It is our great pleasure to welcome you to Greenville, South Carolina, for the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality (IEEE VR) 2016. This is the 18th year of the premiere conference in virtual reality and 3D interaction in the world, and we are proud to host it here in South Carolina. In recent years, the conference has travelled to Singapore, Orange County, USA, Orlando, USA, Minneapolis, USA, and Arles, France. During these years the conference has grown in many respects, yet the basic format of mostly a single-track technical session has changed little. This year's conference, however, will feature some notable departures from previous years while still keeping with our cherished traditions of the IEEE VR conference.

In this paper we report on the design and results of a one-week, residential summer camp experience that introduced computing concepts to middle school girls in the context of an online, multiplayer, virtual world known as the Curiosity Grid. In contrast to programming environments designed specifically as teaching tools to introduce children to programming, virtual world programming exposes novice learners to a more representative computer science experience. Students write real code and get real syntax errors when their code is not correct. They also design objects in a three-dimensional world where knowledge of mathematical concepts such as 3-D global and local coordinate systems, and 3-D transformations are important to the creation of objects and behaviors. Programming artifacts from the camp and feedback from the camp participants provide a strong argument that middle school girls can handle the challenge of this approach and even be enthusiastic about it.

Simulation training using virtual patients can provide many benefits for nursing and medcial students in learning patient interaction skills, especially since virtual patients can represent a wide range of patient scenarios and demographics that are not typically represented through roleplay or clinical rotations. However, creation of a single virtual patient scenario may take six months or more, so it is difficult to provide many unique scenarios during the course of a nurse's education. In this work, I propose the user-centered design, creation, and evaluation of a scenario-builder tool to enable nursing faculty to create their own scenarios, reducing development costs.

We empirically examined the impact of virtual human animation on the emotional responses of participants in a medical virtual reality system for education in the signs and symptoms of patient deterioration. Participants were presented with one of two virtual human conditions in a between-subjects experiment, static (non-animated) and dynamic (animated). Our objective measures included the use of psycho-physical Electro Dermal Activity (EDA) sensors, and subjective measures inspired by social psychology research included the Differential Emotions Survey (DES IV) and Positive and Negative Affect Survey (PANAS). We analyzed the quantitative and qualitative measures associated with participants’ emotional state at four distinct time-steps in the simulated interpersonal experience as the virtual patient’s medical condition deteriorated. Results suggest that participants in the dynamic condition with animations exhibited a higher sense of co-presence and greater emotional response as compared to participants in the static condition, corresponding to the deterioration in the medical condition of the virtual patient. Negative affect of participants in the dynamic condition increased at a higher rate than for participants in the static condition. The virtual human animations elicited a stronger response in negative emotions such as anguish, fear, and anger as the virtual patient’s medical condition worsened.

One of the most common clinical education methods for teaching patient interaction skills to nursing students is role-playing established scenarios with their classmates. Unfortunately, this is far from simulating real world experiences that they will soon face, and does not provide the immediate, impartial feedback necessary for interviewing skills development. We present a system for Scaffolded Interviews Developed by Nurses In Education (SIDNIE) that supports baccalaureate nursing education by providing multiple guided interview practice sessions with virtual characters. Our scenario depicts a mother who has brought in her five year old child to the clinic. In this paper we describe our system and report on a preliminary usability evaluation conducted with nursing students.

We present a set of demonstrations of current work in the Clemson University Virtual Environments Group involving the development and testing of interactive virtual environments for applications in training, rehabilitation and workforce development. All of these applications are designed to leverage commodity hardware such as HDTVs, game controllers, and the Kinect sensor.

We report a series of experiments conducted to investigate the effects of travel technique on information gathering and cognition in complex virtual environments. In the first experiment, participants completed a non-branching multilevel 3D maze at their own pace using either real walking or one of two virtual travel techniques. In the second experiment, we constructed a real-world maze with branching pathways and modeled an identical virtual environment. Participants explored either the real or virtual maze for a predetermined amount of time using real walking or a virtual travel technique. Our results across experiments suggest that for complex environments requiring a large number of turns, virtual travel is an acceptable substitute for real walking if the goal of the application involves learning or reasoning based on information presented in the virtual world. However, for applications that require fast, efficient navigation or travel that closely resembles real-world behavior, real walking has advantages over common joystick-based virtual travel techniques.

We report on a study in which we investigate the effects of travel technique on simulator sickness in a real and virtual environment. Participants explored either a real maze or a virtual maze using either natural walking or simulated walking. Reported scores for measures of overall simulator sickness, disorientation, nausea, and occulomotor discomfort were all higher in the natural walking condition than either the simulated walking or real world conditions. This indicates that simulated walking is a better choice for reducing simulator sickness during tasks requiring a navigationally complex environment and a long amount of time.

Do human-human social interactions carry over to human-virtual human social interactions? How does this affect future interface designers? We replicated classical tests of social influence known as the social facilitation and inhibition effects. Social facilitation/inhibition theory states that when in the presence of others, people perform simple tasks better and complex tasks worse. Participants were randomly assigned to perform both simple and complex tasks alone and in the presence of either a real human, a projected virtual human, or a virtual human in a head-mounted display. Our results showed participants were inhibited by the presence of others, whether real or virtual. That is, participants performed worse on the complex task, both in terms of percent correct and reaction times, when in the presence of others than when alone. Social facilitation did not occur with the real or virtual human. We discuss these results and their implications for future interface designers.

We investigated the effects of using immersive virtual humans to teach users social conversational verbal and non-verbal protocols in south Indian culture. The study was conducted using a between-subjects experimental design, and compared instruction and interactive feedback from immersive virtual humans against instruction based on a written study guide with illustrations of the social protocols. Participants were then tested on how well they learned the social conversational protocols by exercising the social conventions in front of videos of real people. The results of our study suggest that participants who trained with the virtual humans performed significantly better than the participants who studied from literature.

Traditionally, students study plays by reading from a book. However, reading dialogue on paper does not always communicate the various emotions and actions that help people understand the significance of the person-to-person interactions that are represented.

An analysis of court cases has revealed that the mistaken identification of the wrong person by victims and witnesses of a crime is the single most common error leading to the arrest and conviction of innocent people [Wells et al. 2006]. Recognizing the role of mistaken identification in erroneous conviction, a growing number of states and police departments have reformed their eyewitness identification procedures. In this paper, we investigate a new procedural reform: the use of a virtual officer who does not know the identity of the suspect in the lineup and therefore cannot bias the witness toward false identification.

Using both hands for 3D interaction allows users to transfer ingrained interaction skills, significantly increase performance on certain tasks, and reduce training [Bowman et al. 2005]. Guiard's framework of Bimanual manipulation states that different classes of bimanual actions exist [1997]. The Bimanual Asymmetric classification consists of both hands, performing different actions, coordinated to accomplish the same task. The Bimanual Symmetric classification involves each hand performing identical actions, either synchronously or asynchronously. Latulipe et al. compared a symmetric, dual-mouse technique for manipulation of spline curves, to two asymmetric dual-mouse techniques and a standard single-mouse technique. The symmetric technique performed best and was most preferred by participants [2006].

This study examines the roles of gender and visual realism in the persuasiveness of speakers. Participants were presented with a persuasive passage delivered by a male or female person, virtual human, or virtual character. They were then assessed on attitude change and their ratings of the argument, message, and speaker. The results indicated that the virtual speakers were as effective at changing attitudes as real people. Male participants were more persuaded when the speaker was female than when the speaker was male, whereas female participants were more persuaded when the speaker was male than when the speaker was female. Cross gender interactions occurred across all conditions, suggesting that some of the gender stereotypes that occur with people may carry over to interaction with virtual characters. Ratings of the perceptions of the speaker were more favorable for virtual speakers than for human speakers. We discuss the application of these findings in the design of persuasive human computer interfaces.

User-centered design is often performed without regard to individual user differences in aptitude and experience. The methodology of this study is an anthropological and observational approach observing users performing a selection task using common virtual environment raybased techniques and analyzes the interaction through psychology aptitude tests, questionnaires and observation. The results of this study show the approach yields useful information about users even in a simple task. The study indicates correlations between performance and aptitude test and user behavior performed to overcome difficulties in the task.

We describe a between-subjects experiment that compared four different methods of travel and their effect on cognition and paths taken in an immersive virtual environment (IVE). Participants answered a set of questions based on Crook's condensation of Bloom's taxonomy that assessed their cognition of the IVE with respect to knowledge, understanding and application, and higher mental processes. Participants also drew a sketch map of the IVE and the objects within it. The users' sense of presence was measured using the Steed-Usoh-Slater Presence Questionnaire. The participants' position and head orientation were automatically logged during their exposure to the virtual environment. These logs were later used to create visualizations of the paths taken. Path analysis, such as exploring the overlaid path visualizations and dwell data information, revealed further differences among the travel techniques. Our results suggest that, for applications where problem solving and evaluation of information is important or where opportunity to train is minimal, then having a large tracked space so that the participant can walk around the virtual environment provides benefits over common virtual travel techniques.

Level of detail (LOD) is widely used to control visual feedback in interactive applications. LOD control is typically based on perception at threshold -- the conditions in which a stimulus first becomes perceivable. Yet most LOD manipulations are quite perceivable and occur well above threshold. Moreover, research shows that supra-threshold perception differs drastically from perception at threshold. In that case, should supra-threshold LOD control also differ from LOD control at threshold?In two experiments, we examine supra-threshold LOD control in the visual periphery and find that indeed, it should differ drastically from LOD control at threshold. Specifically, we find that LOD must support a task-dependent level of reliable perceptibility. Above that level, perceptibility of LOD control manipulations should be minimized, and detail contrast is a better predictor of perceptibility than detail size. Below that level, perceptibility must be maximized, and LOD should be improved as eccentricity rises or contrast drops. This directly contradicts prevailing threshold-based LOD control schemes, and strongly suggests a reexamination of LOD control for foveal display.

Novel speech and/or gesture interfaces are candidates for use in future mobile or ubiquitous applications. This paper describes an evaluation of various interfaces for visual navigation of a whole Earth 3D terrain model. A mouse driven interface, a speech interface, a gesture interface, and a multimodal speech and gesture interface were used to navigate to targets placed at various points on the Earth. This study measured each participant's recall of target identity, order, and location as a measure of cognitive load. Timing information as well as a variety of subjective measures including discomfort and user preference were taken. While the familiar and mature mouse interface scored best by most measures, the speech interface also performed well. The gesture and multimodal interface suffered from weaknesses in the gesture modality. Weaknesses in the speech and multimodal modalities are identified and areas for improvement are discussed.

Virtual Reality (VR) technology continues to evolve from the realm of an “expensive toy” into that of a functional technology. Although media hype may have oversold VR’s potential during the early 90’s, data has now emerged that supports its use as a valuable tool for cognitive, behavioral, physical, mental health and medical applications. Much like an aircraft simulator serves to test and train pilots under a variety of controlled conditions, VE simulations can model processes that are vital in the assessment, rehabilitation and treatment of clinical populations. In this regard, a growing number of laboratories are developing research programs investigating the use of VEs for these patient purposes and some of these systems have now made the transition into clinical practice. The presenters for this workshop have all developed and/or implemented VR applications that have shown promise for addressing fear reduction with phobic clients, pain and stress reduction for cancer patients, post traumatic stress disorder, physical therapy, anger management, driving abilities with Multiple Sclerosis and brain injury patients, and in the assessment and rehabilitation of motor skills, attention, memory, and vis uospatial processing in persons with central nervous system dysfunction and the elderly. These therapeutic targets reflect an informed appreciation of the unique assets that are available when using VR technology and provide a foundation of work that is supportive of the further development of these “healing” applications. The presenters will detail their work and support the case that these areas represent the “Kinder Killer App”!

This paper concerns stereoscopic virtual reality displays in which the head is tracked and the display is stationary, attached to a desk, tabletop or wall. These are called stereoscopic HTDs (head-tracked displays). Stereoscopic displays render two perspective views of a scene, each of which is seen by one eye of the user. Ideally, the user's natural visual system combines the stereo image pair into a single, 3D perceived image. Unfortunately, users often have difficulty fusing the stereo image pair. Researchers use a number of software techniques to reduce fusion problems. This paper geometrically examines and compares a number of these techniques and reaches the following conclusions: In interactive stereoscopic applications, the combination of view placement, scale, and either false eye separation or /spl alpha/-false eye separation can provide fusion control that is geometrically similar to image shifting and image scaling. However, in stereo HTDs, image shifting and image scaling also generate additional geometric artifacts that are not generated by the other methods. We anecdotally link some of these artifacts to exceeding the perceptual limitations of human vision. While formal perceptual studies are still needed, geometric analysis suggests that image shifting and image scaling may be less appropriate than the other methods for interactive, stereo HTDs.

As part of a process to identify potential simulator sickness issues with our NAVE (Non-expensive Automatic Virtual Environment), a new virtual environment display system developed at Georgia Tech, we have conducted a study to address the experience of simulator sickness and presence under different display and user role configurations. The NAVE has three 8 feet by 6 feet screens. The two side screens are positioned at 120 degree angles to the central screen to give a three-sided display area that is sixteen feet wide and approximately seven feet deep. This allows for two different field of view configurations, a one-screen set-up that provides a 60 degree FOV, and a three-screen set-up that provides a 180 degree FOV. Users are seated in front of the center screen and navigate with a joystick. The virtual environment used in this study could be displayed in the NAVE stereo-visually or in mono, providing us with a second experimental factor, display fidelity. Lastly, we were interested in determining whether or not the user's role in the environment would affect their experience of simulator sickness and presence as suggested by Stanney and Kennedy (1997). This provided us with our third factor user role, with its two levels, driver and passenger.

We are currently developing an immersive virtual environment display for research into the rehabilitation of balance disorders, called the Balance NAVE (BNAVE). Using this system, the therapist can create varying degrees of sensory conflict and congruence in persons with balance disorders. With the capability of changing visual scenes based on the needs of the therapist, the BNAVE is a promising tool for rehabilitation. The system uses four PC's, three stereoscopic projectors, and three rear-projected screens, which surround the patient's entire horizontal field of view. The BNAVE can accommodate many types of sensors and actuators for a wide range of experiments.

In this paper, we introduce a new style of visualization called Situational Visualization, in which the user of a robust, mobile visualization system uses mobile computing resources to enhance the experience and understanding of the surrounding world. Additionally, a Situational Visualization system allows the user to add to the visualization and any underlying simulation by inputting the user's observations of the phenomena of interest, thus improving the quality of visualization for the user and for any other users that may be connected to the same database. Situational Visualization allows many users to collaborate on a common set of data with real-time acquisition and insertion of data. In this paper, we present a Situational Visualization system we are developing called Mobile VGIS, and present two sample applications of Situational Visualization

The Perceptive Workbench enables a spontaneous, natural and unimpeded interface between the physical and virtual worlds. It uses vision-based methods for interaction that eliminate the need for wired input devices and wired tracking. Objects are recognized and tracked when placed on the display surface. Through the use of multiple light sources, the object's 3D shape can be captured and inserted into the virtual interface. This ability permits spontaneity since either preloaded objects or those objects selected on-the-spot by the user can become physical icons. Integrated into the same vision-based interface is the ability to identify 3D hand position, pointing direction and sweeping arm gestures. Such gestures can enhance selection, manipulation and navigation tasks. In this paper, the Perceptive Workbench is used for augmented reality gaming and terrain navigation applications, which demonstrate the utility and capability of the interface.

It is still unclear what, if any, impact virtual reality will have on public education. The virtual reality gorilla system is being used as a testbed to study if and how virtual reality might be use ful as an aid in educating middle school children, and to investigate the issues that arise when building virtual reality systems for knowledge acquisition and concept formation.

1.1: In discussion of OpenGL implementation the “[α]view = T-1 • α •T ” included an implicit scale factor. For clarity I replaced this with “[α]view = S-1•T-1 • α •T•S ” in order to make the scale factor’s necessity clearer. ACM COPYRIGHT NOTICE. Copyright © 1999 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is

322 subjects participated in an experimental study to investigate the effects of tactile, olfactory, audio and visual sensory cues on a participant's sense of presence in a virtual environment and on their memory for the environment and the objects in that environment. Results strongly indicate that increasing the modalities of sensory input in a virtual environment can increase both the sense of presence and memory for objects in the environment. In particular, the addition of tactile, olfactory and auditory cues to a virtual environment increased the user's sense of presence and memory of the environment. Surprisingly, increasing the level of visual detail did not result in an increase in the user's sense of presence or memory of the environment.

Navigation and interaction in virtual environments that use stereoscopic head-tracked displays and have very large data sets present several challenges beyond those encountered with smaller data sets and simpler displays. First, zooming by approaching or retreating from a target must be augmented by integrating scale as a seventh degree of freedom. Second, in order to maintain good stereoscopic imagery, the interface must: maintain stereo image pairs that the user perceives as a single 3D image, minimize loss of perceived depth since stereoscopic imagery cannot properly occlude the screen's frame, provide maximum depth information, and place objects at distances where they are best manipulated. Finally, the navigation interface must work when the environment is displayed at any scale. This paper addresses these problems for god's-eye-view or third person navigation of a specific large-scale virtual environment: a high-resolution terrain database covering an entire planet.

As immersive virtual environment (VE) applications become more complex, it is clear that we need a firm understanding of the principles of VE interaction. In particular, designers need guidance in choosing three-dimensional interaction techniques. In this paper, we present a systematic approach, testbed evaluation, for the assessment of interaction techniques for VEs. Testbed evaluation uses formal frameworks and formal experiments with multiple independent and dependent variables in order to obtain a wide range of performance data for VE interaction techniques. We present two testbed experiments, covering techniques for the common VE tasks of travel and object selection/manipulation. The results of these experiments allow us to form general guidelines for VE interaction, and to provide an empirical basis for choosing interaction techniques in VE applications. This has been shown to produce measurable usability gains in a real-world VE application.

Grabbing and manipulating virtual objects is an important user interaction for immersive virtual environments. We present implementations and discussion of six techniques which allow manipulation of remote objects. A user study of these techniques was performed which revealed their characteristics and deficiencies, and led to the development of a new class of techniques. These hybrid techniques provide distinct advantages in terms of ease of use and efficiency because they consider the tasks of grabbing and manipulation separately. CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]:Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism - Virtual Reality; I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]:Methodology and Techniques - Interaction Techniques. 1 INTRODUCTION A defining feature of virtual reality (VR) is the ability to manipulate virtual objects interactively, rather than simply viewing a passive environment. This capability is desirable in many VR applications and is typically accomplished using ...

Previous work has demonstrated the utility of reductions in the level of detail (LOD) in the periphery of head-tracked, large field of view displays. This paper provides a psychophysically based model, centered around an eye/head movement tradeoff, that explains the effectiveness of peripheral degradation and suggests how peripherally degraded displays should be designed. An experiment evaluating the effect on search performance of the shape and area of the high detail central area (inset) in peripherally degraded displays was performed, results indicated that inset shape is not a significant factor in performance. Inset area, however, was significant: performance with displays subtending at least 30 degrees of horizontal and vertical angle was not significantly different from performance with an undegraded display. These results agreed with the proposed model.

Two user studies were performed to evaluate the effect of level-of-detail (LOD) degradation in the periphery of head-mounted displays on visual search performance. In the first study, spatial detail was degraded by reducing resolution. In the second study, detail was degraded in the color domain by using grayscale in the periphery. In each study, 10 subjects were given a complex search task that required users to indicate whether or not a target object was present among distracters. Subjects used several different displays varying in the amount of detail presented. Frame rate, object location, subject input method, and order of display use were all controlled. The primary dependent measures were search time on correctly performed trials and the percentage of all trials correctly performed. Results indicated that peripheral LOD degradation can be used to reduce color or spatial visual complexity by almost half in some search tasks with out significantly reducing performance.

We present an algorithm for real-time level of detail reduction and display of high-complexity polygonal surface data. The algorithm uses a compact and efficient regular grid representation, and employs a variable screen-space threshold to bound the maximum error of the projected image. A coarse level of simplification is performed to select discrete levels of detail for blocks of the surface mesh, followed by further simplification through repolygonalization in which individual mesh vertices are considered for removal. These steps compute and generate the appropriate level of detail dynamically in real-time, minimizing the number of rendered polygons and allowing for smooth changes in resolution across areas of the surface. The algorithm has been implemented for approximating and rendering digital terrain models and other height fields, and consistently performs at interactive frame rates with high image quality. 1 INTRODUCTION Modern graphics workstations allow the display of thousa...

Advances in computer graphics hardware and algorithms, visualization, and interactive techniques for analysis offer the components for a highly integrated, efficient real-time 3D Geographic Information System. We have developed "Virtual GIS", a system with truly immersive capability for navigating and understanding complex and dynamic terrain-based databases. The system provides the means for visualizing terrain models consisting of elevation and imagery data, along with GIS raster layers, protruding features, buildings, vehicles, and other objects. We have implemented window-based and virtual reality versions and in both cases provide a direct manipulation, visual interface for accessing the GIS data. Unique terrain data structures and algorithms allow rendering of large, high resolution datasets at interactive rates.

We present a careful evaluation of the sensory characteristics of the CyberGlove model CG1801 whole-hand input device. In particular, we conducted an experimental study that investigated the level of sensitivity of the sensors, their performance in recognizing angles, and factors that affected accuracy of recognition of flexion measurements. Among our results, we show that hand size differences among the subjects of the study did not have a statistical effect on the accuracy of the device. We also analyzed the effect of different software calibration approaches on accuracy of the sensors.

This research has implications for tasks in human‐computer interaction where the user must interact with display information that is organized on multiple axes. We describe the results of an experiment that compared the effectiveness of five different techniques for shape and depth discrimination. The methods evaluated were binocular parallax, alternating horizontal parallax, alternating vertical parallax, motion parallax, and motion parallax in conjunction with the Pulfrich effect. Binocular parallax, closely followed by motion parallax and the Pulfrich effect, was most effective for the depth discrimination task in terms of both correctness and response time. Alternating parallax techniques provided cues for distinguishing between foreground and background in a scene but did not provide cues that were intuitively translated into depth. Response time of subjects for the shape discrimination task was fastest with alternating parallax. For depth discrimination, subjects preferred binocular parallax. For shape discrimination, binocular parallax and motion parallax were both highly rated.

Currently almost all computer graphic stereoscopic images are generated by doubling the work required to create a single image. In this paper we derive and analyze algorithms for simultaneous generation of the two views necessary for a stereoscopic image. We begin with a discussion of the similarities of the two perspective views of a stereo pair. Following this, several graphics algorithms that have been optimized from known single‐view methods are described and performance results obtained from testing the new stereo algorithms against the originals are presented.

The vast amount of machine-dependent details which must be covered concurrently with general architecture and assembly language concepts often hinder the student from assimilating the main objectives of the ACM CS 3 course. Current instructional strategies are ineffective in building a comprehensive framework of basic concepts from which machine and programming details can be understood. A new approach is required if our students are to complete this course with an understanding of some of the larger issues of computer architecture rather than scattered details of some particular assembly language.