Dealing with fear of falling is a challenge in sport climbing. Virtual reality (VR) research suggests that using physical and reality-based interaction increases the presence in VR. In this paper, we present a study that investigates the influence of physical props on presence, stress and anxiety in a VR climbing environment involving whole body movement. To help climbers overcoming fear of falling, we compared three different conditions: Climbing in reality at 10 m height, physical climbing in VR (with props attached to the climbing wall) and virtual climbing in VR using game controllers. From subjective reports and biosignals, our results show that climbing with props in VR increases the anxiety and sense of realism in VR for sport climbing. This suggests that VR in combination with physical props are an effective simulation setup to induce the sense of height.

For the development and maintenance of distributed systems, it is useful to analyze the system condition and utilization for each hardware component. With pulseAT, a tool has been developed which collects that system utilization systematically with lightweight pulseAT Agents. The hierarchical structure of pulseAT allows having all system utilization data at one place on a pulseAT Manager to show an overall current health condition of the system. A cloud-based pulseAT Analyzer stores the data into a time-based database to support long-term analyses and to process analyzing algorithms, e.g., to forecast future health conditions. This paper describes the structure of pulseAT, main concepts, e.g., how the response time for each component is calculated. Some technical details of the implementation are shown. Finally, it describes how pulseAT has been tested on a mobile robot, the DAEbot.