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Abstract

The so-called second wave of VR has brought to research and market a lot of new displays, input devices, and content solutions during the last few years. Not only has new hardware entered the consumer market with low-cost price patterns, but whole new technologies are also being designed and developed.

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Virtual reality (VR) is receiving attention enough to be considered as its revival age in both industrial and academic field. Since VR systems have various types of interaction with users and new types of interaction are constantly being developed, various studies investigating user experience (UX) of VR systems are continuously needed. However, there is still a lack of research on the taxonomy that can recognize the main characteristics of VR system at a glance by reflecting the influencing factors of UX. Therefore, we collected and reviewed the research related to the UX evaluation of the VR system in order to identify the current research status and to suggest future research direction. To achieve this, a systematic review was conducted on UX studies for VR, and taxonomies of VR system including influencing factors of UX were proposed. A total of 393 unique articles were collected, and 65 articles were selected to be reviewed via Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses methodology. The selected articles were analyzed according to predefined taxonomies. As a result, current status of research can be identified base on the proposed taxonomies. Besides, issues related to VR devices and technology, and research method for future research directions can be suggested.
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The popularity of head-worn displays (HWD) technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) headsets is growing rapidly. To predict their commercial success, it is essential to understand the acceptability of these new technologies, along with new methods to interact with them. In this vein, the evaluation of social acceptability of interactions with these technologies has received significant attention, particularly from the performer's (i.e., user's) viewpoint. However, little work has considered social acceptability concerns from observers' (i.e., spectators') perspective. Although HWDs are designed to be personal devices, interacting with their interfaces are often quite noticeable, making them an ideal platform to contrast performer and observer perspectives on social acceptability. Through two studies, this paper contrasts performers' and observers' perspectives of social acceptability interactions with HWDs under different social contexts. Results indicate similarities as well as differences, in acceptability, and advocate for the importance of including both perspectives when exploring social acceptability of emerging technologies. We provide guidelines for understanding social acceptability specifically from the observers' perspective, thus complementing our current practices used for understanding the acceptability of interacting with these devices.
Chapter
As other interactive technologies, the promising virtual reality (VR) applications and their success highly depend on the quality of the user’s experience. The present study gives first insights into relations between general and VR specific aspects of user experience by: (1) Analyzing the evaluation requirements for a large-scale multi-user use case; (2) relating evaluation concepts from the fields of (2D) user experience (UX) and (3D) VR experiences; (3) testing these relations by incorporating measurements from different research fields, and (4) discussing implications for a holistic evaluation framework. During and after experiencing a multi-user adventure on the Immersive Deck of Illusion Walk, participants rated their experience with respect to various components of general UX as well as other components specific to VR experiences. The results revealed positive correlations of presence and social presence with most of the employed post-experience UX measures. The relations between the post- and in-experience measurements showed some inconsistencies. Overall, the experience was positively appraised. The results encourage further investigations into integrating measurements from different lines of research in order to explore the evaluation space of VR experiences.
Book
This pioneering book develops definitions and concepts related to Quality of Experience in the context of multimedia- and telecommunications-related applications, systems and services, and applies these to various fields of communication and media technologies. The editors bring together numerous key-protagonists of the new discipline “Quality of Experience” and combine the state-of-the-art knowledge in one single volume.
Book
This textbook provides an introduction to the fundamentals of serious games, which differ considerably from computer games that are meant for pure entertainment. Undergraduate and graduate students from various disciplines who want to learn about serious games are one target group of this book. Prospective developers of serious games are another, as they can use the book for self-study in order to learn about the distinctive features of serious game design and development. And ultimately, the book also addresses prospective users of serious game technologies by providing them with a solid basis for judging the advantages and limitations of serious games in different application areas such as game-based learning, training and simulation or games for health. To cater to this heterogeneous readership and wide range of interests, every effort was made to make the book flexible to use. All readers are expected to study Chapter 1, as it provides the necessary basics and terminology that will be used in all subsequent chapters. The eleven chapters that follow cover the creation of serious games (design, authoring processes and tools, content production), the runtime context of serious games (game engines, adaptation mechanisms, game balancing, game mastering, multi-player serious games), the effects of serious games and their evaluation (player experience, assessment techniques, performance indicators), and serious games in practice (economic aspects, cost-benefit analysis, serious game distribution). To familiarize the readers with best practice in this field, the final chapter presents more than 30 selected examples of serious games illustrating their characteristics and showcasing their practical use. Lecturers can select chapters in a sequence that is most suitable for their specific course or seminar. The book includes specific suggestions for courses such as “Introduction to Serious Games”, “Entertainment Technology”, “Serious Game Design”, “Game-based Learning”, and “Applications of Serious Games”.
Article
Immersive learning environments that use virtual simulation technology are increasingly relevant as medical learners train in an environment of restricted clinical training hours and a heightened focus on patient safety. We conducted a consensus process with a breakout group of the 2017 Academic Emergency Medicine Consensus Conference “Catalyzing System Change Through Health Care Simulation: Systems, Competency, and Outcomes.” This group examined the current uses of virtual simulation in training and assessment, including limitations and challenges in implementing virtual simulation into medical education curricula. We discuss the role of virtual environments in formative and summative assessment. Finally, we offer recommended areas of focus for future research examining virtual simulation technology for assessment, including high stakes assessment in medical education. Specifically, we discuss needs for determination of areas of focus for virtual simulation training and assessment, development and exploration of virtual platforms, automated feedback within such platforms, and evaluation of effectiveness and validity of virtual simulation education.
Chapter
‘Applications of virtual reality’ documents some of the wider applications of VR and considers the value of good sound design across such applications. Here, we take a look at data visualisation, telepresence, education, creative applications, rapid product prototyping and health applications. Throughout this chapter, sound is positioned as an underappreciated yet vitally powerful contributor across all wider applications of VR; from increasing the ease of comprehension in VR visualisations, enabling more complex data sets to be more readily interpreted, to facilitating the retention of more information in an eLearning application by increasing users’ engagement and immersion in the material.
Article
The GameFlow model strives to be a general model of player enjoyment, applicable to all game genres and platforms. Derived from a general set of heuristics for creating enjoyable player experiences, the GameFlow model has been widely used in evaluating many types of games, as well as non-game applications. Initial applications of the GameFlow model were limited to real-time strategy games. However, in order to be considered a general model of player enjoyment in games, the GameFlow model needs to be applied to a more varied set of play experiences. In this article, we revisit the design of the GameFlow model, review the various applications and derivative models, and discuss on-going analysis of the model. Subsequently, we describe a study that aims to extend the initial validation of the GameFlow model to incorporate additional game types. We report the results of expert reviews conducted using the GameFlow criteria to evaluate first person shooter games on Sony PlayStation 3 and adventure games on Apple iPhone. Our findings provide insight into the manifestation of the GameFlow elements in these types of games and also highlight some of the genre-specific considerations in the application of the GameFlow model. Key issues are raised and discussed in relation to immersion, social interaction, and multiplayer games.
Conference Paper
Latency between a user's movement and visual feedback is inevitable in every Virtual Reality application, as signal transmission and processing take time. Unfortunately, a high end-to-end latency impairs perception and motor performance. While it is possible to reduce feedback delay to tens of milliseconds, these delays will never completely vanish. Currently, there is a gap in literature regarding the impact of feedback delays on perception and motor performance as well as on their interplay in virtual environments employing full-body avatars. With the present study at hand, we address this gap by performing a systematic investigation of different levels of delay across a variety of perceptual and motor tasks during full-body action inside a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment. We presented participants with their virtual mirror image, which responded to their actions with feedback delays ranging from 45 to 350 ms. We measured the impact of these delays on motor performance, sense of agency, sense of body ownership and simultaneity perception by means of psychophysical procedures. Furthermore, we looked at interaction effects between these aspects to identify possible dependencies. The results show that motor performance and simultaneity perception are affected by latencies above 75 ms. Although sense of agency and body ownership only decline at a latency higher than 125 ms, and deteriorate for a latency greater than 300 ms, they do not break down completely even at the highest tested delay. Interestingly, participants perceptually infer the presence of delays more from their motor error in the task than from the actual level of delay. Whether or not participants notice a delay in a virtual environment might therefore depend on the motor task and their performance rather than on the actual delay.
Conference Paper
The present study is designed to test how immersion, presence, and narrative content (with a focus on emotional immersion) can affect one's pro-environmental attitude and behavior with specific interest in 360° videos and meat consumption as a non pro-environmental behavior. This research describes a between-group design experiment that compares two systems with different levels of immersion and two types of narratives, one with and one without emotional content. In the immersive video (IV) condition (high immersion), 21 participants used a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) to watch an emotional 360° video about meat consumption and its effects on the environment; another 21 participants experienced the tablet condition (low immersion) where they viewed the same video but with a 10.1 inch tablet; 22 participants in the control condition viewed a non emotional video about submarines with an HMD. The purpose of the experiment was to test the effect of presence and emotional impact on pro-environmental attitude and behavior. In a questionnaire, self-reported measurements were used to address presence, emotional impact and pro-environmental attitude, while an unobtrusive method evaluated pro-environmental behavior. The results showed that both immersion and emotional impact enhance self-reported presence; higher immersion and emotional impact enhanced pro-environmental attitude; narrative content and emotional immersion (i.e., personal attachment to the characters) enhanced pro-environmental behavior. Higher immersion appeared to increase pro-environmental behavior but not significantly.
Article
Fully articulated hand tracking promises to enable fundamentally new interactions with virtual and augmented worlds, but the limited accuracy and efficiency of current systems has prevented widespread adoption. Today's dominant paradigm uses machine learning for initialization and recovery followed by iterative model-fitting optimization to achieve a detailed pose fit. We follow this paradigm, but make several changes to the model-fitting, namely using: (1) a more discriminative objective function; (2) a smooth-surface model that provides gradients for non-linear optimization; and (3) joint optimization over both the model pose and the correspondences between observed data points and the model surface. While each of these changes may actually increase the cost per fitting iteration, we find a compensating decrease in the number of iterations. Further, the wide basin of convergence means that fewer starting points are needed for successful model fitting. Our system runs in real-time on CPU only, which frees up the commonly over-burdened GPU for experience designers. The hand tracker is efficient enough to run on low-power devices such as tablets. We can track up to several meters from the camera to provide a large working volume for interaction, even using the noisy data from current-generation depth cameras. Quantitative assessments on standard datasets show that the new approach exceeds the state of the art in accuracy. Qualitative results take the form of live recordings of a range of interactive experiences enabled by this new approach.