313 research outputs found

    What We Measure in Mixed Reality Experiments

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    There are many potential measures that one might use when evaluating mixed-reality experiences. In this position paper I will argue that there are various stances to take for evaluation, depending on the framing of the experience within a larger body of work. I will draw upon various types of work that my team has been involved with in order to illustrate these different stances. I will then sketch out some directions for developing more robust measures that can help the field move forward

    AccompliceVR: Lending Assistance to Immersed Users by Adding a Generic Collaborative Layer

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    The current model of development for virtual reality applications is that a single application is responsible for construction of the main immersive experience. If the application is collaborative, that application must implement the required network functionality. We present VRAccomplice an overlay application that adds a collaboration layer to applications running on SteamVR. Using the Ubiq software, we can add avatars controlled by remote users as an overlay into running application. Remote users can see video of the local user. We demonstrate this with some simple examples of a remote user helping a local user in two popular SteamVR games

    Three technical challenges of scaling from social virtual reality to metaverse(s): interoperability, awareness and accessibility

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    The development of metaverse systems is marked by uncertainty regarding their technical architecture and the scope of their capabilities. Current social virtual reality (SVR) systems offer glimpses of future metaverse environments but remain fragmented, with limited interoperability, poor discoverability, and challenges in preserving assets and social capital across different platforms. Drawing parallels with the evolution of the Internet and World Wide Web, the essay argues that while certain metaverse standards may emerge naturally, fundamental challenges persist, particularly concerning client software. The essay highlights three overlooked yet critical issues for user experience: interoperability, scalable awareness, and accessibility. These challenges, often underemphasized in current standards discussions, are crucial for the practical development of user-friendly metaverse systems

    Defining Interaction within Immersive Virtual Environments

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    PhDThis thesis is concerned with the design of Virtual Environments (YEs) - in particular with the tools and techniques used to describe interesting and useful environments. This concern is not only with respect to the appearance of objects in the VE but also with their behaviours and their reactions to actions of the participants. The main research hypothesis is that there are several advantages to constructing these interactions and behaviours whilst remaining immersed within the VE which they describe. These advantages include the fact that editing is done interactively with immediate effect and without having to resort to the usual edit-compile-test cycle. This means that the participant doesn't have to leave the VE and lose their sense of presence within it, and editing tasks can take advantage of the enhanced spatial cognition and naturalistic interaction metaphors a VE provides. To this end a data flow dialogue architecture with an immersive virtual environment presentation system was designed and built. The data flow consists of streams of data that originate at sensors that register the body state of the participant, flowing through filters that modify the streams and affect the yE. The requirements for such a system and the filters it should contain are derived from two pieces of work on interaction metaphors, one based on a desktop system using a novel input device and the second a navigation technique for an immersive system. The analysis of these metaphors highlighted particular tasks that such a virtual environment dialogue architecture (VEDA) system might be used to solve, and illustrate the scope of interactions that should be accommodated. Initial evaluation of the VEDA system is provided by moderately sized demonstration environments and tools constructed by the author. Further evaluation is provided by an in-depth study where three novice VE designers were invited to construct VEs with the VEDA system. This highlighted the flexibility that the VEDA approach provides and the utility of the immersive presentation over traditional techniques in that it allows the participant to use more natural and expressive techniques in the construction process. In other words the evaluation shows how the immersive facilities of VEs can be exploited in the process of constructing further VEs

    Defining Interaction within Immersive Virtual Environments

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    Submitted to the University of London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Scienc

    Effectiveness of Social Virtual Reality

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    A lot of work in social virtual reality, including our own group's, has focused on effectiveness of specific social behaviours such as eye-gaze, turn taking, gestures and other verbal and non-verbal cues. We have built upon these to look at emergent phenomena such as co-presence, leadership and trust. These give us good information about the usability issues of specific social VR systems, but they don't give us much information about the requirements for such systems going forward. In this short paper we discuss how we are broadening the scope of our work on social systems, to move out of the laboratory to more ecologically valid situations and to study groups using social VR for longer periods of time

    Exploring User Behaviour in Asymmetric Collaborative Mixed Reality

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    A common issue for collaborative mixed reality is the asymmetry of interaction with the shared virtual environment. For example, an augmented reality (AR) user might use one type of head-mounted display (HMD) in a physical environment, while a virtual reality (VR) user might wear a different type of HMD and see a virtual model of that physical environment. To explore the effects of such asymmetric interfaces on collaboration we present a study that investigates the behaviour of dyads performing a word puzzle task where one uses AR and the other VR. We examined the collaborative process through questionnaires and behavioural measures based on positional and audio data. We identified relationships between presence and co-presence, accord and co-presence, leadership and talkativeness, head rotation velocity and leadership, and head rotation velocity and talkativeness. We did not find that AR or VR biased subjective responses, though there were interesting behavioural differences: AR users spoke more words, AR users had a higher median head rotation velocity, and VR users travelled further

    Context-Relevant Locations as an Alternative to the Place Illusion in Augmented Reality

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    Presence is a powerful aspect of Virtual Reality (VR). However, there has been no consensus on how to achieve presence in Augmented Reality (AR) or whether it exists at all. The Place Illusion, a key component in presence as defined in VR, cannot be obtained in AR as there is no way to make the user feel as though they are transported somewhere else when they are limited to what they can physically see in front of them. However, recently it has been argued that coherence or congruence are important parts of the Place and Plausibility Illusions. The implication for AR is that the AR content might invoke a higher Plausibility Illusion if it is consistent with the physical place the content is situated in. In this study, we define the concept of a Context-Relevant Location (CRL), a physical place that is congruent with the experience. We present a study with a between-subjects design that allowed users to interact with AR objects in a CRL and in a generic environment. The results indicate that presence was higher in the CRL setting than the generic environment, contribute to the debate about providing a concrete description of presence-like phenomena in AR, and posit that CRLs play a similar role to the Place Illusion in an AR setting

    Tomato Presence: Virtual Hand Ownership with a Disappearing Hand

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    Tomato presence is a term coined by Owlchemy Labs to refer to the observation that players of their game Job Simulator can experience `hand presence' over an object that is not their hand. When playing the game, if a player grabs an object, their virtual hand disappears leaving the grabbed object. While players still observe a direct proprioceptive match between their hand movements and the object being manipulated, it seems that there should be a conflict with current theories of how users might react to visual/proprioceptive mismatch of their embodiment. We run a hand ownership experiment where we implement standard object grasp and the disappearing hand grasp. We show that on a body-ownership questionnaire there is evidence to support the notion that users still feel ownership over a virtual hand even though it is periodically disappearing. We also confirm that most users do not report that their hand disappeared
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