Due to the impact of the pandemic situation, applying online learning methods become an immediate response to tackle the difficulties in teaching and learning, including software engineering courses. Online video meeting platforms (e.g., MS Teams, Webex) are popularly adopted as a medium between instructors and students to conduct online learning classes and they have been modified to provide functions supporting remote teaching and learning activities such as the breakout rooms for conducting group activities. However, maintaining student engagement is still a challenging problem in online learning. Especially, drawing students’ attention and enhancing their experience during in-class activities (e.g., project presentations, group discussions) is critical to achieving of activities’ objective. Virtual Reality (VR) has been considered to be a potential answer to this online teaching and learning enhancement. This study evaluates the benefit of adopting VR in software engineering class presentation activities. The evaluation result from 3 courses shows that VR improves the online learning and presentation experience by offering visual attractions and presence to students.

Prehospital emergency healthcare personnel are responsible for finding, rescuing, and taking prehospital care of emergency patients. They are regularly exposed to stressful and traumatic lifesaving situations. The stress involved can impact their performance and can cause mental disorders in the long term. Stress inoculation training (SIT) inoculates individuals to potential stressors by letting them practice stress-coping skills in a controlled environment. Our work explores a story-driven stressful virtual environment design that can potentially be used for SIT in the new context of emergency healthcare personnel. Users role-play a first-time emergency worker on a rescue mission. The interactive storytelling is designed to engage users and elicit strong emotional responses, and follows the three-act structure commonly found in films and video games. To understand the stress-inducing and sense of presence qualities of our approach including the previously untested impact of an emotional connection factor, we conduct a between-subjects experiment involving 60 subjects. Results show that the approach successfully induces stress by increasing heart rate, galvanic skin response, and subjective stress rating. Questionnaire results indicate positive presence. One subject group engages in an initial friendly conversation with a virtual co-worker to establish an emotional connection. Another group includes no such conversation. The group with the emotional connection shows higher physiological stress levels and more occurrences of subject behaviors reflecting presence. Medical experts review our approach and suggest several applications that can benefit from its stress inducing ability.

We present design and impact studies of visual feedback for virtual grasping. The studies suggest new or updated guidelines for feedback. Recent grasping techniques incorporate visual cues to help resolve undesirable visual or performance artifacts encountered after real fingers enter a virtual object. Prior guidelines about such visuals are based largely on other interaction types and provide inconsistent and potentially-misleading information when applied to grasping. We address this with a two-stage study. In the first stage, users adjusted parameters of various feedback types, including some novel aspects, to identify promising settings and to give insight into preferences regarding the parameters. In the next stage, the tuned feedback techniques were evaluated in terms of objective performance (finger penetration, release time, and precision) and subjective rankings (visual quality, perceived behavior impact, and overall preference). Additionally, subjects commented on the techniques while reviewing them in a final session. Performance wise, the most promising techniques directly reveal penetrating hand configuration in some way. Subjectively, subjects appreciated visual cues about interpenetration or grasp force, and color changes are most promising. The results enable selection of the best cues based on understanding the relevant tradeoffs and reasonable parameter values. The results also provide a needed basis for more focused studies of specific visual cues and for choosing conditions in comparisons to other feedback modes, such as haptic, audio, or multimodal. Considering results, we propose that 3D interaction guidelines must be updated to capture the importance of interpenetration cues, possible performance benefits of direct representations, and tradeoffs involved in cue selection.

We tuned and evaluated visual feedback techniques for virtual grasps. To date, development of such feedback has been largely ad-hoc, with minimal work that can guide technique selection. We considered several techniques including both standard and novel aspects. In terms of impact on real hand behavior, the best techniques all directly reveal penetrating hand configuration in some way. Subjectively, color changes are most liked.

Recent virtual grasping approaches involve physical simulation and virtual couplings between tracked and virtual hand configurations. We introduce a nonuniform coupling in which the stiffness of thumb coupling is scaled relative to that of other digits. This shifts the position of grasped objects in the hand, which may impact grasp and release performance. We graphically illustrate the effects on grasped object position, and we experimentally measure impact on object motion during grasp release. In addition to basic nonuniform scaling, we propose adaptive scaling to account for the number and depth of digits involved in multi-finger grasps. We show that one particular choice of adaptive coupling results in a tradeoff of increased object position consistency and decreased release consistency. The knowledge gained from our study will enable researchers to optimize couplings in future work.

The goal of this project is to develop a training system that can simulate the welding process in real-time and give feedback that avoids learning wrong motion patterns for beginning welders and can be used to analyze the process by the teacher afterwards. The system is based mainly on COTS components. A standard PC with a Dual-core CPU and a medium-end nVidia graphics card is sufficient. Input is done with a regular welding gun to allow realistic training. The gun is tracked by an OptiTrack system with 3 FLEX:V100 cameras. The same is also used to track a regular welding helmet to get accurate eye positions for display, which was chosen over glasses for robustness. The display itself is a Zalman Trimon stereo monitor that is laid out horizontally. The software is designed around a main simulation component for solving heat conduction on a grid of simulation points based on local GaussSeidel elimination.