Frontiers Virtual Real.最新文献

{"title":"An empirical evaluation of enhanced teleportation for navigating large urban immersive virtual environments","authors":"A. S. Badr, R. Amicis","doi":"10.3389/frvir.2022.1075811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2022.1075811","url":null,"abstract":"Navigation is the most prevalent interaction in large urban virtual environments (VEs). Any Metaverse application that foresees navigating or exploring virtual cities requires an effective and efficient navigation technique. These environments, however, have distinct characteristics that make the navigation more challenging and the design of the interactions more critical. We have conducted an empirical study to assess how enhancing the teleportation technique with additional capabilities affects the performance of navigating large urban VEs. For this purpose, three interactions have been developed that extend the conventional point-and-click teleportation. The first one is named Mini-Map and provides a top-down view of the user’s surroundings. Portal Preview provides a preview of the selected target location and allows users to choose their desired orientation at that location. The last technique, called X-Ray Vision, makes the buildings around the user translucent and allows teleporting to locations that would otherwise be obscured. A within-subject controlled lab study with twenty five participants has been conducted, where each extension is evaluated individually as well as in combination with others. Our results show that extending the teleportation can significantly improve its performance when navigating large urban VEs. Overall, the X-Ray Vision was the most successful extension with respect to both task metrics and usability measures. Mini-Map was able to improve some of the task metrics, but did not have a significant effect on most self-reported measures. Portal Preview was the least effective extension, however, multiple participants liked the fact that they could define their desired orientation with the controller. Combining all interactions together performed well with respect to the task metrics, but this option was not favored by the participants. Extending the teleportation with X-Ray Vision and Mini-Map was by far the most favored option.","PeriodicalId":313989,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Virtual Real.","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115471732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Identifying emotions toward an overweight avatar in Virtual Reality: The moderating effects of visuotactile stimulation and drive for thinness","authors":"Nadine Elisa van der Waal, Julie A. W. van Bokhorst, L. N. V. D. Laan","doi":"10.3389/frvir.2022.989676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2022.989676","url":null,"abstract":"Virtual reality technologies can be used to alter one’s body image by inducing ownership of an overweight virtual body. This illusion can possibly lead to both negative affective responses toward the virtual body as well as perceptual changes of one’s own body size, which are both scarcely examined with regard to the embodiment of an overweight avatar. This study’s fundamental aim is to investigate, among healthy weight participants, whether negative affect toward a virtual body and changes in body-size perception can be evoked when embodying an overweight virtual avatar. Additionally, the study investigates whether applying visuotactile stimulation (which has been identified as a proxy for virtual body ownership by previous studies) and drive for thinness influence the strength of these effects. A 2 (healthy weight vs. overweight virtual body) × 2 (congruent vs. incongruent visuotactile stimulation) between-subjects design was employed, with participants’ drive for thinness measured to test its potential moderating effect. ANOVAs revealed that participants (N = 114) experienced significantly more negative affect toward the virtual body when embodying one that was overweight compared to a healthy weight virtual body. Visuotactile stimulation did not moderate this effect, even though the manipulation of visuotactile stimulation worked as intended (i.e., the experience of ownership over the virtual body was significantly higher in the congruent compared to incongruent visuotactile stimulation condition). Additionally, participants with a high drive for thinness did not experience significantly more negative affect than participants with a low drive for thinness. Embodiment of an overweight avatar did not affect body-size perceptions, nor did visuotactile stimulation or the drive for thinness moderate this effect. Knowing that embodiment of an overweight avatar results in negative affective responses toward it, future studies could deepen our understanding of the role of negative affect in the transfer of emotions to one’s own body, and the interplay between negative affect toward a virtual body and body-size perceptions.","PeriodicalId":313989,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Virtual Real.","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115975658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Informing and Evaluating Educational Applications With the Kirkpatrick Model in Virtual Environments: Using a Virtual Human Scenario to Measure Communication Skills Behavior Change","authors":"Stephanie Carnell, A. G. D. Siqueira, A. Miles, Benjamin C. Lok","doi":"10.3389/frvir.2022.810797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2022.810797","url":null,"abstract":"Increasingly, virtual environments are being used in educational and training applications. As with other types of applications that use virtual environments, these scenarios must be evaluated in terms of user experience. However, they also should be evaluated on the efficacy of the training or learning provided, so as to ensure learning transfer. Frameworks, such as the Kirkpatrick Model, exist to evaluate training scenarios, but application of these frameworks has not been fully utilized in development of virtual environment-based education and training. To address this gap and to also share our process with other virtual environment developers, we discuss our experience applying the Kirkpatrick Model to an existing virtual human (VH) application for medical communication skills training. The Kirkpatrick Model provides different levels of evaluation for training programs that include learners’ reactions to the training, the knowledge acquired from the training, behaviors indicating the training was applied, and the degree high-level results were impacted as a result of the training. While we discuss all of the Model’s levels, our focus for this work is Level 3 Behavior. The Kirkpatrick Model currently recommends that behavioral change may only be measured while a trainee is working in a real-world context. However, given existing evidence that VH applications have been shown to elicit real-world behaviors from participants, we suggest that VH training scenarios may be a method of measuring Behavior level metrics before trainees are evaluated in situ. Initial support for this suggestion is provided by our study examining whether VHs can elicit changes in communication skills learners’ message production behavior over time. This study indicates that learners displayed changes in several metrics over the course of the semester. Based on this finding, we suggest a direction for future research: observing learner behavior in a virtual environment as a pre-cursor to behavioral measures while in a real-world scenario.","PeriodicalId":313989,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Virtual Real.","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114256690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}