Computational content generation increasingly shapes digital games, visual computing, and interactive environments by automating the production of characters, faces, and environments. Alongside these capabilities, such pipelines raise persistent challenges around fairness, social bias, and representational diversity. This article presents an AI-assisted, PRISMA-informed literature review of 37 recent studies that address these social dimensions across character creation, facial modeling, and procedural environment generation. We synthesize technical approaches – including deep learning, reinforcement learning, generative adversarial networks, and optimization – together with behavioral, participatory, and culturally grounded perspectives. To reduce terminological ambiguity, we provide a consolidated cross-domain conceptual framing of fairness , social bias , and diversity in the reviewed work and map recurring operational proxy families to content types. Our analysis highlights substantial variation in how these concepts are defined and evaluated: only a small subset of studies uses explicit parity- or subgroup-performance formulations, whereas many contributions rely on domain-specific gameplay proxies, distributional/perceptual generative proxies, or qualitative and behavioral evaluation, and are infrequently supported by scalable auditing or benchmarking tools. We further differentiate how fairness concerns manifest across game contexts (e.g., outcome parity in competitively oriented procedural scenarios versus representational inclusion in avatar and face pipelines). Finally, we operationalize these proxy families and recurring limitations in three applied use-cases, illustrating where auditing can attach within end-to-end workflows and where methodological gaps remain when integrating representational and outcome-focused perspectives.

Desk-based VR interactions carry safety risks when users unintentionally collide with unseen physical objects. Existing solutions often compromise immersion or lack situational precision. We present Reach-to-Reveal, a proximity-based system that dynamically visualizes real-world desk objects using headsetintegrated depth sensing, passthrough, and hand tracking. Objects are revealed only when the user reaches into their vicinity, enhancing safety while preserving immersion. Implemented on Meta Quest 3, Reach-to-Reveal was evaluated in a user study with 19 participants. Results show improved interaction confidence in cluttered desk setups, while highlighting challenges in visual realism and usability for future work.

Virtual Reality (VR) offers highly immersive experiences but often isolates users from their physical surroundings, leading to safety concerns. Conventional boundary systems such as Meta's Guardian or Valve's Chaperone provide static perimeters that fail to account for dynamically appearing obstacles during VR sessions. This paper explores the feasibility of dynamically integrating real-world obstacles directly into the virtual scene using the built-in RGB and depth sensors of the Meta Quest 3 headset. We present an implementation that dynamically integrates real-world obstacles in the play area to improve situational awareness without relying on external sensors or hardware modifications. A user study evaluates how this integration affects users' sense of presence, involvement, and perceived safety compared to the Guardian system. Results suggest that while involvement may slightly decrease due to visual inconsistencies, spatial presence and general presence remain statistically equivalent. These findings highlight the potential and current limitations of leveraging consumer-grade VR hardware for dynamic real-world integration in virtual environments.

Standard virtual reality (VR) controllers often provide limited tactile feedback, which can detract from player immersion and the seamlessness of interactions diminishing the overall experience. This paper evaluates MUHI - a Multi-Use Haptic Interface, which is a novel passive haptic tool designed to enhance player experience by convincingly simulating multiple virtual tools through its distinct physical handles. These tools are central to a series of playable mini-games embedded within a narrative-driven, redirected walking (RDW) based VR experience. The experience incorporates the RDW related drift, such that the temporarily stationary physical prop MUHI can represent various virtual tools in different parts of the virtual environment. The core investigation focuses on how integrating tangible, tool-based interactions via MUHI into these minigames enhances the game experience and immersive qualities, potentially concealing the RDW resets incidentally. A user study (N=17) compared the experience of playing the VR game with MUHI against a standard VR controller. Results demonstrate that MUHI significantly enhanced user enjoyment and increased reported presence scores. These findings suggest that specialized passive haptic interfaces like MUHI can substantially improve player engagement and the overall experience in VR applications, particularly by making core game mechanics, including those designed to mask RDW resets, more interactive and compelling.

With the advent of consumer-targeted, low-cost virtual reality devices and facile authoring technologies, the development and design of experiences in virtual reality are also becoming more accessible to non-expert authors. However, the inherent freedom of exploration in these virtual spaces presents a significant challenge for designers seeking to guide user attention toward points and objects of interest. This paper proposes the new technique WarpVision, which utilizes spatial curvature to subtly guide the user's attention in virtual reality. WarpVision distorts an area around the point of interest, thus changing the size, form, and location of all objects and the space around them. In this way, the user's attention can be guided even when the point of interest is not in the immediate field of vision. WarpVision is evaluated in a user study based on a within-subjects design, comparing it to the state-of-the-art technique Deadeye. Participants completed visual search tasks across two virtual environments being supported with WarpVision at four different intensities. Results show that WarpVision significantly reduces search times compared to Deadeye. While both techniques introduce comparable levels of immersion disruption, WarpVision has a lower reported impact on the user's well-being.

Abstract In the context of e-learning, it is challenging to incorporate emerging technologies, such as alternate reality games or Virtual Reality (VR), within current learning trends. Microlearning is such a current trend. It divides large and complex chunks of content into small and elementary learning nuggets. These single self-contained nuggets are then composed to overarching lessons or courses. The concept of VR nuggets dovetails this educational trend. VR nuggets are standalone, self-contained, and rather short VR experiences that can be combined with other learning nuggets. By using initial implementations of VR nuggets, they can be used to let authors create VR earning content, for example, to let learners experience alternate realities. In this paper, we further investigate the VR nugget authoring concept and extent it. We introduce two novel authoring toolkits that rely on VR nuggets – one based on context-related module interaction (CoNMoD) and one based on visual scripting (ViNS Tiles). In two separate user studies, we examine the acceptance of the toolkits and compare them to existing authoring environments that also rely on VR nuggets but utilize different interface techniques. These studies’ results emphasize the importance of exchanging content between different established tools and indicate the acceptance of our tools regarding their hedonic and pragmatic qualities, also compared to existing tools from related work. As a conclusion, we propose an exchange format for VR nuggets that supports their reusability. It enables authors that use different toolkits to work together. They can utilize VR nuggets created with other toolkits and still use their own preferred toolkit. By means of an expert survey, we draw conclusions on technical aspects and a suitable platform to make VR nuggets available to the community. This survey indicates that potential authors would use such an exchange-approach for creating and presenting VR content and that they are willing to share their work and to contribute in a VR nugget authoring community.

Abstract Every Virtual Reality (VR) experience has to end at some point. While there already exist concepts to design transitions for users to enter a virtual world, their return from the physical world should be considered, as well, as it is a part of the overall VR experience. We call the latter outro-transitions. In contrast to offboarding of VR experiences, that takes place after taking off VR hardware (e.g., HMDs), outro-transitions are still part of the immersive experience. Such transitions occur more frequently when VR is experienced periodically and for only short times. One example where transition techniques are necessary is in an auditorium where the audience has individual VR headsets available, for example, in a presentation using PowerPoint slides together with brief VR experiences sprinkled between the slides. The audience must put on and take off HMDs frequently every time they switch from common presentation media to VR and back. In a such a one-to-many VR scenario, it is challenging for presenters to explore the process of multiple people coming back from the virtual to the physical world at once. Direct communication may be constrained while VR users are wearing an HMD. Presenters need a tool to indicate them to stop the VR session and switch back to the slide presentation. Virtual visual cues can help presenters or other external entities (e.g., automated/scripted events) to request VR users to end a VR session. Such transitions become part of the overall experience of the audience and thus must be considered. This paper explores visual cues as outro-transitions from a virtual world back to the physical world and their utility to enable presenters to request VR users to end a VR session. We propose and investigate eight transition techniques. We focus on their usage in short consecutive VR experiences and include both established and novel techniques. The transition techniques are evaluated within a user study to draw conclusions on the effects of outro-transitions on the overall experience and presence of participants. We also take into account how long an outro-transition may take and how comfortable our participants perceived the proposed techniques. The study points out that they preferred non-interactive outro-transitions over interactive ones, except for a transition that allowed VR users to communicate with presenters. Furthermore, we explore the presenter-VR user relation within a presentation scenario that uses short VR experiences. The study indicates involving presenters that can stop a VR session was not only negligible but preferred by our participants.

A current educational trend is to divide learning content in relatively small and independent learning units, referred to as learning nuggets. These “bite-sized” nuggets often rely on patterns in order to reuse these patterns within highly diverse curricular structures like lessons, presentations or demos.

Painting galleries typically provide a wealth of data composed of several data types. Those multivariate data are too complex for laymen like museum visitors to first, get an overview about all paintings and to look for specific categories. Finally, the goal is to guide the visitor to a specific painting that he wishes to have a more closer look on. In this paper we describe an interactive visualization tool that first provides such an overview and lets people experiment with the more than 41,000 paintings collected in the web gallery of art. To generate such an interactive tool, our technique is composed of different steps like data handling, algorithmic transformations, visualizations, interactions, and the human user working with the tool with the goal to detect insights in the provided data. We illustrate the usefulness of the visualization tool by applying it to such characteristic data and show how one can get from an overview about all paintings to specific paintings.