Parents and primary carers often shape whether Autistic people access, trial, continue, or avoid virtual reality (VR), yet parent-focused evidence on family-level VR adoption remains limited. This exploratory, cross-sectional survey examined parent and primary carer perspectives on VR use, including perceived benefits, concerns, support goals, and intentions to use or continue using VR. Forty-one parents or primary carers of Autistic people aged 3–42 years completed this self-selected online survey. Descriptive statistics, Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, and Kendall’s tau-b correlations were used. Thirty participants reported that their child had previously used VR, mainly through home-based, commercial or general-purpose applications. Participants held favourable views of VR, particularly for controlled, predictable, and self-paced engagement. The clearest concerns related to neurodiversity-affirming design, cost, and screen time. Reported sensory support goals were positively associated with the likelihood of using or continuing to use VR (τb = 0.32, p = 0.02), whereas communication/social interaction and transition-related goals were not. Beyond participants’ favourable evaluations of VR, prior experience and access to guidance and resources were the clearest exploratory correlates of intention to use or continue using VR. These patterns need to be treated as hypothesis-generating, and the findings are specific to this small, self-selected and largely VR-exposed sample. Findings suggest a gap between family-led VR use and implementation support. Because the data reflect parent- and primary-carer-reported intentions to use or continue using VR, they do not establish VR effectiveness or represent Autistic users’ own experiences.
Smart-city infrastructure is increasingly operated through cyber–physical systems that combine embedded sensing, edge computing, communication networks, automation platforms, and digital-twin environments. The emerging industrial metaverse extends this paradigm by enabling immersive, real-time interaction with infrastructure assets, mobile agents, and operational data. Existing metaverse-city discussions, however, often remain visualization-oriented, and the literature offers no unifying architectural framework for integrating geospatial modeling, industrial sensing, distributed synchronization, multi-agent simulation, and human-in-the-loop control into a deployable smart-city platform. This paper presents a design framework and reference architecture for industrial metaverse urban digital twins. The framework has not yet been implemented as a software system; its value lies in a principle-driven design blueprint—layers, responsibilities, inter-layer data flows, and design rules—that is intended to guide future implementations. The architecture organizes the system into five layers: physical infrastructure and sensing, geospatial–semantic modeling, edge/cloud digital-twin services, multi-agent simulation and analytics, and immersive human–machine interaction. It links WGS-84 georeferencing, semantic city models, event-driven synchronization, and latency-aware networking into a unified computational pipeline. Boundary conditions, deployment assumptions, and the integration of legacy devices that do not conform to prevailing standards are stated for each layer, and security and data-governance obligations are assigned per layer. An illustrative smart-city scenario and a proposed evaluation protocol show how future implementations can be assessed under different latency and crowd-density conditions; no empirical results are reported in this Perspective. The protocol defines each metric formally, ranks the metrics by priority, documents the conflicts among them, and states test scenarios with acceptance thresholds. Analytical resource budgets, derived from stated assumptions rather than measured, identify interest management as the decisive scaling mechanism. Deployment challenges related to scalability, synchronization accuracy, cybersecurity, accessibility, cross-domain operation under multiple administrative authorities, and standards-based interoperability are also discussed.
Multifunctional material systems increasingly combine several active phases, including photocatalysts, magnetic phases, adsorbents, controlled-release agents, and antimicrobial oxides, within a single encapsulating matrix. This paper presents an augmented reality and interactive 3D mobile app for visualizing a Multifunctional Hybrid Material (MHM-App) that provides a representation of a multifunctional sphere composed of titanium dioxide (TiO2), magnetite (Fe3O4), activated carbon, hypochlorite-loaded clinoptilolite zeolite, and copper (Cu), encapsulated in a sodium alginate matrix formed by ionic gelation and coated with a crosslinked chitosan shell. The MHM-App provides two complementary visualization modes: an AR mode in which the sphere is anchored to a detected horizontal surface through raycasting, and a non-AR mode in which the same geometry is rendered in a virtual scene with a fixed-perspective camera and explicit lighting. We evaluated the user experience using the User Experience Questionnaire and its short version (UEQ and UEQ-S, respectively), obtaining an excellent overall score in the UEQ-S and in five of six categories of the UEQ (except the novelty category, with a “good” score), confirming that MHM-App is perceived as attractive, understandable, efficient, dependable, and stimulating. The MHM-App integrates augmented reality and interactive 3D visualization, enabling students and technical audiences to explore the spatial coexistence of multiple active phases and their functions within a single material structure, overcoming the limitations of conventional static diagrams and representing a technological approach to support scientific communication, interdisciplinary collaboration, education, and technical dissemination in materials science.
The need for efficiency in radiology has been made clear and augmented reality (AR) has the potential to address this by aiding with issues around irregular lighting conditions impacting the accuracy of reports, while also speeding up the process with improved interactions. However, some interaction questions are still very much open, and interactions for radiological applications deserve more attention. This short-term exposure study involved a series of seven interviews with practising radiologists and radiology registrars, most of whom were AR-novices. Participants engaged in AR tasks using the Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Meta Quest 3, running software provided by GigXR, as a basis for rich dialogue around the interaction value of AR for radiological tasks. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse the resulting data, generating five themes, with the NASA-TLX providing additional context. The themes were mapped to three design considerations that stand as the contribution of this work and highlight how radiological AR requires interaction design distinguishing intended from unintended movement, standardised hardware requirements for clinical-grade HMDs, and versatile, workflow-integrated deployment to overcome resistance to clinical adoption. These are embodied in the speculation of an AR-First world that illustrates key requirements.
The study examines the acceptance of Virtual Reality (VR) as a university educational resource using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). A quasi-experimental design was applied with 132 students from the Bachelor’s Degree in Education at the University of Seville. A desktop VR learning object developed according to Mayer’s principles was used and evaluated with three instruments: a TAM questionnaire, a SUS usability scale, and an ad hoc scale for technical and educational aspects. The results indicate high reliability (α > 0.9) and high scores for perceived usefulness, ease of use, enjoyment, attitude, and intention to use. The most notable correlations were between usability, usefulness, and intention. Usability was related to technical quality, ease of use and educational usefulness. The findings support the use of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) for examining the acceptance of desktop VR in higher education. The results also suggest that desktop VR can provide motivating learning experiences. Future research should replicate these findings using random samples and immersive VR environments.
