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.

The inherent freedom of exploration in virtual reality poses a challenge for directing user attention toward relevant points or objects of interest, which are potentially located outside the user's field of view or are temporarily obscured. Accordingly, guidance must sustain users' perceptual focus while preserving the sense of presence. This paper presents RippleVision, a subtle gaze guidance technique using wave-like ripples that modulate brightness with inverted polarity between the eyes and appear only within a cone from the point of interest to the gaze location. A calibration study defined detectability and acceptability thresholds for the cues, followed by a comparative user study against four state-of-the-art techniques. Results show RippleVision achieves similar search times to clearly visible techniques while significantly reducing visual dominance. Moreover, its effectiveness scales with cue visibility, improving search performance with minimal impact on perceived visual obstruction and presence.

Tools for collecting fine-grained programming process data may use pseudonyms when linking the data to students to increase privacy. However, some of these tools allow researchers or instructors to access the pseudonym mapping. Others do not sufficiently consider the students' device usage, which may introduce bias when multiple devices are used, or when devices are reset or replaced. We propose a novel technique that addresses these limitations by generating pseudonyms using login credentials to university accounts. In addition, we provide results on a survey about device usage in introductory programming courses. These suggest that the vast majority of our students use more than one device and that the majority reset or replace their device at least once. We conclude that our technique is of considerable interest, particularly in contexts where compliance with legal or ethical regulations is required.

Collecting fine-grained programming process data may require students’ informed consent in order to comply with ethical and legal regulations. Previous studies suggest that such consent is not always given in the context of graded introductory programming courses due to students’ concerns about being accused of plagiarism. Little is known about the students’ willingness to give consent in these contexts and what strategies can be used to increase consent. In this work, we propose a novel strategy that combines data encryption with a data trustee to address a conflict of interest that arises when instructors are involved in research. Trustee-based encryption prevents instructors and researchers from accessing collected data until students have been graded while ensuring that data can be recovered if students drop out of the course. We present initial evidence that student councils are suitable candidates to serve as data trustees in higher education. To determine the impact of our strategy on consent, we conducted two experiments with computer science students enrolled in graded introductory programming courses at a German university. While we were unable to find evidence for increased willingness to consent, we found evidence that trustee-based encryption reduces signs of anxiety about the misuse of collected data. As such, our strategy can be considered beneficial for obtaining informed consent. In contexts where such consent is not required, trustee-based encryption could prevent missing or biased data caused by students who attempt to bypass data collection.

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.

For evaluating the appearance and design language of car interiors, the surface quality and shapes are inspected by highly trained professionals. At the same time, virtual reality (VR) is making major progress, pushing the boundaries of this technology. In this paper, we evaluate the applicability of VR using head mounted displays (HMDs) in an experiment where we had experts examine the design quality of an interior in VR and compared the results with the examination on a powerwall as well as in reality. Our goal is to find out in how far current VR hardware can be used in the automotive industry and which advantages and disadvantages occur. Our results show that the experts are able to detect an amount of flaws comparable to reality with the powerwall being the superior medium in terms of flaws identified. Additionally, symptoms of cybersickness and a reduced lack of confidence was measured in the subjects using a HMD.

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.

In the process of construction work, taking notes of real world objects like walls, pipes, cables and others is an important task. The ad hoc capturing of small information pieces on such objects on site can be challenging when there is no specialized technology available. Handwritten or hand drawn notes on paper are good for textual information like measurements whereas images are better to capture the physical state of objects. Without a proper combination however the benefit is limited. In this paper we present an interaction system for taking ad hoc notes on real world objects by using a combination of a smartphone and a laserpointer as input device. Our interface enables the user to directly annotate objects by drawing on them and to store these annotations for later reviewing. The deictic gestures of the user are then replayed on a stitched image of the scene. The users voice input is captured and analyzed to integrate additional Information. The user can mark positions and place hand taken measurements by pointing on the objects and speaking the corresponding voice commands.

Besides visual validations of virtual car models, immersive applications like a Virtual Seating Buck enable car designers and engineers to decide product related issues without building expensive hardware prototypes. For replacing real models, it is mandatory that decision makers can rely on VR-based findings. However, especially when using a Head Mounted Display, users complain about an unnatural perception of space. Such misperceptions have already been reported in literature where several evaluation methods have been proposed for researching possible causes. Unfortunately, most of the methods do not represent the scenarios usually found in the automotive industry, since they focus on too large distances of five to fifteen meters. In this paper, we present an evaluation scenario adapted to size and distance perception within the reach of the user. With this method, we analyzed our standard setups and found a systematic error that is lower than aberrations reported by earlier research work. Furthermore, we tried to mitigate perception errors by a Depth of Field Blur applied to the virtual images.

Efficient creation of high-quality mixed reality content is challenging today due to a variety of difficult problems not only on a technological level, but also on an author role level, production process level and testing level. We propose a concept that takes a significant step towards solving these problems on all different levels simultaneously. Our concept combines component and framework-based approaches with the idea of providing a dedicated authoring environment in mixed reality. The concept serves as a basis for novel authoring metaphors and production processes that can be supported by specific authoring tools. Beside the concepts, we also deal with implementation aspects and give an illustration in the context of communicating cultural heritage

Optical tracking with fiducial markers is commonly used in augmented reality (AR) systems - AR systems that rely on the ARToolKit (Kato and Billinghurst, 1999) are prominent examples. The information obtained by the tracking subsystem are widely used in AR, e.g. in order to calculate how virtual objects should be located and oriented. The results of extensive accuracy experiments with single markers are reported and made operational by the definition of an accuracy function. The results show a specific distribution of tracking accuracy dependent on distance as well as angle between camera and marker. This insight is applicable for designing the set-up of AR applications in general that rely on optical tracking.

A 3D information space is a three-dimensional visualization that contains 2D visualizations and puts them in a semantic context. In this paper, we sketch how mixed reality (MR) can be exploited as a technology in order to realize better interaction in a 3D information space and, as a result, to develop new interactive visualization techniques. Here, the real space is used as a metaphor for interacting with the 3D information space.

An approach for authoring virtual environments within the virtual environments themselves is presented, integrating a database containing arbitrary components that are used to construct the 3D scene. The issues important to a seamless integration of the database, such as multimedia data storage and database linkage are discussed, with the focus on the human‐computer interaction component. A concept for a 3D database interface is described for query, presentation and usage of query results in the virtual environment. Finally, an implementation of the concept using VRML and Java is presented.

In this paper we examine the potential of the virtual reality modeling language (VRML) to support different methodologies used in virtual reality (VR), like head tracking or special VR input and output devices. A realization concept is presented and its implementation in the VRML browser CASUS Presenter is described.

3D animation is becoming a key technology in application areas such as information visualization, telecommunications or teaching and training systems. In addition, the application potential of 3D animation is growing due to innovations like VRML. The authoring of 3D scenes and animations is, therefore, increasingly becoming a task in areas other than its classical application areas, entertainment and marketing, and is not only performed by professional computer animators. Accordingly, there is a rising demand for authoring tools that are efficient and easy to use, cost-effective, flexible and suitable for distributed systems. In this paper a concept for authoring 3D animations that can fulfil these requirements is presented. Based upon an element-oriented approach similar to clip art in drawing, authoring efficiency is increased. The concept is described and its implementation and applications are briefly discussed.