Empirical evidence, evaluation criteria and challenges for the effectiveness of virtual and mixed reality tools for training operators of car service maintenance

The debate on effectiveness of virtual and mixed reality (VR/MR) tools for training professionals and operators is long-running with prominent contributions arguing that there are several shortfalls of experimental approaches and assessment criteria reported within the literature. In the automotive context, although car-makers were pioneers in the use of VR/MR tools for supporting designers, researchers started only recently to explore the effectiveness of VR/MR systems as mean for driving external operators of service centres to acquire the procedural skills necessary for car maintenance processes. In fact, from 463 journal articles on VR/MR tools for training published in the last thirty years, we identified only eight articles in which researchers experimentally tested the effectiveness of VR/MR tools for training service operators’ skills. To survey the current findings and the deficiencies of these eight studies, we use two main drivers: i) a well-known framework of organizational training programmes, and ii) a list of eleven evaluation criteria widely applied by researchers of different fields for assessing the effectiveness of training carried out with VR/MR systems. The analysis that we present allows us to: i) identify a trend among automotive researchers of focusing their analysis only on car service operators’ performance in terms of time and errors, by leaving unexplored important pre- and post-training aspects that could affect the effectiveness of VR/MR tools to deliver training contents – e.g., people skills, previous experience, cibersickness, presence and engagement, usability and satisfaction and ii) outline the future challenges for designing and assessing VR/MR tools for training car service operators

Spatial cognition in virtual environments

Since the last decades of the past century, Virtual Reality (VR) has been developed also as a methodology in research, besides a set of helpful applications in medical field (trainings for surgeons, but also rehabilitation tools). In science, there is still no agreement if the use of this technology in research on cognitive processes allows us to generalize results found in a Virtual Environment (VE) to the human behavior or cognition in the real world. This happens because of a series of differences found in basic perceptual processes (for example, depth perception) suggest a big difference in visual environmental representation capabilities of Virtual scenarios. On the other side, in literature quite a lot of studies can be found, which give a proof of VEs reliability in more than one field (trainings and rehabilitation, but also in some research paradigms). The main aim of this thesis is to investigate if, and in which cases, these two different views can be integrated and shed a new light and insights on the use of VR in research. Through the many experiments conducted in the "Virtual Development and Training Center" of the Fraunhofer Institute in Magdeburg, we addressed both low-level spatial processes (within an "evaluation of distances paradigm") and high-level spatial cognition (using a navigation and visuospatial planning task, called "3D Maps"), trying to address, at the same time, also practical problems as, for example, the use of stereoscopy in VEs or the problem of "Simulator Sickness" during navigation in immersive VEs. The results obtained with our research fill some gaps in literature about spatial cognition in VR and allow us to suggest that the use of VEs in research is quite reliable, mainly if the investigated processes are from the higher level of complexity. In this case, in fact, human brain "adapts" pretty well even to a "new" reality like the one offered by the VR, providing of course a familiarization period and the possibility to interact with the environment; the behavior will then be “like if” the environment was real: what is strongly lacking, at the moment, is the possibility to give a completely multisensorial experience, which is a very important issue in order to get the best from this kind of “visualization” of an artificial world. From a low-level point of view, we can confirm what already found in literature, that there are some basic differences in how our visual system perceives important spatial cues as depth and relationships between objects, and, therefore, we cannot talk about "similar environments" talking about VR and reality. The idea that VR is a "different" reality, offering potentially unlimited possibilities of use, even overcoming some physical limits of the real world, in which this "new" reality can be acquired by our cognitive system just by interacting with it, is therefore discussed in the conclusions of this work

Spatial cognition in virtual environments

Since the last decades of the past century, Virtual Reality (VR) has been developed also as a methodology in research, besides a set of helpful applications in medical field (trainings for surgeons, but also rehabilitation tools). In science, there is still no agreement if the use of this technology in research on cognitive processes allows us to generalize results found in a Virtual Environment (VE) to the human behavior or cognition in the real world. This happens because of a series of differences found in basic perceptual processes (for example, depth perception) suggest a big difference in visual environmental representation capabilities of Virtual scenarios. On the other side, in literature quite a lot of studies can be found, which give a proof of VEs reliability in more than one field (trainings and rehabilitation, but also in some research paradigms). The main aim of this thesis is to investigate if, and in which cases, these two different views can be integrated and shed a new light and insights on the use of VR in research. Through the many experiments conducted in the "Virtual Development and Training Center" of the Fraunhofer Institute in Magdeburg, we addressed both low-level spatial processes (within an "evaluation of distances paradigm") and high-level spatial cognition (using a navigation and visuospatial planning task, called "3D Maps"), trying to address, at the same time, also practical problems as, for example, the use of stereoscopy in VEs or the problem of "Simulator Sickness" during navigation in immersive VEs. The results obtained with our research fill some gaps in literature about spatial cognition in VR and allow us to suggest that the use of VEs in research is quite reliable, mainly if the investigated processes are from the higher level of complexity. In this case, in fact, human brain "adapts" pretty well even to a "new" reality like the one offered by the VR, providing of course a familiarization period and the possibility to interact with the environment; the behavior will then be “like if” the environment was real: what is strongly lacking, at the moment, is the possibility to give a completely multisensorial experience, which is a very important issue in order to get the best from this kind of “visualization” of an artificial world. From a low-level point of view, we can confirm what already found in literature, that there are some basic differences in how our visual system perceives important spatial cues as depth and relationships between objects, and, therefore, we cannot talk about "similar environments" talking about VR and reality. The idea that VR is a "different" reality, offering potentially unlimited possibilities of use, even overcoming some physical limits of the real world, in which this "new" reality can be acquired by our cognitive system just by interacting with it, is therefore discussed in the conclusions of this work

The function and structure of the entorhinal cortex in mild cognitive impairment

The function and structure of the entorhinal cortex in mild cognitive impairment Background: The entorhinal cortex (EC) is the first brain region to exhibit neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). As such, tests of EC function may help aid detection of the disease in its earliest stages. Animal and human studies indicate that the posteromedial (pmEC) and anterolateral (alEC) subdivisions of the EC are involved respectively in navigation and object-location memory. The advent of immersive VR (iVR) technology provides an opportunity to determine whether tests of pmEC and alEC function has value in the detection of AD prior to dementia onset. Aim: To test the hypotheses that measures of pmEC and alEC function and structure differentiate i) patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from age-matched healthy controls and ii) MCI patients at high and low risk of developing AD dementia. Methodology: Participants underwent testing of EC function using novel iVR paradigms of path integration and object-location memory. Total EC, pm-EC and al-EC volumes were segmented from high resolution MRI. A proportion of MCI patients underwent CSF testing for AD biomarkers to separate into biomarker-positive and negative groups (MCI+ and MCI-). The ability of the VR tests to classify pre-dementia AD (i.e. MCI+ patients) was compared with that of a battery of comparator cognitive tests used in current clinical and research practice. 8 Results: Performance on the path integration task was not only impaired in MCI but importantly differentiated MCI+ from MCI- with greater classification accuracy than comparator cognitive tasks. Task performance correlated with pm-EC volume. For the object-location task MCI patients demonstrated larger distance errors than controls, with performance associated with both anterolateral EC volume and total hippocampal volume. However, no difference between MCI+ and MCI- was observed. Conclusion This work demonstrates that iVR-based testing of EC function may improve diagnosis of early AD above and beyond current cognitive tests. The basis of such tests on single cell physiology and their comparability with behavioural tasks used in animal models of disease, confers additional advantages for translational research aimed at understanding the mechanisms linking pathological spread, disruption of cell physiology and behavioural alterations in early AD.MRC Sackler fund