The IEEE VR Steering Committee congratulates and offers gratitude to the enormous efforts of the IEEE VR Conference Organizing Committees—with special recognition for the multiple years of hard work of the General Chairs, Carolina Cruz-Neira, Greg Welch, and Xubo Yang. To realize the conference requires a sizeable, motivated team of volunteers to work with the IEEE conference management team. Maintaining the conference’s status as the premier international virtual reality conference is a testament to the commitment of all the organizers and participants that make up the IEEE Virtual Reality community.

The IEEE VR Steering Committee congratulates and offers gratitude to the enormous efforts of the IEEE VR Conference Organizing Committees — with special recognition for the multiple years of hard work of the General Chairs, Xubo Yang, Kun Zhou, Tobias Langlotz, and Stephan Lukosch. To realize the conference requires a sizeable, motivated team of volunteers to work with the IEEE conference management team. Maintaining the conference's status as the premier international virtual reality conference is a testament to the commitment of all the organizers and participants that make up the IEEE Virtual Reality community.

Daily operation and management of complex systems typically include multiple working sessions during which a team presents a set of information and discusses issues relevant to their decision making. A complex set of operational technology (OT) networks installed onboard a Navy ship is an example of such a system. A crew’s ability to effectively communicate OT networks status to the ship commander, visualize, and discuss the options available in a given situation, has a significant impact on mission success. While the complexity of contemporary OT networks has dramatically increased, visualization tools have witnessed little improvement over several decades—they include sets of two-dimensional blueprints that are inherently hard to understand and conceptualize as three-dimensional (3D) information. To address this problem, we designed and implemented an augmented reality (AR) system that allowed a small team to visualize a 3D model of the ship with details of its computer networks. We recruited 30 individuals familiar with network management tasks central to our study and examined the usability of the tool on a set of real-world scenarios focused on network management. Analysis of objective and subjective data suggested that there was a general agreement among the participants that AR portrayal of the network was very supportive of their understanding of the physical-to-logical relationship within the network and that it fostered constructive collaboration among the team members. The reported levels of discomfort associated with oculomotor symptoms made the highest contribution to the total Simulator Sickness Questionnaire score; we believe that those symptoms should be given more attention in future studies with AR setups. The results provided in this empirical study offer early insights into the benefits and challenges of AR approaches applied to the decision making of small teams in high stakes scenarios and real-world situations.

Assembly tasks are an essential component in complex operations done by a large number of humans on a regular basis; examples include system maintenance (preventive and corrective), industrial production lines, and teleoperation. Having access to superior and low-cost solutions that can be used to train personnel who need to conduct these tasks is essential. Virtual reality (VR) technology, with its immersive and non-immersive display solutions combined with hand controllers suitable for bimanual operations, is especially appealing for training purposes in this domain. We designed and executed a user study in which we tested the influence of stereopsis and immersion on execution of bimanual assembly task and examined the effects of tested system configurations on symptoms of cybersickness. Our user study, with its between-subjects format, collected comprehensive data sets in four distinct experimental conditions: immersive stereoscopic (IS), immersive non-stereoscopic (INS), non-immersive stereoscopic (NIS), and non-immersive non-stereoscopic (NINS). The results of this study suggest that IS platforms are the most promising contenders for an efficient system solution, and that NINS solutions that use larger screens (like a TV set, in our case) may also be considered. It is encouraging that no significant simulator sickness issues were recorded in any condition. The results of this study provide important input and guidance that people who work in the training domain need to have before making decisions about the acquisition of new solutions for assembly task training.

A major training device used to train all Landing Signal Officers (LSOs) for several decades has been the Landing Signal Officer Trainer, Device 2H111. This simulator, located in Oceana, VA, is contained within a two story tall room; it consists of several large screens and a physical rendition of the actual instruments used by LSOs in their operational environment. The young officers who serve in this specialty will typically encounter this system for only a short period of formal instruction (six one-hour long sessions), leaving multiple gaps in training. While experience with 2H111 is extremely valuable for all LSO officers, the amount of time they can spend using this training device is undeniably too short. The need to provide LSOs with an unlimited number of training opportunities unrestricted by location and time, married with recent advancements in commercial off the shelf (COTS) immersive technologies, provided an ideal platform to create a lightweight training solution that would fill those gaps and extend beyond the capabilities currently offered in the 2H111 simulator. This paper details our efforts on task analysis, surveying of user domain, mapping of 2H111 training capabilities to new prototype system to ensure its support of major training objectives of 2H111, design and development of prototype training system, and a feasibility study that included tests of technical system performance and informal testing with trainees at the LSO Schoolhouse. The results achieved in this effort indicate that the time for LSO training to make the leap to immersive VR has decidedly come.

One of the great benefits VR systems offer is their ability to simulate a number of virtual humans when their presence is needed in the context of some learning or training experience. Being that the real humans may not be available to play different roles and support virtual sessions, the ability of a system to generate highly believable representations of autonomous virtual humans - virtual intelligent agents - is vital in achieving specific learning and training objectives. Eliminating the elements of the system that can cause a negative learning and training transfer is a paramount in those systems. We illustrate the results of two user studies focused on validation of non-deterministic domain-specific behaviors generated by our system (example: behaviors typical for a well coordinated group of paramedics or military unit). The results and observations confirmed that when it comes to VR systems with stringent requirements and high expectations for positive learning/training transfer, we still need humans to evaluate and validate synthesized human-like agent behaviors.

This paper presents an approach to visibility called the Viewpoint Movement Space (VpMS) algorithm which supports the concept of dynamic polygon visibility orderings for head‐slaved viewing in virtual environments (VE). The central idea of the approach is that the visibility, in terms of back‐to‐front polygon visibility ordering, does not change dramatically as the viewpoint moves. Moreover, it is possible to construct a partition of the space into cells, where for each cell the ordering is invariant. As the viewpoint moves across a cell boundary typically only a small and predictable change is made to the visibility ordering. The cost to perform this operation represents a notable reduction when compared with the cost of resolving the visibility information from the BSP tree where the classification of the viewpoint with every node plane has to be performed. The paper demonstrates how the subdivision into such cells can represent the basic source for an acceleration of the rendering process. We also discuss how the same supportive data structure can be exploited to solve other tasks in the graphics pipeline.

We present an experiment that investigates the behaviour of small groups of participants in a wide-area distributed collaborative virtual environment (CVE). This is the third and largest study in a series of experiments that have examined trios of participants carrying out a highly collaborative puzzle-solving task. The results reproducing those of earlier studies suggest a positive relationship between place-presence and co-presence, between co-presence and group accord, with evidence supporting the notion that immersion confers leadership advantage.