Cinematic virtual reality (CVR) brings viewers a novel and immersive movie-watching experience. However, they may miss story events and scene transitions that the director has designed as key points hidden in the VR scene. In this paper, we introduce implicit gaze-based interaction for enhancing the exploration experience in CVR. In contrast to most research on gaze-based selection of objects or explicit guidance of attention using visual cues, we focus on implicit interaction that utilizes the user’s natural gaze and attention to explore the scene. We design and implement different gaze trigger methods for implicit interaction, making the interaction more intuitive and natural when users reveal the invisible objects. We implemented the adaptive collider technique, offering users a better sense of exploration than raycasting and spotlight techniques. We have also conducted user studies to compare animation sequences for visual feedback, with each animation sequence offering different storytelling techniques. One of the sequences is better suited for describing spaces in the virtual world, while the other sequence offers users the feeling of constructing a world through their gaze.

We propose a real-time excavation simulation system for interactive gameplay in Virtual Reality. In order to increase the player's immersion, our simulation system will produce actual potholes and clods according to the depth and angle of the players excavation. We divide the process into three phases: ground deformation, clod generation and clod fragmentation. In ground deformation, we describe how to simulate the topographic changes before and after excavation. In clod generation, we describe how to generate the clod which mesh matches the depth and angle of the players excavation action. In clod fragmentation, the clods are broken and fall as the shovel lifts. This simulation system can create excavation effects on different geologies by changing the material of the ground and clods.

In this paper, we present Haptic Around, a hybrid-haptic feedback system, which utilizes fan, hot air blower, mist creator and heat light to recreate multiple tactile sensations in virtual reality for enhancing the immersive environment and interaction. This system consists of a steerable haptic device rigged on the top of the user head and a handheld device also with haptics feedbacks to simultaneously provide tactile sensations to the users in a 2m x 2m space. The steerable haptic device can enhance the immersive environment for providing full body experience, such as heat in the desert or cold in the snow mountain. Additionally, the handheld device can enhance the immersive interaction for providing partial body experience, such as heating the iron or quenching the hot iron. With our system, the users can perceive visual, auditory and haptic when they are moving around in virtual space and interacting with virtual object. In our study, the result has shown the potential of the hybrid-haptic feedback system, which the participants rated the enjoyment, realism, quality, immersion higher than the other.

Current medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) do not support prioritized channel access and often suffer from varying degrees of starvation and fairness problems. That is, with a little bad luck, a sensor node might have to wait arbitrarily long to send its frame, and thus results in the invisibility of some sensed area. In this paper we introduce a simple, but yet well performing starvation free backoff scheme based on sensor MAC (S-MAC) protocol for WSNs. The proposed scheme allows a sensor node to adjust its backoff window size according to its re-transmission times. An analytical analysis is carried out to study the saturation throughput of proposed scheme under backlogged conditions. In addition to the theoretical analysis, simulations were also conducted to analyze the proposed scheme and the results show that our scheme can effectively alleviate the starvation and fairness problem and achieve better performance in high density WSNs.