PublicVR: A Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy intervention for adults with speech anxiety

Availability of data. The data from this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.Code availability. The code of this study is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request....The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work

Reflective agents for personalisation in collaborative games

The collaborative aspect of games has been shown to potentially increase player performance and engagement over time. However, collaborating players need to perform well for the team as a whole to benefit and thus teams often end up performing no better than a strong player would have performed individually. Personalisation offers a means for improving overall performance and engagement, but in collaborative games, personalisation is seldom implemented, and when it is, it is overwhelmingly passive such that the player is not guided to goal states and the effectiveness of the personalisation is not evaluated and adapted accordingly. In this paper, we propose and apply the use of reflective agents to personalisation (‘reflective personalisation’) in collaborative gaming for individual players within collaborative teams via a combination of individual player and team profiling in order to improve player and thus team performance and engagement. The reflective agents self-evaluate, dynamically adapting their personalisation techniques to most effectively guide players towards specific goal states, match players and form teams. We incorporate this agent-based approach within a microservices architecture, which itself is a set of collaborating services, to facilitate a scalable and portable approach that enables both player and team profiles to persist across multiple games. An experiment involving 90 players over a two-month period was used to comparatively assess three versions of a collaborative game that implemented reflective, guided, and passive personalisation for individual players within teams. Our results suggest that the proposed reflective personalisation approach improves team player performance and engagement within collaborative games over guided or passive personalisation approaches, but that it is especially effective for improving engagement

The Application of Virtual Reality in Engineering Education

The advancement of VR technology through the increase in its processing power and decrease in its cost and form factor induced the research and market interest away from the gaming industry and towards education and training. In this paper, we argue and present evidence from vast research that VR is an excellent tool in engineering education. Through our review, we deduced that VR has positive cognitive and pedagogical benefits in engineering education, which ultimately improves the students’ understanding of the subjects, performance and grades, and education experience. In addition, the benefits extend to the university/institution in terms of reduced liability, infrastructure, and cost through the use of VR as a replacement to physical laboratories. There are added benefits of equal educational experience for the students with special needs as well as distance learning students who have no access to physical labs. Furthermore, recent reviews identified that VR applications for education currently lack learning theories and objectives integration in their design. Hence, we have selected the constructivist and variation learning theories as they are currently successfully implemented in engineering education, and strong evidence shows suitability of implementation in VR for education

A brief gamified immersive intervention to improve 11–14-year-olds’ cycling-related looking behaviour and situation awareness: A school-based pilot study

Data availability: Data will be made available on request.Supplementary material: the supplementary data to this article are available online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369847823001365#s0165 .Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). . Despite the health benefits of active travel, very few people in the UK choose to cycle short journeys; a frequently cited barrier is personal safety concerns. Recent research using immersive video-based training has shown promise, in terms of improving young children’s situation awareness and looking behaviour when cycling, although such evidence is sparse. We designed and delivered a brief gamified immersive intervention to address this. Forty-four schoolchildren took part in a 10-minute intervention comprising 360-degree real-world point-of-view footage of a cycle journey through a busy urban environment, experienced via a head-mounted display (HMD) with built-in eye tracking. The participants were split into two groups: an explicit learning group who received instructions regarding adaptive looking behaviour, and an implicit learning group who received no instructions. In a gamified protocol, participants scored points for fixating on target areas that represented adaptive looking behaviour; reward sounds notified them when they were successful. The explicit learning group accrued points more rapidly in the early stages of the intervention, but the implicit learning group matched the explicit group’s performance level by the end of the brief intervention. All participants’ cycling confidence increased after the brief intervention, and these increases were correlated with their performance in the game, but participants’ performance on video-based situation awareness tests did not improve. Brief gamified immersive interventions could be used to develop young cyclists’ competence, and therefore confidence, regarding cycling on roads, which could, in turn, encourage them to cycle short journeys.The Department of Transport and The Bikeability Trust

A serious game to improve engagement with web accessibility guidelines

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Behaviour & Information Technology on 07 Jan 2020, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144929X.2019.171145

Evaluation metrics for intelligent generation of graphical game assets: a systematic survey-based framework

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Intelligent Generation of Graphical Game Assets: A Conceptual Framework and Systematic Review of the State of the Art

A preprint, arXiv:2311.10129v1 [cs.GR], is available on arXiv at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10129. It has not been certified by peer reviewed.Procedural content generation (PCG) can be applied to a wide variety of tasks in games, from narratives, levels and sounds, to trees and weapons. A large amount of game content is comprised of graphical assets, such as clouds, buildings or vegetation, that do not require gameplay function considerations. There is also a breadth of literature examining the procedural generation of such elements for purposes outside of games. The body of research, focused on specific methods for generating specific assets, provides a narrow view of the available possibilities. Hence, it is difficult to have a clear picture of all approaches and possibilities, with no guide for interested parties to discover possible methods and approaches for their needs, and no facility to guide them through each technique or approach to map out the process of using them. Therefore, a systematic literature review has been conducted, yielding 200 accepted papers. This paper explores state-of-the-art approaches to graphical asset generation, examining research from a wide range of applications, inside and outside of games. Informed by the literature, a conceptual framework has been derived to address the aforementioned gaps

Implementing an Augmented Reality and Animated Infographics Application for Presentations: Effect on Audience Engagement and Efficacy of Communication

© The Author(s) 2021. Presentations are the most successful and popular form of communication in business. However, the formats of presentations in business have not changed much for past few decades. The emergent and disruptive technologies such as Augmented Reality and Animated Infographics have provided potential for enhancing communications in businesses to increase engagement and therefore increasing the effectiveness of such communications. This paper focuses on the impact and effectiveness of using interactive AR in business presentations. The paper presents the design and development of our AR presentation application. Followed by a presentation of an empirical study into the usability and effectiveness of using Augmented Reality and Animated Infographics in business presentation and compares the results against the traditional slideware slides presentation approach. The results of the experiment with 94 participants are presented and analysed. The results demonstrate that the AR approach out performs the traditional methods in terms of usability, audience engagement and effectiveness of communication