Subjective-situational Study of Presence

The paper is devoted to the description of the interview approach to reveal presence state and its types such as environmental, social and personal presence. The questions of the interview is described and analyzed in detail. The questions were formulated in view of the subject's behavior and the reactions during tests. Also the answers of the test subjects are analyzed from a perspective of sense of presence revealing. The interview method proved its efficiency. This method allowed to identify in practice types of presence being under researching. In addition, it has enabled a better understanding of the dynamics of the perception changes in the case of presence. The flexibility of this method allows to adjust it under specific virtual environment, and to clarify all key aspects to understand presence. © 2014 Springer International Publishing

The visual, the auditory and the haptic – A user study on combining modalities in virtual worlds

Fröhlich J, Wachsmuth I. The visual, the auditory and the haptic – A user study on combining modalities in virtual worlds. In: Shumaker R, ed. Virtual Augmented and Mixed Reality. Designing and Developing Augmented and Virtual Environments. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol 8021. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg; 2013: 159-168.In order to make a step further towards understanding the impact of multi-modal stimuli in Virtual Reality we conducted a user study with 80 participants performing tasks in a virtual pit environment. Participants were divided into four groups, each presented a different combination of multi-sensory stimuli. Those included real-time 3D graphics, audio stimuli (ambient, static and event sounds), and haptics consisting of wind and tactile feedback when touching objects. A presence questionnaire was used to evaluate subjectively reported presence on the one hand, and on the other physiological sensors were used to measure heart rate and skin conductance as an objective measure. Results strongly indicate that an increase of modalities does not automatically result in an increase of presence

Una comunidad de construcción de conocimiento: el caso de la maestría en ingeniería de la UADY

Se desea estudiar la construcción de conocimiento en una comunidad epistémica, entendida como una comunidad de práctica (CoP) por medio del uso de conocimiento matemático. Se analiza el uso de las gráficas de variación y cambio en tesis, revistas de investigación y notas de clases de la Maestría en ingeniería de la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (UADY) en tres diferentes escenarios de interacción, a los cuales denominamos episodios: clases de la maestría, productos de investigación y con el asesor; en todos los escenarios las personas son expertos (profesores investigadores) y aprendices (alumnos en diferentes etapas) de la especialidad de ingeniería ambiental, construcción y estructuras. Se presentarán algunos avances referentes al método y cómo se inicia el análisis de la información para evidenciar la construcción de conocimiento, todo ello de acorde con la problemática

The EPOCH Multimodal Interface for Interacting with Digital Heritage Artefacts

In recent years, 3D and virtual reality have emerged as areas of extreme interest as methods for visualizing digital museum artefacts in context, and particularly over the Internet. The technology associated with these new visualization techniques has until now been very expensive. The advent of cheap computing and graphics cards coupled with increasing Internet broadband access has made possible the implementation of effective virtual museums both online and within the museum. Virtual museums are valuable for the end-user for efficient and remote learning about their local heritage in a diverse multimodal manner. Multimodal access to museum artefacts can help the user to better understand and appreciate the objects and stories that the museum brings forward, but also creates a closer psychological bond between the user and his past. If we now couple cheap computing technologies, 3D and virtual reality with appropriate 3D interaction techniques based on formal usability evaluations, museums are able to implement high fidelity exhibitions that are intuitive for the museum visitor. This paper reports on the latest technological additions to the EPOCH Multimodal Interface, which is used as an interaction interface that can be implemented as part of a virtual museum interactive system