Some relaxation methods create a sensation of returning to the fetal stage, but often involve large pieces of equipment such as a floating tank. This study develops a portable virtual reality (VR) system that brings users back into the fetal state of relaxation. It explores the effects of being swaddled in a stretchable cloth that simulates the feeling of being in the mother’s womb. The user’s entire body is wrapped in cloth using a Japanese technique called Otonamaki. While being swaddled, participants experience an artistic video and sound representation of the womb. The heart rates and questionnaire answers of swaddled people and those from the control group were compared. Questionnaire results show that being swaddled can reduce subjective tension. Heart rate results show no signs of mental stress caused by swaddling. The future plan is to incorporate this VR setup into medical devices and therapy to relieve tension.
The number of Virtual Reality applications has increased tremendously in the recent years to the point where every single digital entertainment company is investing heavily in VR systems. This increase in VR products demands the improvement in the evaluation of VR experience since current evaluations require an attendee per survey taker and can only move onto the next survey taker after the current survey is done. Traditional evaluations also require many evaluation machines if done digitally, costing survey takers unnecessary expenses. "MasQueRade" is a QR code based instant user feedback online system. This system allows users to scan the QR code on their VR sanitary masks and access an online evaluation system on their own mobile phones. This enables users to conduct the evaluation on their own free time and decreases the expenses surveyors have to spend on machines, therefore greatly decreases the manpower and time required to conduct the evaluations. While this approach to solving the issue of obtaining user feedback may sound elementary, the amount of efforts and resources "MasQueRade" saves by transferring the evaluation from a paper or digital form into an online database gives near infinite possibilities in the future of gathering feedback and evaluation. This paper seeks to explain the functions of "MasQueRade" and the results the team obtains during Anime Expo 2017 and propose a real-time live user VR commentary system drawing inputs form the attendees.
We propose Charrot, a novel pseudo-haptic approach for interaction with computer-generated (CG) characters that are displayed by mid-air imaging technology. Pseudo-haptic approach is based on the combination of the visual representation of the CG character movement and the vibrotactile cues. The vibrotactile cues are generated by a small robot that can be easily handled by children. We designed the movements of a CG character pushing or pulling the small robot. Experiments have been carried out to evaluate the interaction between the visual representation of the CG character movements and the vibrotactile cues. The results showed that the visual representation of the CG character movement can change the direction of the perceived force. We demonstrated a game that allows to interact with the CG characters using pseudo-haptics at the open campus of the University of Electro-Communications.
We contribute a new library, DynCam, for real-time, low latency, streaming point cloud processing with a special focus on telepresence in VR. Our library combines several RGBD-images from multiple distributed sources to a single point cloud and transfers it through a network. This processing is organized as a pipeline that supports implicit multithreading. The pipeline uses functional reactive programming to describe transformations on the data in a declarative way. In contrast to previous libraries, DynCam is platform independent, modular and lightweight. This makes it easy to extend and allows easy integration into existing applications. We have prototypically implemented a telepresence application in the Unreal Engine. Our results show that DynCam outperforms competing libraries concerning latency as well as network traffic.
The capacity to visually represent innovative product/service ideas and concepts as well as usage scenarios while anticipating the resulting User eXperience (UX) is extremely critical in order to ensure innovation success. Our previous empirical studies on low-cost Immersive Virtual Environments (IVE), and, more recently, on Immersive Collaborative Environments (ICE) have unveiled the great potential of 'close-to-real-life' immersion. It fulfills the necessary level of realism in order to engage and facilitate stakeholders' contribution to alternative solutions and usage scenarios. Therefore, this paper is intended to present our ICE framework that could be used in investigations of Immersive and Collaborative performances.
Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GVS) is a technique that induces virtual acceleration (or virtual head motion) by applying electrical current to electrodes placed on the bilateral mastoids. Since the vestibular sensation also closely reality of experience, it is a promising technique for virtual reality (VR) systems for presenting a highly realistic experience. However, the usual GVS can induce only lateral directional acceleration sensation. Thus, we invented four-pole GVS is able to induce multi directional virtual acceleration (i.e., lateral, anteroposterior, and yaw rotation). This method could realize the novel head set which can adding virtual motion sensation and virtual impacts sensation. In this paper, we explain two examples of new applications named "GVS RIDE" and "Beaten by Virtual Character" which gives a highly realistic experience using four-pole GVS and a Head Mounted Display (HMD) in synchronization.
Many people sometimes imagine if they can wield superhuman abilities like that appear in games and animation. Among these abilities, we focused particularly on representing the experience of arm stretching beyond the limits of the human body. We proposed a method for inducing a sense of arm stretching by designing the device attached to forearm and giving the user a visual cue by changing the body structure of the user's avatar in the virtual environment. Our device shifts the mass from the elbow to the wrist while stretching the skin of the forearm according to the animation in the virtual environment. The sensation of the elongation of the arm skin as well as the change in the weight of arm is thought to be the feeling when the arms are stretched out. As a result., we introduce these two mechanisms into our device, which allows the user to feel the sense of arm stretching.
The rate of evolution of surgical robotics has continuously increased since its inception. Training and experience with the robots is a key factor to successful operations but training is time-consuming and expensive, as the equipment used is expensive and has a short life-time. To explore the possibility of enabling alternative training methods for robot assisted surgery, we designed a multi-user virtual reality simulation of team training as practised in certified institutes and conducted an expert review in cooperation with a training centre for minimally invasive surgery, first nurse assistant and nurse specialist in robot surgery Jane Petersson and head surgeon at Aalborg University Hospital Johan Poulsen. To this end, a contextual study was conducted to ensure realism and accuracy of the simulation. The experts were positive about the system's future, however it was not considered sufficiently complete for use in actual surgery training at this stage. More scenarios and features would be required in future implementations to allow for near full training sessions to be performed in virtual reality.
The capacity to visually represent innovative product/service ideas and concepts as well as usage scenarios while anticipating the resulting User eXperience (UX) is extremely critical in order to ensure innovation success. Our previous empirical studies on low-cost Immersive Virtual Environments (IVE), and, more recently, on Immersive Collaborative Environments (ICE) have unveiled the great potential of 'close-to-real-life' immersion. It fulfills the necessary level of realism in order to engage and facilitate stakeholders' contribution to alternative solutions and usage scenarios. Therefore, this paper is intended to present our ICE framework that could be used in investigations of Immersive and Collaborative performances.
Product prototyping, through the use of immersive technologies, has demonstrated its huge potential enabling co-creative exploration of different usage scenarios and evaluation of the User eXperience. It is already an extremely relevant and valuable activity in many industries and revealed as an essential element of experience design. Service prototyping is a new prominent progressive process used within service innovation intended to improve the service experience and quality while accelerating the service development process. Different types of service prototypes can be used to encompass all the different service elements throughout the service design and engineering processes. This paper presents a comparative study between the conventional and immersive service prototyping This comparison encompasses application, advantages and disadvantages of these different service prototyping. Several use cases of immersive service prototyping, either based on Virtual, Augmented or Mixed Reality technologies, are presented. This study aims to improve the body of knowledge on the use of immersive service prototyping. This is intended to help service designer understand what can be done with immersive service prototyping, and increase awareness on service prototyping. The main objective is to provide a guidance to service designers for selecting the most appropriate immersive service prototyping techniques per each case specificity.
Virtual Reality (VR) is now an affordable technology that is starting to penetrate the mass market. While cardboard is the most distributed system, it lacks interaction to provide really engaging experiences. Providing low cost solutions to enhance VR experiences is crucial. We hypothesized that the integration of a smart wristband in a VR experience, provide a reliable and comfortable enough setup to add a biofeedback loop to a game. We created a physiologically enhanced game and coupled it with a smart wristband capable of monitoring one's heart rate. We tested our game with and without biofeedback and compared the reported novelty. We observed a high interest of the participants for the integration of smart wearables in VR. We highlighted the stability of our setup, even in mobility and the reported absence of discomfort created by the addition of the wristband.
Immersive virtual reality simulators are increasingly being used in different domains. One open research problematic of such systems is the user's representation inside the environment, what is called, the self-avatar representation. Our research focus on using immersive virtual environments (IVEs) for training motor skills. In this case, the typical self-avatar representation is the user's hand. Researchers have focused on studying the influence of hand appearance and structure on the user's sense of presence and embodiment, but little is known about the role it plays in learning motor skills. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a virtual reality (VR) training simulator for a basic motor task, as well as the design of an experiment to investigate this research problematic.
Virtual reality offers a new way of telling stories and engaging audiences. To create appealing content for this new imaging modality, content production and post-production workflows need to be adapted or completely rethought. One key aspect for ensuring image quality and preservation of the director's intent throughout the production workflow is color management. In this paper, we review color managed workflows for (post) production and explore the challenges that arise for ensuring color accuracy in VR. We focus on the display end of the imaging pipeline, presenting a workflow for characterizing and calibrating VR devices. Our workflow is evaluated on several key VR devices, allowing us to compare their display characteristics and calibration quality.
We propose "Shin-Ken VR" as a superhuman fighting sport (1), where a universal design game controller and a motion tracker control enable any two players to battle each other in a VR game field, overcoming personal barriers of physical differences, e.g. between a physically challenged person and a professional mixed martial arts fighter. The universal design game controller is proposed for upper limb disabilities based on the field study. Physically challenged players can control a VR game character with the proposed controller, and experience a feeling of fighting with physical vibration by wearable feedback devices. For fighter players, motion tracker control with HMD (HTC-VIVE) is prepared for extended visual feedback of body action, where fighter players can experience a realistic feeling of fighting. The proposed system aims to realize a new superhuman sport, where physically challenged persons and fighters can battle on an equal footing overcoming physical difference.
Several studies compared the player experience of Virtual Reality (VR) games and non-VR games. However, there is a lack of research on the specific subject of VR and non-VR multiplayer games. Therefore, this work explores how implementing a multiplayer game in VR may influence the player experience compared to the non-VR alternative. We developed a short multiplayer puzzle game that can be played as a VR game or as a non-VR game. The player experience of the different game versions was evaluated by having players answer the Game Experience Questionnaire by IJsselsteijn et al. and the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire by Kennedy et al. after playing each version. The results showed that a majority of the aspects of player experience were rated significantly higher for the VR versions compared to the non-VR alternative. However, it was noted that two different VR versions fared differently compared to the non-VR alternative, and they scored vastly different when calculating a total simulator sickness score. We conclude that implementing similar multiplayer games in VR can improve the player experience, but care is required to achieve the best player experience in VR.
To provide cultural night experiences with tourists in Kanazawa City, we exhibited our interactive digital installation titled "Temari and Shadow" at the open space of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Our installation utilizes shadows cast by people standing in front of a projector. We chose Kanazawa's Kaga Temari, a hand-sized colorful toy ball made of thread, as a motif of this work. Our shadow-based system achieved 60 fps in rendering and we estimate that the time required for the response of a shadow is 133 ms. However, the latency can be shortened by a projector with a higher refresh rate. The result of the questionnaire at the exhibition suggests that our system is widely accepted by the people of various ages.
Stereoscopic Live Action Video can be combined with Holobench-type displays to create art installations that explore stereo depth and space dimensions. This art project experiments with such combination to create seemingly impossible spaces that appear tangible and physically real.
Non-trivial virtual environments often require implementation of complex forms of user interaction, including spatial navigation within the whole environment as well as various forms of interaction with particular components of the environment. Dynamic environments, in which content or context changes in response to user interaction, raise serious problems to both content designers and users. Often in-scene interaction elements are used, but they impede perception of the virtual environment, especially in multi-user scenarios, in which majority of users are passive observers. In this paper, a new approach to navigation and interaction with three-dimensional virtual environments is proposed. This approach uses semantic metadata attached to particular components of the environment to build a dynamic interaction interface on a user's handheld mobile device. The interface is built in a contextual manner, enabling a user to interact with the virtual environment with full awareness of the possible actions. Prototypes of the server and the client modules have been implemented using the Unity engine, and the system has been tested on a large-size Powerwall setup.
This paper introduces the "Immex" program that experiences how to provide services through virtual immersive online real-time environments. The idea is to offer another way to share data and make it accessible within mirror-worlds. We try to gather the data disseminated in the information system of the university and present them at a relevant place and in a meaningful form to the user experiencing the simulation.
