This work presents four possible designs for the handshake interaction in a Social VR-like virtual environment in which the user operates using hand-held controllers: a first design based on a graphics user interface (GUI), a second design leveraging a physical button on hand-held controllers, and two designs based on recreating the handshaking gesture by grabbing the other party’s hand and shaking it. The four designs were evaluated and compared through a user study which involved 24 participants, analyzing factors pertaining to embodiment, presence and social presence, usability, and handshake quality of experience. Results indicated that the gesture-based design was preferred, overall.

Technology is disrupting the way films involving visual effects are produced. Chroma-key, LED walls, motion capture (mocap), 3D visual storyboards, and simulcams are only a few examples of the many changes introduced in the cinema industry over the last years. Although these technologies are getting commonplace, they are presenting new, unexplored challenges to the actors. In particular, when mocap is used to record the actors' movements with the aim of animating digital character models, an increase in the workload can be easily expected for people on stage. In fact, actors have to largely rely on their imagination to understand what the digitally created characters will be actually seeing and feeling. This paper focuses on this specific domain, and aims to demonstrate how Augmented Reality (AR) can be helpful for actors when shooting mocap scenes. To this purpose, we devised a system named AR-MoCap that can be used by actors for rehearsing the scene in AR on the real set before actually shooting it. Through an Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Display (OST-HMD), an actor can see, e.g., the digital characters of other actors wearing mocap suits overlapped in real-time to their bodies. Experimental results showed that, compared to the traditional approach based on physical props and other cues, the devised system can help the actors to position themselves and direct their gaze while shooting the scene, while also improving spatial and social presence, as well as perceived effectiveness.

Instance-level object re-identification is a fundamental computer vision task, with applications from image retrieval to intelligent monitoring and fraud detection. In this work, we propose the novel task of damaged object re-identification, which aims at distinguishing changes in visual appearance due to deformations or missing parts from subtle intra-class variations. To explore this task, we leverage the power of computer-generated imagery to create, in a semi-automatic fashion, high-quality synthetic images of the same bike before and after a damage occurs. The resulting dataset, Bent & Broken Bicycles (BB-Bicycles), contains 39,200 images and 2,800 unique bike instances spanning 20 different bike models. As a baseline for this task, we propose TransReI3D, a multi-task, transformer-based deep network unifying damage detection (framed as a multi-label classification task) with object re-identification. The BBBicycles dataset is available at https://tinyurl.com/37tepf7m

First responders require adequate training to operate safely in dangerous situations. However, low-fidelity exercises used in courses are an approximation of real scenarios. This is particularly true for firefighters since practice sessions often do not include real fire. A way to overcome these limitations consists in using Virtual Reality (VR) to create experiences where trainees can face detailed simulations of actual risks. The system presented in this work-in-progress paper aims to support practice training on the use of the blower as a firefighting tool and offers two training modes to assist trainees in learning the procedure and assessing their knowledge.

In the domain of CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear) hazards, first responders need a high-quality training to avoid fatal errors that can compromise the success of operations. Nevertheless, CBRN exercises are often expensive and require a complex management. Furthermore, for preserving trainees’ safety and for logistic constraints, trials may reproduce just an approximation of the real hazard scenario. In order to cope with these issues, a prototype of an Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) training platform was developed by Politecnico di Torino and LINKS Foundation in cooperation with CBRN experts from the Italian Air Force, particularly from Terzo Stormo – Aeronautica Militare di Villafranca di Verona. The platform aims at allowing CBRN operators to train, alone or in a team, testing their ability to carry out required operational procedures in a digital environment that exhibits the complexity of a real-life situation, but does not expose them to life-threatening dangers.

Interest is raising around eXtended Reality Training Systems (XRTSs), which started to be considered as a credible option to train companies' workforce. Even though there is a growing body of literature on best practices and techniques to be adopted for teaching individuals how to perform a variety of operations (e.g., for assembly and maintenance procedures), there are also training situations which have gone mostly unexplored yet. In this paper, we propose and evaluate three different metaphors to face the key challenges associated with training procedures involving parallax-dependent tasks, i.e., tasks in which the instructor needs to make the trainee reach a target observation point and guide his/her attention towards a given point of interest at the same time. Effects observed through a user study that was run in a testbed environment indicated that metaphors based on 3D avatars and frustum visualization can provide important advantages over video-based techniques.

A common operation performed in Virtual Reality (VR) environments is locomotion. Although real walking can represent a natural and intuitive way to manage displacements in such environments, its use is generally limited by the size of the area tracked by the VR system (typically, the size of a room) or requires expensive technologies to cover particularly extended settings. A number of approaches have been proposed to enable effective explorations in VR, each characterized by different hardware requirements and costs, and capable to provide different levels of usability and performance. However, the lack of a well-defined methodology for assessing and comparing available approaches makes it difficult to identify, among the various alternatives, the best solutions for selected application domains. To deal with this issue, this article introduces a novel evaluation testbed which, by building on the outcomes of many separate works reported in the literature, aims to support a comprehensive analysis of the considered design space. An experimental protocol for collecting objective and subjective measures is proposed, together with a scoring system able to rank locomotion approaches based on a weighted set of requirements. Testbed usage is illustrated in a use case requesting to select the technique to adopt in a given application scenario.

Although passive haptic interfaces have been shown to be capable to enhance the user's sense of presence in Mixed Reality experiences, their use is still constrained by the need to rely on exact replicas of virtual objects or on custom-made devices mimicking the original ones. Unfortunately, the former are not flexible enough in terms of reconfigurability, whereas the latter may be difficult to reproduce. To tackle these issues, this paper explores the possibility to build passive haptic interfaces using off-the-shelf toy construction bricks. Bricks can be assembled to provide the intended feedback in more than one task. Moreover, they may be reassembled in another application to mimic completely new objects and support totally different tasks.