This study examined the impact of a "white lie" designed to boost motivation during virtual reality exercise on enjoyment and mental fatigue. Participants engaged in a ball-throwing or ball-targeting task and were randomly assigned to groups with or without the white lie. Results indicated that both groups experienced similar levels of enjoyment and fatigue, suggesting the white lie had minimal effect on these factors. All participants, regardless of group, reported high levels of enjoyment, with 17 out of 18 indicating they had fun, no significant differences in mental fatigue were found between groups while participants generally favored the white lie. However, the positive experience across all participants highlights the potential of Virtual Reality for promoting exercise engagement.

Assistive agents have to adapt training tasks according to the needs of the users. Virtual Reality can be helpful in understanding the best support strategies to improve people’s motivation, performance and confidence in their capabilities, defined as self-efficacy. When given a virtual body, users can develop a sense of embodiment towards it. We developed a ball-throwing training system that is able to support users by enhancing the sphere’s trajectory without them being aware of it, to increase their confidence. We analyzed the influence of the support system on sense of embodiment and found that it persisted despite the alterations.

In Virtual Reality, the need to understand how subjects perceive their representation is gaining attention and importance. We present a contribution to a better understanding of the sense of embodiment by assessing two of its main components, body ownership and agency, through an experiment involving alien motion. The key aspect of the experimental protocol is to integrate a condition with some personalized alien finger movement while the subject is asked to remain still. Body ownership appears to be significantly reduced, but not agency. We also propose a metric to assess quantitatively that the view of the alien movement induces more finger posture variation compared to the reference context in the still condition.

Gaze detection in Virtual Reality systems is mostly performed using eye-tracking devices. The coordinates of the sight, as well as other data regarding the eyes, are used as input values for the applications. While this trend is becoming more and more popular in the interaction design of immersive systems, most visors do not come with an embedded eye-tracker, especially those that are low cost and maybe based on mobile phones. We suggest implementing an innovative gaze estimation system into virtual environments as a source of information regarding users intentions. We propose a solution based on a combination of the features of the images and the movement of the head as an input of a Deep Convolutional Neural Network capable of inferring the 2D gaze coordinates in the imaging plane.

Design and engineering of space vehicles involve several different disciplines, each of which have specific research methodologies and software tools. Interaction among the physical analysis tools, as well as collaboration among teams, is a delicate and difficult subject of collaborative engineering research topics. This paper presents a solution based on a new technical and interaction design. We encourage the development of Virtual Reality 3D applications to interface the tools that perform the quantitative physical analysis of given space vehicles, as this approach improves productivity and communication effectiveness and brings consisting benefits to the engineering and design collaborative processes. As an evaluation of this method, we report the design and implementation of two Virtual Reality Applications specifically developed for the European Space Agency's space vehicle IXV. This evaluation showed that users found the Virtual Reality interface easy to use and likely to be useful in their own work. The benefits underlined by this method brought to the acquirement of this approach as the new future standard methodology in pre-launch phases of space vehicles.