be leveraged for identification. While such solutions can identify XR users within a few seconds, current systems require one or the other trade-off: either they apply simple distance-based app...

The administrative burden for physicians in the hospital can affect the quality of patient care. The Service Center Medical Informatics (SMI) of the University Hospital Würzburg developed and implemented the smartphone-based mobile application (MA) ukw.mobile¹ that uses speech recognition for the point-of-care ordering of radiological examinations....

This paper presents the results of the seminar concept and the accompanying research conducted on inter- and transcultural learning in Virtual Reality (VR). As part of a university seminar, TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) students designed lessons for advanced learners of high school English that focused on the development of empathy...

This paper examines the relationship between time and motion perception in virtual environments. Previous work has shown that the perception of motion can affect the perception of time. We developed a virtual environment that simulates motion in a tunnel and measured its effects on the estimation of the duration of time, the speed at which perceive...

This article explores the effect of one's body representation on time perception. Time Perception is modulated by a variety of factors including, e.g., the current situation or activity, it can display significant disturbances caused by psychological disorders, and it is influenced by emotional and interoceptive states, i.e., “the sense of the phys...

This article compares two state-of-the-art text input techniques between non-stationary virtual reality (VR) and video see-through augmented reality (VST AR) use-cases as XR display condition. The developed contact-based mid-air virtual tap and wordgesture (swipe) keyboard provide established support functions for text correction, word suggestions,...

Mixed Reality (MR) applications along Milgram's Reality-Virtuality (RV) continuum motivated a number of recent theories on potential constructs and factors describing MR experiences. This paper investigates the impact of incongruencies that are processed on different information processing layers (i.e., sensation/perception and cognition layer) to...

Many studies show the significance of the Proteus effect for serious virtual reality applications. The present study extends the existing knowledge by considering the relationship (congruence) between the self-embodiment (avatar) and the virtual environment. We investigated the impact of avatar and environment types and their congruence on avatar p...

Virtual humans, including virtual agents and avatars, play an increasingly important role as VR technology advances. For example, virtual humans are used as digital bodies of users in social VR or as interfaces for AI assistants in online financing. Interpersonal trust is an essential prerequisite in real-life interactions, as well as in the virtua...

Virtual reality applications employing avatar embodiment typically use virtual mirrors to allow users to perceive their digital selves not only from a first-person but also from a holistic third-person perspective. However, due to distance-related biases such as the distance compression effect or a reduced relative rendering resolution, the self-ob...

Physical well-being depends essentially on how the own body is perceived. A missing correspondence between the perception of one’s own body and reality can be distressing and eventually lead to mental illness. The touch of the own body is a multi-sensory experience to strengthen the feeling of the own body. We have developed an interaction techniqu...

Social Virtual Reality (social VR or SVR) provides digital spaces for diverse human activities, social interactions, and embodied face-to-face encounters. While our digital bodies in SVR can in general be of almost any conceivable appearance, individualized or even personalized avatars bearing users’ likeness recently became an interesting research...

Medical graduates lack procedural skills experience required to manage emergencies. Recent advances in virtual reality (VR) technology enable the creation of highly immersive learning environments representing easy-to-use and affordable solutions for training with simulation. However, the feasibility in compulsory teaching, possible side effects of...

Medical graduates lack procedural skills experience required to manage emergencies. Recent advances in virtual reality (VR) technology enable the creation of highly immersive learning environments representing easy-to-use and affordable solutions for training with simulation. However, the feasibility in compulsory teaching, possible side effects of...

This article investigates the effects of different XR displays on the perception and plausibility of personalized virtual humans. We compared immersive virtual reality (VR), video see-through augmented reality (VST AR), and optical see-through AR (OST AR). The personalized virtual alter egos were generated by state-of-the-art photogrammetry methods...

Obesity is a serious disease that can affect both physical and psychological well-being. Due to weight stigmatization, many affected individuals suffer from body image disturbances whereby they perceive their body in a distorted way, evaluate it negatively, or neglect it. Beyond established interventions such as mirror exposure, recent advancements...

Reliable and robust user identification and authentication are important and often necessary requirements for many digital services. It becomes paramount in social virtual reality (VR) to ensure trust, specifically in digital encounters with lifelike realistic-looking avatars as faithful replications of real persons. Recent research has shown great...

The development of embodied Virtual Reality (VR) systems involves multiple central design choices. These design choices affect the user perception and therefore require thorough consideration. This article reports on two user studies investigating the influence of common de- sign choices on relevant intermediate factors (sense of embodiment, presen...

This study aims to evaluate the usability and user experience of the InteractionSuitcase. This is a collection of virtual objects that have cultural connotations (associated with German or Anglo-American culture). They are intended to promote communication about cultural differences and similarities in English lessons at German schools. They are th...

Mirror exposure is an important method in the treatment of body image disturbances. Eye tracking can support the unaffected assessment of attention biases during mirror exposure. However, the analysis of eye tracking data in mirror exposure comes with various difficulties and is associated with a high manual workload during data processing. We pres...

Goal This paper presents an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) system to analyze and train Executive Functions (EFs) of soccer players. EFs are important cognitive functions for athletes. They are a relevant quality that distinguishes amateurs from professionals. Method The system is based on immersive technology, hence, the user interacts naturally a...

Virtual environments (VEs) can evoke and support emotions, as experienced when playing emotionally arousing games. We theoretically approach the design of fear and joy evoking VEs based on a literature review of empirical studies on virtual and real environments as well as video games’ reviews and content analyses. We define the design space and id...

Visual stimuli are frequently used to improve memory, language learning or perception, and understanding of metacognitive processes. However, in virtual reality (VR), there are few systematically and empirically derived databases. This paper proposes the first collection of virtual objects based on empirical evaluation for inter-and transcultural e...

This article targets one of the fundamental changes in the judicial system induced by the severe limitations due to the absence of face-to-face meetings: the application of video conferencing in court sessions, an application with special requirements in this critical domain. A semi-structured literature review that we conducted revealed a lack of...

Presence is often considered the most important quale describing the subjective feeling of being in a computer-generated and/or computer-mediated virtual environment. The identification and separation of orthogonal presence components, i.e., the place illusion and the plausibility illusion, has been an accepted theoretical model describing Virtual...

This article presents a novel method for controlling a virtual audience system (VAS) in Virtual Reality (VR) application, called STAGE, which has been originally designed for supervised public speaking training in university seminars dedicated to the preparation and delivery of scientific talks. We are interested in creating pedagogical narratives:...

Mind-body therapies aim to improve health by combining physical and mental exercises. Recent developments tend to incorporate virtual reality (VR) into their design and execution, but there is a lack of research concerning the inclusion of virtual bodies and their effect on body awareness in these designs. In this study, 24 participants performed i...

Der Aufbau von inter- und transkulturellen Kompetenzen im modernen Englischunterricht verlangt nach authentischen, kulturübergreifenden Begegnungs- und Kommunikationssituationen. Virtual Reality (VR) als Ort der Partizipation und Konstruktion kann dem Erwerb kultureller Kompetenzen zentrale Vorteile bieten, die die physischen Grenzen des Klassenzim...

The purpose of this study is to examine whether pre-service teachers studying classroom management (CM) in a virtual reality (VR)-supported setting enhance their CM competencies more than students do in a setting using conventional methods. With this aim in mind and to address a lack of available situations of practicing and reflecting CM competenc...

Management of radiology requests in larger clinical contexts is characterized by a complex and distributed workflow. In our partner hospital, representing many similar clinics, these processes often still rely on exchanging physical papers and forms, making patient or case data challenging to access. This often leads to phone calls with long waitin...

The embodiment of avatars in virtual reality (VR) is a promising tool for enhancing the user's mental health. A great example is the treatment of body image disturbances, where eliciting a full-body illusion can help identify, visualize, and modulate persisting misperceptions. Augmented reality (AR) could complement recent advances in the field by...

Obesity is a serious disease that can affect both physical and psychological well-being. Due to weight stigmatization, many affected individuals suffer from body image disturbances whereby they perceive their body in a distorted way, evaluate it negatively, or neglect it. Beyond established interventions such as mirror exposure, recent advancements...

In recent years, the applications and accessibility of Virtual Reality (VR) for the healthcare sector have continued to grow. However, so far, most VR applications are only relevant in research settings. Information about what healthcare professionals would need to independently integrate VR applications into their daily working routines is missing...

Objective : Gait adaptation to environmental challenges is fundamental for independent and safe community ambulation. The possibility of precisely studying gait modulation using standardized protocols of gait analysis closely resembling everyday life scenarios is still an unmet need. Methods : We have developed a fully-immersive virtual reality (VR...

A novel theoretical model recently introduced coherence and plausibility as the essential conditions of XR experiences, challenging contemporary presence-oriented concepts. This article reports on two experiments validating this model, which assumes coherence activation on three layers (cognition, perception, and sensation) as the potential sources...

Slot machines are one of the most played games by players suffering from gambling disorder. New technologies like immersive Virtual Reality (VR) offer more possibilities to exploit erroneous beliefs in the context of gambling. Recent research indicates a higher risk potential when playing a slot machine in VR than on desktop. To continue this inves...

This chapter is a collection of selected VR/AR case studies from academia and industry.

Finding robust and accurate feature matches is a fundamental problem in computer vision. However, incorrect correspondences and suboptimal matching accuracies lead to significant challenges for many real-world applications. In conventional feature matching, corresponding features in an image pair are greedily searched using their descriptor distanc...

The presence of a partner can attenuate physiological fear responses, a phenomenon known as social buffering. However, not all individuals are equally sociable. Here we investigated whether social buffering of fear is shaped by sensitivity to social anxiety (social concern) and whether these effects are different in females and males. We collected...

This article introduces the accessory dock, a 3D printed multi-purpose extension for consumer-grade XR controllers that enables flexible mounting of self-made and commercial accessories. The uniform design of our concept opens new opportunities for XR systems being used for more diverse purposes, e.g., researchers and practitioners could use and co...

In this paper, we adapt an existing VR framework for handwriting and sketching on physically aligned virtual surfaces to AR environments using the Microsoft HoloLens 2. We demonstrate a multimodal input metaphor to control the framework’s calibration features using hand tracking and voice commands. Our technical evaluation of fingertip/surface accu...

Joint applications of virtual reality (VR) systems and electroencephalography (EEG) offer numerous new possibilities ranging from behavioral science to therapy. VR systems allow for highly controlled experimental environments, while EEG offers a non-invasive window to brain activity with a millisecond-ranged temporal resolution. However, EEG measur...

Social VR's characteristics, by offering authentic learning environments that enable interaction remotely and synchronously and permit learning experiences that affect learners in a multi-sensory way, offer great potential for teaching and learning processes. However, concerning its use to promote pre-service teachers' TPACK in initial teacher educ...

The combination of globalization and digitalization emphasizes the importance of media-related and intercultural competencies of teacher educators and pre-service teachers. This article reports on the initial prototypical implementation of a pedagogical concept to foster such competencies of pre-service teachers. The proposed pedagogical concept ut...

Plenty of theories, models, measures, and investigations target the understanding of virtual presence, i.e., the sense of presence in immersive Virtual Reality (VR). Other varieties of the so-called eXtended Realities (XR), e.g., Augmented and Mixed Reality (AR and MR) incorporate immersive features to a lesser degree and continuously combine spati...

Realistic and lifelike 3D-reconstruction of virtual humans has various exciting and important use cases. Our and others’ appearances have notable effects on ourselves and our interaction partners in virtual environments, e.g., on acceptance, preference, trust, believability, behavior (the Proteus effect), and more. Today, multiple approaches for th...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) covers a broad spectrum of computational problems and use cases. Many of those implicate profound and sometimes intricate questions of how humans interact or should interact with AIs. Moreover, many users or future users do have abstract ideas of what AI is, significantly depending on the specific embodiment of AI appli...

Modulating emotional responses to virtual stimuli is a fundamental goal of many immersive interactive applications. In this study, we leverage the illusion of illusory embodiment and show that owning a virtual body provides means to modulate emotional responses. In a single-factor repeated-measures experiment, we manipulated the degree of illusory...

Requests for radiological examinations in large medical facilities are a distributed and complex process with potential health-related risks for patients. A user-centered qualitative analysis with contextual interviews uncovered nine core problems, which hinder work efficiency and patient care: (1) Difficulties to access patient data & requests, (2...

Immersion programs and the experiences they offer learners are irreplaceable. In times of Covid-19, social VR applications can offer enormous potential for the acquisition of inter- and transcultural competencies (ITC). Virtual objects (VO) could initiate communication and reflection processes between learners with different cultural backgrounds an...

ErnährungsexpertInnen sind laut der vorliegenden Daten weder mit der Therapie von Körperwahrnehmung und -bild vertraut noch nutzen sie VR-Ansätze. Da die Befragten Interesse an diesem Therapieansatz angaben, könnten ErnährungsexpertInnen durch die Integration von VR-Systemen in der Anwendung von Ansätzen zur Verbesserung von Körperwahrnehmung und -...

Impaired decision-making leads to the inability to distinguish between advantageous and disadvantageous choices. The impairment of a person’s decision-making is a common goal of gambling games. Given the recent trend of gambling using immersive Virtual Reality it is crucial to investigate the effects of both immersion and the virtual environment (V...

21-century challenges demand a change towards collaborative and constructive seminar designs in initial teacher education regarding preservice teachers acquiring meta-conceptual awareness (TPACK) about how to implement emerging technologies in their future profession. Against this background the paper addresses the following research questions: 1)...

Measurements of physiological parameters provide an objective, often non-intrusive, and (at least semi-)automatic evaluation and utilization of user behavior. In addition, specific hardware devices of Virtual Reality (VR) often ship with built-in sensors, i.e. eye-tracking and movements sensors. Hence, the combination of physiological measurements...