Maintenance is a highly procedural activity requiring motor and cognitive engagement. The aim of this experimental study was to examine how expertise affects maintenance tasks, in particular, the use of procedural documents. A total of 22 aircraft maintenance technicians were divided into two groups according to their level of expertise. Helicopter maintenance was evaluated in a real work environment, using an eye tracker, a fixed camera, and NASA-TLX to measure workload. Both groups reported a high mental load. Novices showed elevated levels of effort and mental demand. Experts were faster at all levels of the task and spent less time consulting maintenance documentation. The acquisition of procedural information was greater at the start of the task, where the gap between groups was more pronounced. This may be related to the overall planning of the task, in addition, the task was atomized, with frequent back-and-forth between execution and information intake, for all participants. Novices had a longer document consultation duration, spread over a greater number of consultations, but did not have a higher average consultation time. The results indicate a higher mental load for novices, potentially linked to an increased atomization of the task, as shown by the frequency of consultations.

We investigated how naturalistic actions in a highly immersive, multimodal, interactive 3D virtual reality (VR) environment may enhance word encoding by recording EEG in a pre/post-test learning paradigm. While behavior data has shown that coupling word encoding with gestures congruent with word meaning enhances learning, the neural underpinnings of this effect have yet to be elucidated. We coupled EEG recording with VR to examine whether "embodied learning" improves learning and creates linguistic representations that produce greater motor resonance. Participants learned action verbs in an L2 in two different conditions: Specific action (observing and performing congruent actions on virtual objects) and Pointing (observing actions and pointing to virtual objects). Pre and post-training participants performed a Match-mismatch task as we measured EEG (variation in the N400 response as a function of match between observed actions and auditory verbs) and a Passive listening task while we measured motor activation (mu (8-13 Hz) and beta band (13-30Hz) desynchronization during auditory verb processing) during verb processing. Contrary to our expectations, post-training results revealed neither semantic nor motor effects in either group when considered independently of learning success. Behavioral results showed both groups learned the verbs, but also a great deal of variability in learning success. When considering performance, Low performance learners showed no semantic effect and High performance learners exhibited an N400 effect for Mismatch vs Match trails post-training, independent of the type of learning. Taken as a whole, our results suggest that embodied processes can play an important role in L2 learning.

The main objective of this study is to improve maintenance activities using mixed reality. Co-design work with Support Engineers was undertaken to develop a mixed reality solution that corresponded to the different needs of task sequencing feasibility. Multiple versions of the solution were tested using Microsoft HoloLens hardware to achieve continuous improvement. The study compared the two latest versions of the solution: the CAD version and the PHYS version. The CAD version was an immersive version inspired by CATIA CAD software, while the PHYS version implemented a realistic approach to parts handling (including gravity, continuous presence, and spatial organization of physical parts on a real table). Support Engineers carried out an experiment, performing a disassembly/assembly task using both versions of the solution. Results showed that the overall workload was significantly reduced, along with task completion time, using the PHYS solution. The PHYS version was also judged to be more usable than the CAD version. Adding 'pseudo-natural' manipulation of virtual objects to a maintenance task simulation better suits the needs of Support Engineers.

Nuclear maintenance operations require several types of cognitive and motor skills that can be trained in immersive environments. However, there is a lack of normalized methodological approaches to classify tasks and guide them for a potential transposition to immersive training. This paper proposes a methodological approach to classify nuclear maintenance tasks based on their complexity and the potential transfer of training obtainable from each type of immersion techniques and their related interactions.This proposed methodology provides a novel approach to compare various immersive technologies and interactions in a normalized way for a same industrial task.This paper aims at serving as a base for a methodological guide dedicated to the transposition of nuclear maintenance skills learned in immersive environments to real environment setups and proposes two future use cases based on this methodological approach.

Herein we present electrophysiological evidence of extremely rapid learning of new labels in a second language (L2) for existing concepts, via computerized games. However, the effect was largely constrained by crosslinguistic grammatical gender congruency. We recorded ERPs both prior to exposure with the L2 and following a 4-day training session. Prior to exposure, no modulation of the N400 component was found as a function of the correct Match vs. Mismatch of audio presentation of words and their associated images. Post-training, a large N400 effect emerged for Mismatch compared to Match trials, but only for trials on which the L2 words shared grammatical gender in the learners' L1. Behavioral results showed that all L2 words were learned equally as well, independent of gender congruency across the L1 and the L2. The results demonstrate that crosslinguistic grammatical gender congruency influences lexical activation during the initial stages of establishing a new L2 lexicon.

Aircraft maintenance technicians (AMTs) play an essential role in life-long security of helicopters. There are two major types of operations in maintenance activity: information intake/processing and motor actions. Modeling expertise of the AMT is the main objective of this doctoral project. Given the constraints of real-world research, mobile eye-tracking appears to be an essential tool for the measurement of information intake, notably concerning the use of maintenance documentation during the maintenance task preparation and execution. . This extended abstract will present the main research objectives, our approach and methodology and some preliminary results.

More than 1.3 million people lose their lives every year in traffic accidents. Improving road safety requires designing better vehicles and investigating drivers’ abilities more closely. Driving simulators are constantly being used for this purpose, but the question which often arises as to their validity tends to be a barrier to developments in this field. Here we studied the validity of a simulator, defined as how closely users’ behavior under simulated conditions resembles their behavior on the road, based on the concept of drivers’ feeling of presence. For this purpose, the driving behavior, physiological state and declarative data of 41 drivers were tested in the Sherpa2 simulator and in a real vehicle on a track while driving at a constant speed. During each trial, drivers had to cope with an unexpected hazardous event (a one-meter diameter gym ball crossing the road right in front of the vehicle), which occurred twice. During the speed-maintenance task, the simulator showed absolute validity, in terms of the driving and physiological parameters recorded. During the first hazardous event, the physiological parameters showed that the level of arousal (Low Heart Rate/High Heart Rate ratio x10) increased up to the end of the drive. On the other hand, the drivers’ behavioral (braking) responses were 20% more frequent in the simulator than in the real vehicle, and the physiological state parameters showed that stress reactions occurred only in the real vehicle (+5 beats per minute, +2 breaths per minute and the phasic skin conductance increased by 2). In the subjects’ declarative data, several feeling of presence sub-scales were lower under simulated conditions. These results suggest that the validity of motion based simulators for testing drivers coping with hazards needs to be questioned.

Car manufacturers expect driving simulators to be reliable research and development tools. Questions arise, however, as to whether drivers? behavior on simulators exactly matches that observed when they are driving real cars. Drivers? performances and their subjective feelings about their driving were compared between two groups during a 40-min driving test on the same circuit in a real car (n = 20) and a high-fidelity dynamic simulator (n = 27). Their speed and its variability, the braking force and the engine revolutions per minute (rpm) were recorded five times on a straight line and three times on a curve. The differences observed in these measurements between circuit driving (CD) and simula-tor driving (SD) from the 6th to 40th minute showed no significant changes during the drive. The drivers also completed the NASA Raw Task Load Index (NASA RTLX) question-naire and the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) and estimated the ease and standard of their own driving performances. These subjective feelings differed significantly between the two groups throughout the experiment. The SD group?s scores on the NASA RTLX and SSQ questionnaires increased with time and the CD group?s perceived driving quality and ease increased with time, reaching non-significantly different levels from their usual car driving standards by the end of the drive. These findings show the existence of a fairly good match between real-life and simulated driving, which stabilized six minutes after the start of the test, regardless of whether the road was straight or curved. These objective findings and subjective assessments suggest possible ways of improving the match between dri-vers? performances on simulators and their real-life driving behavior. ? 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Microsoft has recently released a mixed reality headset called HoloLens. This semi-transparent visor headset allows the user who wears it to view the projection of 3D virtual objects placed in its real environment. The user can also grasp these 3D objects, which can also interact with each other. The framework of this new technology taking into account this physical approach (interactions, collisions) is called mixed reality. We had the opportunity to digitally transform a conventional nutrition workshop for patients waiting for bariatric surgery by designing a mixed reality software using the HoloLens headset. This software is called HOLO_NUTRI. In this paper, we present this software and its assessment (acceptance of this technology) by a cohort of thirty patients.

Optic flow has been found to be a significant cue for static observers’ perception of distance travelled. In previous research conducted in a large-scale immersive display (CAVE), adding viewpoint oscillations to a radial optic flow simulating forward self-motion was found to modulate this perception. In the present two experiments, we investigated (1) whether the improved distance travelled perceptions observed with an oscillating viewpoint in a CAVE were also obtained when the subjects were wearing a head mounted display (HMD, an Oculus Rift) and (2) whether the absence of viewpoint oscillations during treadmill walking was liable to affect the subjects’ perception of self-motion. In Experiment 1, static observers performed a distance travelled estimation task while facing either a purely linear visual simulation of self-motion (in depth) or the same flow in addition to viewpoint oscillations based on the subjects’ own head oscillations previously recorded during treadmill walking. Results show that the benefits of viewpoint oscillations observed in a CAVE persisted when the participants were wearing an HMD. In Experiment 2, participants had to carry out the same task while walking on a treadmill under two different visual conditions simulating self-motion in depth: the one with and the other without the visual consequences of their head translations. Results showed that viewpoint oscillations did not improve the accuracy of subjects’ distance travelled estimations. A comparison between the two experiments showed that adding internal dynamic information about actual self-motion to visual information did not allow participants better estimates.

Embodied cognition studies have shown motor resonance during action language processing, indicating that linguistic representations are at least partially multimodal. However, constraints of this activation linked to linguistic and extra-linguistic context, function and timing have not yet been fully explored. Importantly, embodied cognition binds social and physical contexts to cognition, suggesting that more ecologically valid contexts will yield more valid measures of cognitive processing. Herein, we measured cortical motor activation during language processing in a fully immersive Cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE). EEG was recorded while participants engaged in a Go/No-Go task. They heard action verbs and, for Go trials, performed a corresponding action on a virtual object. ERSP (event-related spectral perturbation) was calculated during verb processing, corresponding to the pattern of power suppression (event-related desynchronization ERD) and enhancement (event-related synchronization - ERS) relative to the reference interval. Significant ERD emerged during verb processing in both the mu (8-13 Hz) and beta band (20-30 Hz) for both Go and No-Go trials. mu ERD emerged in the 400-500 msec time window, associated with lexical-semantic processing. Greater mu ERD emerged for Go compared to No-Go trials. The present results provide compelling evidence in a naturalistic setting of how motor and linguistic processes interact.

With the increasing use of avatars (i.e. the virtual representation of the user in a virtual environment) in virtual reality, it is important to identify the factors eliciting the sense of embodiment or the factors that can disrupt this feeling. This paper reports an exploratory study aiming at identifying internal factors (personality traits and body awareness) that might cause either a resistance or a predisposition to feel a sense of embodiment towards a virtual avatar. To this purpose, we conducted an experiment (n=123) in which participants were immersed in a virtual environment and embodied in a gender-matched generic virtual avatar through a head-mounted display. After an exposure phase in which they had to perform a number of visuomotor tasks (during 2 minutes) a virtual character entered the virtual scene and stabbed the participants' virtual hand with a knife. The participants' sense of embodiment was measured, as well as several personality traits (Big Five traits and locus of control) and body awareness, to evaluate the influence of participants' personality on the acceptance of the virtual body. The major finding of the experiment is that the locus of control is linked to several components of embodiment: the sense of agency is positively correlated with an internal locus of control and the sense of body ownership is positively correlated with an external locus of control. Interestingly, both components are not influenced by the same traits, which confirms that they can appear independently. Taken together our results suggest that the locus of control could be a good predictor of the sense of embodiment when the user embodies an avatar with a similar physical appearance. Yet, further studies are required to confirm these results.

Résumé Participants were instructed to reproduce a previously observed distance by travelling passively at a constant velocity into straight textured tunnels in a CAVE. The diameter of the tunnel into which participants travelled and the egocentric distance to be reproduced were manipulated. Participants’ distance perception was sensitive to the tunnel’s scale, distance being overestimated with the tunnel’s diameter increase and underestimated with the tunnel’s diameter decrease.

The way doctors deliver bad news has a significant impact on the therapeutic process. In order to facilitate doctor’s training, we have developed an embodied conversational agent simulating a patient to train doctors to break bad news. In this article, we present an evaluation of the virtual reality training platform comparing the users’ experience depending on the virtual environment displays: a PC desktop, a virtual reality headset, and four wall fully immersive systems. The results of the experience, including both real doctors and naive participants, reveal a significant impact of the environment display on the perception of the user (sense of presence, sense of co-presence, perception of the believability of the virtual patient), showing, moreover, the different perceptions of the participants depending on their level of expertise.

In this paper, we introduce a two-step corpora-based methodology, starting from a corpus of human-human interactions to construct a semi-autonomous system in order to collect a new corpus of human-machine interaction, a step before the development of a fully autonomous system constructed based on the analysis of the collected corpora. The presented methodology is illustrated in the context of a virtual reality training platform for doctors breaking bad news.

The concepts of immersion and presence are complementary in the field of Virtual Reality research. Immersion is indeed a necessary and non-sufficient condition for the sensation of presence, this latter being also linked to psychological and contextual factors. In our experimental approach, we focus mainly on spatial presence (the sensation of being "there" in the virtual environment). Spatial presence is dependent on cognitive and sensorimotor aspects of navigation and manipulation within virtual environments. More precisely, we focus on behavioral presence, the fact that participants in virtual reality experiences behave in a manner similar to their behavior in a real environment. In this sense, presence appears as a relevant concept, to evaluate the psychological and behavioral validity of human behavior within virtual environments, with respect to reality. Through different experimental studies dealing with human spatial behavior and using different VR setups, our behavioral approach to presence is presented and discussed. An application case will be also presented, suggesting that presence is also related to visuo-proprioceptive coherency.