This work describes the iterative design and development of a Virtual Reality (VR) tool intended to explore how immersive technologies can support autistic adolescents when facing everyday situations characterised by uncertainty. We report the results of a co-design workshop with four psychologists specialised in neurodevelopmental intervention, which led to the creation of storyboards about uncertainty in a supermarket context. Results include sensory and social considerations in the simulation of uncertainty, as well as coping strategies and design implications for virtual environments with potential clinical relevance. These storyboards were used to develop a mid-fidelity prototype of a VR system. We then invited six autistic adolescents (aged 10-18) to interact with the prototype and act as expert advisors. Feedback data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and field observations. Our findings reveal that designing for autonomy in VR experiences is shaped by tensions related to individual, social, and interactive aspects. This work contributes to research on designing VR tools for autistic people by providing critical reflections on autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Simulations are frequently used in first aid training to help first aid operators experience real-world scenarios in a controlled, safe environment. In these simulations, special effects can be used to enhance the realism of the scene, such as fake blood and makeup. Although these offer very high realism, they are also non-reusable and have a long setup time. In this paper, we propose an augmented reality (AR) system to provide a platform for designing and implementing special effects for first aid simulations. The AR system was implemented with a focus on the simulation of bleeding wounds, and later tested on 18 operators from the local Red Cross section. Data collected with the questionnaires show that all operators provided medical assistance during the simulation, and all rated the AR experience as useful. Furthermore, 13 did not find any difficulties in using the AR system, while 7 mentioned realism as a positive aspect. However, 3 described the video clarity as insufficient and 3 noted the absence of sounds. Overall, the collected feedback indicates that the AR system can be a useful tool for training Red Cross operators in first-aid scenarios, and participants’ opinions provided valuable suggestions for further development.

When a theater is demolished, the performances, the acoustics, and the shared experience of attending disappear with the building. Virtual Reality can bring these elements back inside a reconstructed space, provided the reconstruction goes beyond static visualization. This work presents an integrated framework to enable shared, interactive and immersive visits to lost theatrical heritage, combining visual and acoustic reconstruction, a catalog of theatrical performances with subtitles, Points of Interest with multilingual audio narration, and real-time volumetric capture of remote visitors rendered as holographic presences inside the virtual space. The approach is demonstrated through Casa de Comedias de l’Olivera, a Valencian theater first built in 1584, rebuilt in 1618, and demolished in the mid eighteenth century.

Convincing crowd behavior simulation is becoming essential in many application domains, including video games, cinematography, urban planning, safety simulations, and training. In this article, we propose a novel and lightweight mesoscopic system for personality-based crowd simulation in immersive virtual reality (iVR). We use the Big Five personality framework, also known as OCEAN, to model a synthetic personality for each autonomous agent. Agents can autonomously aggregate in formations using machine learning-based clustering techniques operating on OCEAN. Moreover, agents can also externalize their personality traits by performing peculiar behavioral animations. To choose which animations to perform, we adopt a probabilistic approach that considers each OCEAN dimension as a continuous spectrum with two extremes linked to pairs of animations. Our system is designed to be flexible and suitable for different applications. Flexibility is achieved by using graphs to store agent and map topology data that control how the agents move and behave at runtime. In a within-subjects study with 40 users, we compare our personality-based system against a basic system that does not use personality. Results show that introducing personality into iVR crowd simulation enhances users' social presence and experienced realism. Introducing personality also increases the perceived match between the agents and the virtual environment where the simulation takes place.

The fidelity level of virtual reality (VR) setups can affect different aspects of virtual experiences, but its effects on knowledge acquisition and retention need clarification. The two studies in this paper focus on spatial knowledge. The first study compared three VR setups, one using a VR headset and two using a tablet, differing in display and interaction fidelity. Since the type of virtual environment (VE), and the locomotion technique employed to explore it, might affect spatial knowledge acquisition, we studied each setup in an indoor and an outdoor VE with two widely used locomotion techniques (teleport and steering). Results showed that setups offering higher display and interaction fidelity can improve acquisition of spatial knowledge in terms of distance estimations (with teleport in the indoor VE, and with steering in the outdoor VE) and object-to-object spatial relations (with steering in the outdoor VE), but not in terms of object locations. This can provide guidance about how to choose the appropriate combination of setup and locomotion technique based on the type of VE and the types of spatial knowledge to acquire. Moreover, sickness and usability results showed that VR headset was more usable than tablet, and suggest using teleport on VR headset and steering on tablet. Therefore, the second study focused on VR headset with teleport and tablet with steering, and extended the assessment of their effects to spatial knowledge retention after two weeks. Results showed that spatial knowledge decreased in both conditions, but the VR headset with teleport led to better acquisition and 2-weeks retention of distance estimations.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in serious games (SGs), i.e., digital games for education and training. However, although the potential scalability of SGs to large player populations is often praised in the literature, available SG evaluations did not provide evidence of it because they did not study learning on large, varied, international samples in naturalistic conditions. This article considers a SG that educates players about aircraft cabin safety. It presents the first study of learning in a SG intervention conducted in naturalistic conditions with a very large, worldwide sample, which includes 45,000 players who accepted to answer a knowledge questionnaire before and after playing the game, and more than 400,000 players whose in-game behavior was analyzed. Results show that the SG led to improvement in players' knowledge, assessed with different metrics. Moreover, analysis of repeated play shows that participants improved their in-game safety behavior over time. We also focus on the role of making errors in the game, showing how they led to improvement in knowledge. Finally, we highlight the theoretical models, such as error-based learning and Protection Motivation Theory, that oriented the game design, and can be reused to create SGs for other domains.

Recent VR head-mounted displays for consumers feature 3-DOF or 6-DOF head tracking. However, position tracking (when available) is limited to a small area. Moreover, in small or cluttered physical spaces, users can safely experience VR only by staying in place, standing or seated. Different locomotion techniques have been proposed to allow users to explore virtual environments by staying in place. Two in-place locomotion techniques, frequently employed in the literature and in consumer applications, are based on joystick and teleport. Some authors explored leaning with the aim of proposing a more natural in-place locomotion technique. However, more research is needed to understand the effects of the three techniques, since no user study thoroughly compared them all together on a variety of fundamental aspects. Therefore, this paper presents a comparative evaluation with 75 users, assessing the effects of the three techniques on performance, sickness, presence, usability, and different aspects of comfort. Performance of teleport was better than the other techniques, and performance of leaning was better than joystick. Teleport also caused less nausea than the other techniques. Unexpectedly, no significant differences were found for presence. Teleport received a higher usability score than the other techniques. Finally, the techniques had different effects on comfort that we discuss in detail.

The increasing availability of head-mounted displays (HMDs) for home use motivates the study of the possible effects that adopting this new hardware might have on users. Moreover, while the impact of display type has been studied for different kinds of tasks, it has been scarcely explored in procedural training. Our study considered three different types of displays used by participants for training in aviation safety procedures with a serious game. The three displays were respectively representative of: (i) desktop VR (a standard desktop monitor), (ii) many setups for immersive VR used in the literature (an HMD with narrow field of view and a 3-DOF tracker), and (iii) new setups for immersive home VR (an HMD with wide field of view and 6-DOF tracker). We assessed effects on knowledge gain, and different self-reported measures (self-efficacy, engagement, presence). Unlike previous studies of display type that measured effects only immediately after the VR experience, we considered also a longer time span (2 weeks). Results indicated that the display type played a significant role in engagement and presence. The training benefits (increased knowledge and self-efficacy) were instead obtained, and maintained at two weeks, regardless of the display used. The paper discusses the implications of these results.

Thanks to the increasing availability of consumer head-mounted displays, educational applications of immersive VR could now reach to the general public, especially if they include gaming elements (immersive serious games). Safety education of citizens could be a particularly promising domain for immersive serious games, because people tend not to pay attention to and benefit from current safety materials. In this paper, we propose an HMD-based immersive game for educating passengers about aviation safety that allows players to experience a serious aircraft emergency with the goal of surviving it. We compare the proposed approach to a traditional aviation safety education method (the safety card) used by airlines. Unlike most studies of VR for safety knowledge acquisition, we do not focus only on assessing learning immediately after the experience but we extend our attention to knowledge retention over a longer time span. This is a fundamental requirement, because people need to retain safety procedures in order to apply them when faced with danger. A knowledge test administered before, immediately after and one week after the experimental condition showed that the immersive serious game was superior to the safety card. Moreover, subjective as well as physiological measurements employed in the study showed that the immersive serious game was more engaging and fear-arousing than the safety card, a factor that can contribute to explain the obtained superior retention, as we discuss in the paper.

Virtual Reality (VR), in the form of 3D interactive simulations of emergency scenarios, is increasingly used for emergency preparedness training. This paper advances knowledge about different aspects of such virtual emergency experiences, showing that: (i) the designs we propose in the paper are effective in improving emergency preparedness of common citizens, considering aviation safety as a relevant case study, (ii) changing specific visual and auditory features is effective to create emotionally different versions of the same experience, increasing the level of fear aroused in users, and (iii) the protection motivation role of fear highlighted by psychological studies of traditional media applies to desktop VR too.

Fast and effective communication is crucial during medical emergencies, but patients' disabilities can make it a challenging task for emergency medical responders. This paper proposes a mobile system to deal with the communication barrier between medical responders and deaf patients. The system allows medical responders to quickly browse a collection of emergency-related sentences, and show videos of the corresponding translations in sign language to the deaf patients. The design process involved experts in emergency medicine as well as experts from the deaf community. The evaluation carried out on ten emergency medical responders and ten deaf subjects showed that the system is useful to support communication with deaf people during medical emergencies.

Our research aims at proposing a user-adaptive and context-aware architecture for mobile and desktop training applications. Our main result to date in the Mobile HCI field is an adaptive wearable system for fitness training.

Embodied agents are employed in several applications (e.g. computer-based presentations, help systems, e-learning and training, sign language communication for the deaf), but the process of developing them is still complex (e.g., modeling animations is one of the difficult and time-consuming tasks). Moreover, although mobile devices have recently reached a performance level that allows them to manage 3D graphics, most embodied agents run on desktop computers only. The aim of our research is twofold: (i) proposing a tool that allows novice users to approach the animation modeling process of 3D anthropomorphic agents in a simple way, and (ii) proposing a 3D player to display these animated agents on PDAs. Besides discussing in detail the proposed system, the paper reports about its informal evaluation and two of its applications: sign language animation for the deaf and mobile fitness training.

Sports and fitness are increasingly attracting the interest of computer science researchers as well as companies. In particular, recent mobile devices with hardware graphics acceleration offer new, still unexplored possibilities. This paper investigates the use of mobile guides in fitness activities, proposing the Mobile Personal Trainer (MOPET) application. MOPET uses a GPS device to monitor user's position during her physical activity in an outdoor fitness trail. It provides navigation assistance by using a fitness trail map and giving speech directions. Moreover, MOPET provides motivation support and exercise demonstrations by using an embodied virtual trainer, called Evita. Evita shows how to correctly perform the exercises along the trail with 3D animations and incites the user. To the best of our knowledge, our project is the first to employ a mobile guide for fitness activities. The effects of MOPET on motivation, as well as its navigational and training support, have been experimentally evaluated with 12 users. Evaluation results encourage the use of mobile guides and embodied virtual trainers in outdoor fitness applications.