This study explores the role of explanatory narration, delivered as non-diegetic audio—in supporting conceptual understanding and long-term motivation in immersive virtual reality (VR). Building on an open-source VR simulation where users embody an Adélie penguin, we conducted a between-subjects experiment (N = 30) to examine how synchronized narration impacts learning outcomes, embodiment, and post-experience engagement. Participants performed four embodied tasks—waddling, nesting, mating, and predator defense—with or without narration. Assessments included immediate and delayed knowledge tests, a 16-item embodiment questionnaire, and motivation measures three weeks post-experience.

This study evaluates augmented reality (AR) tools for spatial measurement in the Augmented Reality Home Assessment Tool, designed for consumer-grade mobile phones. The tool provides a reliable home assessment method based on residents’ functional limitations. A mixed-methods study with a convergent parallel design compared AR and traditional methods across speed, accuracy, ease of use, and user confidence. Learnability was tested through repeated measures with 32 participants in a within-subjects design. Results showed AR tools were faster, more accurate, easier to use, and boosted confidence, though a slight learning curve was noted. Qualitative methods, including think-aloud protocols, interviews, and observations, identified usability concerns related to information accessibility, user control, and cognitive aspects. Findings highlight the potential of phone-based AR for identifying residential barriers, supporting high-quality self-assessment for users familiar with mobile technology.

First responders (FRs) navigate hazardous, unfamiliar environments in the field (e.g., mass-casualty incidents), making life-changing decisions in a split second. AR head-mounted displays (HMDs) have shown promise in supporting them due to its capability of recognizing and augmenting the challenging environments in a hands-free manner. However, the design space have not been thoroughly explored by involving various FRs who serve different roles (e.g., firefighters, law enforcement) but collaborate closely in the field. We interviewed 26 first responders in the field who experienced a state-of-the-art optical-see-through AR HMD, as well as its interaction techniques and four types of AR cues (i.e., overview cues, directional cues, highlighting cues, and labeling cues), soliciting their first-hand experiences, design ideas, and concerns. Our study revealed both generic and role-specific preferences and needs for AR hardware, interactions, and feedback, as well as identifying desired AR designs tailored to urgent, risky scenarios (e.g., affordance augmentation to facilitate fast and safe action). While acknowledging the value of AR HMDs, concerns were also raised around trust, privacy, and proper integration with other equipment. Finally, we derived comprehensive and actionable design guidelines to inform future AR systems for in-field FRs.

Home modification interventions can remedy deficiencies in the home environments of the growing number of older adults that want to age in place. Unfortunately, performing an assessment of a home environment is a difficult process, often requiring numerous measurements from a skilled practitioner. To address these gaps in practice, we used an iterative co-design process to develop a first prototype of a novel augmented reality home assessment tool (ARHAT) that can be utilized more rapidly by both individuals in and outside of health care, as well as performed either on or off-site. The aim of this work is to create a tool for major stakeholders involved in supporting housing design and aging in place, thereby reaching and making a difference in the lives of more older adults.

This paper presents, Waddle, a virtual experience to promote informal learning by embodying the user as an Adélie Penguin to partake in a narrative-based virtual reality application that shares the story of the lives of these unique animals. We test the effects of this experience on informal learning and empathy, an important component for fostering social engagement with ecology. The research demonstrates that the developed experience is able to support informal learning, virtual embodiment, and is able to create a positive change in empathy.

Using one’s hands can be a natural and intuitive method for interacting with 3D objects in a mixed reality environment. This study explores three hand-interaction techniques, including the gaze and pinch, touch and grab, and worlds-in-miniature interaction for selecting and moving virtual furniture in the 3D scene. Overall, a comparative analysis reveals that the worlds-in-miniature provided the best usability and task performance than other studied techniques. We also conducted in-depth interviews and analyzed participants’ hand gestures in order to identify desired attributes for 3D hand interaction design. Findings from interviews suggest that, when it comes to enjoyment and discoverability, users prefer directly manipulating the virtual furniture to interacting with objects remotely or using in-direct interactions such as gaze. Another insight this study provides is the critical roles of the virtual object’s visual appearance in designing natural hand interaction. Gesture analysis reveals that shapes of furniture, as well as its perceived features such as weight, largely determined the participant’s instinctive form of hand interaction (i.e., lift, grab, push). Based on these findings, we present design suggestions that can aid 3D interaction designers to develop a natural and intuitive hand interaction for mixed reality.

Viewers of virtual reality appear to have an incorrect sense of space when performing blind directed-action tasks, such as blind walking or blind throwing. It has been shown that various manipulations can influence this incorrect sense of space, and that the degree of misperception varies by person. It follows that one could measure the degree of misperception an individual experiences and generate some manipulation to correct for it, though it is not clear that correct behavior in a specific blind directed action task leads to correct behavior in all tasks in general. In this work, we evaluate the effectiveness of correcting perceived distance in virtual reality by first measuring individual perceived distance through blind throwing, then manipulating sense of space using a vertex shader to make things appear more or less distant, to a degree personalized to the individual's perceived distance. Two variants of the manipulation are explored. The effects of these personalized manipulations are first evaluated when performing the same blind throwing task used to calibrate the manipulation. Then, in order to observe the effects of the manipulation on dissimilar tasks, participants perform two perceptual matching tasks which allow full visual feedback as objects, or the participants themselves, move through space.

The alignment of virtual and real coordinate spaces is a general problem in virtual reality research, as misalignments may influence experiments that depend on correct representation or registration of objects in space. This work proposes an automated alignment and correction for the HTC Vive tracking system by using three Vive Trackers arranged to describe the desired axis of origin in the real space. The proposed technique should facilitate the alignment of real and virtual scenes, and automatic correction of a source of error in the Vive tracking system shown to cause misalignments on the order of tens of centimeters. An initial proof-of-concept simulation on recorded data demonstrates a significant reduction of error.

Distance misperception (sometimes, distance compression) in immersive virtual environments is an active area of study, and the recent availability of consumer-grade display and tracking technologies raises new questions: Can misperceptions be measured within the small tracking volumes of consumer-grade technology? Are measures practical within this space directly comparable, or are some preferable to others? Do contemporary displays even induce distance misperceptions? This work explores these questions.

Unity3D has become a popular, freely available 3D game engine for design and construction of virtual environments. Unfortunately, the few options that currently exist for adapting Unity3D to distributed immersive tiled or projection-based VR display systems rely on closed commercial products. Uni-CAVE aims to solve this problem by creating a freely-available and easy to use Unity3D extension package for cluster-based VR display systems. This extension provides support for head and device tracking, stereo rendering and display synchronization. Furthermore, Uni-CAVE enables configuration within the Unity environment enabling researchers to get quickly up and running.

Distance has been shown to be incorrectly estimated in virtual environments relative to the same estimation tasks in a real environment. This work describes a preliminary exploration of Perceptual Space Warping, which influences perceived distance in virtual environments by using a vertex shader to warp geometry. Empirical tests demonstrate significant effects, but of smaller magnitude than expected.

Previous approaches to rendering large point clouds on immersive displays have generally created a trade-off between interactivity and quality. While these approaches have been quite successful for desktop environments when interaction is limited, virtual reality systems are continuously interactive, which forces users to suffer through either low frame rates or low image quality. This paper presents a novel approach to this problem through a progressive feedback-driven rendering algorithm. This algorithm uses reprojections of past views to accelerate the reconstruction of the current view. The presented method is tested against previous methods, showing improvements in both rendering quality and interactivity.

This document introduces a new application for rendering massive LiDAR point cloud data sets of interior environments within highresolution immersive VR display systems. Overall contributions are: to create an application which is able to visualize large-scale point clouds at interactive rates in immersive display environments, to develop a flexible pipeline for processing LiDAR data sets that allows display of both minimally processed and more rigorously processed point clouds, and to provide visualization mechanisms that produce accurate rendering of interior environments to better understand physical aspects of interior spaces. The work introduces three problems with producing accurate immersive rendering of Li-DAR point cloud data sets of interiors and presents solutions to these problems. Rendering performance is compared between the developed application and a previous immersive LiDAR viewer.

Search has been unfairly maligned within digital humanities big data research. While many digital tools lack a wide audience due to the uncertainty of researchers regarding their operation and/or skepticism towards their utility, search offers functions already familiar and potentially transparent to a range of users. To adapt search to the scale of Big Data, we offer Scaled Entity Search (SES). Designed as an interpretive method to accompany an under-construction application that allows users to search hundreds or thousands of entities across a corpus simultaneously, SES balances critical reflection on the entities, corpus, and digital with an appreciation of how all of these factors interact to shape both our results and our future questions. Using examples from film and broadcasting history, we demonstrate the process and value of SES as performed over a corpus of 1.3 million pages of media industry documents.

This paper utilizes muscle exertions as a means to affect and study the behavior of participants in a virtual environment. Participants performed a simple lifting task both physically using an actual weight and virtually. In the virtual environment participants were presented with two different types of virtual presentation methods, one in which the weights were shown as a 3D model in the Immersive Visuals scenario and one in which the weights were shown as a simple line in the bland scenario. In the virtual scenarios, the object is only lifted when the participant's muscle activity, measured by surface EMG, exceeds a calibrated minimum level as described in previous literature. We found that while participants were able to perceive the difference for various weights both physically and virtually, we found no significant differences in the perceived efforts between the presentation methods. However, while the participants subjectively indicated that their effort was the same for each of these presentation methods, we found significant differences in the muscle activity between the two virtual presentation methods. For all primary mover muscle groups and weights, the more immersive virtual presentation method led to exertions that were much more approximate to the exertions used for the physical weights.

This paper introduces a distributed approach for playback of video content at resolutions of 4K (digital cinema) and well beyond. This approach is designed for scalable, high-resolution, multi-tile display environments, which are controlled by a cluster of machines, with each node driving one or multiple displays. A preparatory tiling pass separates the original video into a user definable n-by-m array of equally sized video tiles, each of which is individually compressed. By only reading and rendering the video tiles that correspond to a given node's viewpoint, the computation power required for video playback can be distributed over multiple machines, resulting in a highly scalable video playback system. This approach exploits the computational parallelism of the display cluster while only using minimal network resources in order to maintain software-level synchronization of the video playback. While network constraints limit the maximum resolution of other high-resolution video playback approaches, this algorithm is able to scale to video at resolutions of tens of millions of pixels and beyond. Furthermore the system allows for flexible control of the video characteristics, allowing content to be interactively reorganized while maintaining smooth playback. This approach scales well for concurrent playback of multiple videos and does not require any specialized video decoding hardware to achieve ultra-high resolution video playback.

The perception of objects, depth, and distance has been repeatedly shown to be divergent between virtual and physical environments. We hypothesize that many of these discrepancies stem from incorrect geometric viewing parameters, specifically that physical measurements of eye position are insufficiently precise to provide proper viewing parameters. In this paper, we introduce a perceptual calibration procedure derived from geometric models. While most research has used geometric models to predict perceptual errors, we instead use these models inversely to determine perceptually correct viewing parameters. We study the advantages of these new psychophysically determined viewing parameters compared to the commonly used measured viewing parameters in an experiment with 20 subjects. The perceptually calibrated viewing parameters for the subjects generally produced new virtual eye positions that were wider and deeper than standard practices would estimate. Our study shows that perceptually calibrated viewing parameters can significantly improve depth acuity, distance estimation, and the perception of shape.

Externally observing the experience of a participant in a virtual environment is generally accomplished by viewing an egocentric perspective. Monitoring this view can often be difficult for others to watch due to unwanted camera motions that appear unnatural and unmotivated. We present a novel method for reducing the unnaturalness of these camera motions by minimizing camera movement while maintaining the context of the participant's observations. For each time-step, we compare the parts of the scene viewed by the virtual participant to the parts of the scene viewed by the camera. Based on the similarity of these two viewpoints we next determine how the camera should be adjusted. We present two means of adjustment, one which continuously adjusts the camera and a second which attempts to stop camera movement when possible. Empirical evaluation shows that our method can produce paths that have substantially shorter travel distances, are easier to watch and maintain the original observations of the participant's virtual experience.

Direct replay of the experience of a user in a virtual environment is difficult for others to watch due to unnatural camera motions. We present methods for replaying and summarizing these egocentric experiences that effectively communicate the user's observations while reducing unwanted camera movements. Our approach summarizes the viewpoint path as a concise sequence of viewpoints that cover the same parts of the scene. The core of our approach is a novel content-dependent metric that can be used to identify similarities between viewpoints. This enables viewpoints to be grouped by similar contextual view information and provides a means to generate novel viewpoints that can encapsulate a series of views. These resulting encapsulated viewpoints are used to synthesize new camera paths that convey the content of the original viewer's experience. Projecting the initial movement of the user back on the scene can be used to convey the details of their observations, and the extracted viewpoints can serve as bookmarks for control or analysis. Finally we present performance analysis along with two forms of validation to test whether the extracted viewpoints are representative of the viewer's original observations and to test for the overall effectiveness of the presented replay methods.

Tiled display environments present opportune workspaces for displaying multimedia content. Often times, displaying this kind of audio/visual information requires a substantial amount of network bandwidth. In this paper we present a method for distributing the decoding over the entire display environment, allowing for substantially less network overhead. This method also allows for interactive configuration of the visual workspace. The method described scales independently of video frame size and produces lower latency compared to streaming approaches.

Abstract A visual analytics technique for the intuitive, hands‐on analysis of massive, multi‐dimensional and multi‐variate data is presented. This multi‐touch‐based technique introduces a set of metaphors such as wiping, scratching, sandblasting, squeezing and drilling, which allow for rapid analysis of global and local characteristics in the data set, accounting for factors such as gesture size, pressure and speed. A case study is provided for the analysis of multi‐spectral image data of cultural artefacts. By aligning multi‐spectral layers in a stack, users can apply different multi‐touch metaphors to investigate features across different wavelengths. With this technique, flexibly definable regions can be interrogated concurrently without affecting surrounding data.