Redirected walking is a locomotion technique that allows users to naturally walk through large immersive virtual environments (IVEs) by guiding them on paths that might vary from the paths they walk in the real world. While this technique enables the exploration of larger spaces in the IVE via natural walking, previous work has shown that it induces extra cognitive load for the users. On the other hand, previous research has shown that exposure to virtual nature environments can restore users’ diminished attentional capacities and lead to enhanced cognitive performances. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate if the environment in which the user is redirected has the potential to reduce its cognitive demands. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment with 28 participants, who performed a spatial working memory task (i.e., 2-back test) while walking and being redirected with different gains in two different IVEs (i.e., (i) forest and (ii) urban). The results of frequentist and Bayesian analysis are consistent and provide evidence against an effect of the type of IVE on detection thresholds as well as cognitive and locomotion performances. Therefore, redirected walking is robust to the variation of the IVEs tested in this experiment. The results partly challenge previous research findings and, therefore, require future work in this direction.

Avatars in virtual reality (VR) with fully articulated hands enable users to naturally interact with the virtual environment (VE). Interactions are often performed in a one-to-one mapping between the movements of the user’s real body, for instance, the hands, and the displayed body of the avatar. However, VR also allows manipulating this mapping to introduce non-isomorphic techniques. In this context, research on manipulations of virtual hand movements typically focuses on increasing the user’s interaction space to improve the overall efficiency of hand-based interactions.

Prior studies have explored the possibility of inducing social anxiety (SA) in virtual reality (VR). Among various existing protocols for this purpose, the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) has been proven to be robust in evoking SA in the majority of participants in both in vivo as well as VR conditions. The TSST consists of giving a speech and performing mental arithmetic calculations each for five minutes in front of three persons. In this paper, we present an adaptation of TSST to investigate the effects of different numbers of virtual humans (VHs) (i.e., three, six, or fifteen) on perceived SA. In addition, we compare the results with an in vivo TSST with three real persons in the audience. Twenty four participants took part in this experiment. As a result, physiological arousal could be observed with VR inducing SA yet less than in vivo TSST. Furthermore, some of the subjective measures showed a high state of anxiety experienced during the experiment. An effect of the virtual audience size could be observed only in heart rate (HR) as a virtual audience size of three VHs induced the highest HR responses which was significantly different from an audience of size six and fifteen.

The combination of virtual reality (VR) and gamification opens up new vistas for innovative forms of therapy for alcohol use disorder (AUD) and have enormous potential to improve traditional therapy methods. In this paper, three gamified and one non-gamified AUD therapy applications for VR are introduced and evaluated. The games are based on two behavioral therapy methods, which are Cue Exposure Therapy (CET) and Approach Avoidance Training (AAT). The games are realized in the context of a virtual supermarket, which is considered as a relapse-risky environment. The aim is to help AUD patients practice avoiding alcohol first in a VR-based simulation and later in a real supermarket. In preparation for a long-term clinical study, a usability study was conducted with 13 healthy participants. The results show that the VR game was enjoyed, increased the motivation, and fewer errors were made than in the comparable non-gamified application.

What enables an organism to perform behaviour we would call cognitive and adaptive, like language? Here, it is argued that an essential prerequisite is the ability to build up mental representations of external situations to uncouple the behaviour from direct environmental control. Such representations can be realized by building up cell assemblies. The recurrent neural network presented to cope with this task has been used for generation of action but can also be utilized as a basis for mental representations due to its attractor characteristics. In this context, a new learning algorithm (Dynamic Delta Rule) is proposed, which leads to a self-organized weight distribution yielding stable states on the one hand and which, on the other hand, only activates subpopulations of larger networks that code for the respective situation. In a second step, ways are shown of how the static information of these internal models can be transformed into time-dependent behavioural sequences.