In this abstract, we discuss the demand for replication and extension efforts related to two seminal studies focused on virtual reality (VR) locomotion interfaces, initially centered around a VR implementation of the Visual Cliff, often referred to as Virtual Pit. The original experiments by Slater et al. (1995) and Usoh et al. (1999) compared different locomotion methods, including Real Walking, Walking-in-Place, and Flying/Steering, with a focus on presence and ease of use. We discuss the importance of these studies for the field, motivate replication efforts focused on these studies, discuss potential confounding factors, and present considerations for a concerted effort to reproduce the findings with state-of-the-art VR systems and measures, extensions to locomotion methods like Teleportation, and means to support future replications and extensions.

The IEEE VR Steering Committee congratulates and offers gratitude to the enormous efforts of the IEEE VR Conference Organizing Committees—with special recognition for the multiple years of hard work of the General Chairs, Carolina Cruz-Neira, Greg Welch, and Xubo Yang. To realize the conference requires a sizeable, motivated team of volunteers to work with the IEEE conference management team. Maintaining the conference's status as the premier international virtual reality conference is a testament to the commitment of all the organizers and participants that make up the IEEE Virtual Reality community.

The article offers a behind-the-scenes look at the creation process of last year's special issue article commemorating five decades of SIGGRAPH conferences. In this edited transcription of an interview, the article's editors, Mary Whitton, Chris Johnson, and Dave Kasik, share insights on how the project evolved from a conventional idea to an unconventional groundbreaking collection of personal stories. The interview delves into the inception of the project, the challenges faced in gathering contributions, the innovative methods employed for outreach, and the surprises encountered along the way. From the initial concept to the final publication, the editors recount the collaborative effort involved in producing a comprehensive and visually captivating retrospective. The impact of the article on the SIGGRAPH community especially and the computer graphics community in general is reflected in feedback received, highlighting its value as a repository of memories and a testament to the enduring legacy of the conference. Through personal anecdotes and reflections, the interview captures the spirit of camaraderie and innovation that has characterized SIGGRAPH over the past half-century.

The IEEE VR Steering Committee congratulates and offers gratitude to the enormous efforts of the IEEE VR Conference Organizing Committees — with special recognition for the multiple years of hard work of the General Chairs, Xubo Yang, Kun Zhou, Tobias Langlotz, and Stephan Lukosch. To realize the conference requires a sizeable, motivated team of volunteers to work with the IEEE conference management team. Maintaining the conference's status as the premier international virtual reality conference is a testament to the commitment of all the organizers and participants that make up the IEEE Virtual Reality community.

IEEE VR 2023 is the 30th conference in the series, and 2023 is the 24th anniversary of the publication of Professor Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.'s paper "What's Real about Virtual Reality?".In light of those two things, and acknowledging the contribution the paper has made, We propose a panel of people who engage in activities using VR/AR outside of laboratory settings; people who confront, on a daily basis, what's real (and what's not) about virtual reality.Our four panelists will each briefly describe their application and use of VR and then address the pain point--the squeaky wheel--that impedes wider adoption in their application area.The presentations will be followed by Q&A both amongst the panelists and from the audience.Audience questions will be pre-screened.The panel will be recorded for archival purposes.

A description is given of the milieu, including people, events, and research activities, surrounding the development of the author's doctoral thesis, “Applications of B-spline Approximation to Geometric Problems of Computer-Aided Design.” Although initially slow to become adopted, today nonuniform B-splines have become the international de facto standard representation in the CAD industry.

The IEEE VR Steering Committee congratulates and offers gratitude to the enormous efforts of the IEEE VR Conference Organizing Committees -with special recognition for the multiple years of hard work of the General Chairs.To realize the conference requires a sizeable, motivated team of volunteers to work with the IEEE conference management team.Maintaining the conference's status as the premier international virtual reality conference is a testament to the commitment of all the organizers and participants that make up the IEEE Virtual Reality community.The IEEE VR Steering Committee works with the IEEE VR Conference Organizing Committee and the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee.The IEEE VR Steering Committee develops long-term strategic plans to increase the impact of the conference, and to improve processes such as awards, paper reviewing, and archiving.

This work addresses cybersickness, a major barrier to successful long-exposure immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences since user discomfort frequently leads to prematurely ending such experiences. Starting from sensory conflict theory, we posit that if a vibrating floor delivers vestibular stimuli that minimally match the vibration characteristics of a scenario, the size of the conflict between the visual and vestibular senses will be reduced and, thus, the incidence and/or severity of cybersickness will also be reduced. We integrated a custom-built, computer-controlled vibrating floor in our VR system. To evaluate the system, we implemented a realistic off-road vehicle driving simulator in which participants rode multiple laps as passengers on an off-road course. We programmed the floor to generate vertical vibrations similar to those experienced in real off-road vehicle travel. The scenario and driving conditions were designed to be cybersickness-inducing for users in both the Vibration and No-vibration conditions. We collected subjective and objective data for variables previously shown to be related to levels of cybersickness or presence. These included presence and simulator sickness questionnaires (SSQ), self-rated discomfort levels, and the physiological signals of heart rate, galvanic skin response (GSR), and pupil size. Comparing data between participants in the Vibration group (N=11) to the No-Vibration group (N=11), we found that Delta-SSQ Oculomotor response and the GSR physiological signal, both known to be positively correlated with cybersickness, were significantly lower (with large effect sizes) for the Vibration group. Other variables differed between groups in the same direction, but with trivial or small effect sizes. The results indicate that the floor vibration significantly reduced some measures of cybersickness.

Floor vibration, a type of whole-body tactile stimulation, could mitigate cybersickness during virtual reality (VR) exposure. This study aims to further investigate its effects on cybersickness, as well as presence and emotional arousal by introducing floor vibration as a proxy for representing different virtual ground surfaces. For the investigation, a realistic walking-on-the-beach scenario was implemented, and floor vibrations were introduced in synchrony with the footsteps. Three conditions were designed based on the same scenario with different floor vibrations. The user study involving 26 participants found that there was no significant difference in presence and cybersickness across the three conditions, but the introduction of floor vibration (regardless the vibration type) had a mixed impact on the emotional arousal, as measured by changes in pupil sizes and skin conductance. Also, participants generally most preferred the matched vibration.

We report on the design and results of an experiment investigating factors influencing Slater's Plausibility Illusion (Psi) in virtual environments (VEs). Slater proposed Psi and Place Illusion (PI) as orthogonal components of virtual experience which contribute to realistic response in a VE. PI corresponds to the traditional conception of presence as “being there,” so there exists a substantial body of previous research relating to PI, but very little relating to Psi. We developed this experiment to investigate the components of plausibility illusion using subjective matching techniques similar to those used in color science. Twenty-one participants each experienced a scenario with the highest level of coherence (the extent to which a scenario matches user expectations and is internally consistent), then in eight different trials chose transitions from lower-coherence to higher-coherence scenarios with the goal of matching the level of Psi they felt in the highest-coherence scenario. At each transition, participants could change one of the following coherence characteristics: the behavior of the other virtual humans in the environment, the behavior of their own body, the physical behavior of objects, or the appearance of the environment. Participants tended to choose improvements to the virtual body before any other improvements. This indicates that having an accurate and well-behaved representation of oneself in the virtual environment is the most important contributing factor to Psi. This study is the first to our knowledge to focus specifically on coherence factors in virtual environments.

We discuss the design and results of an experiment investigating Plausibility Illusion in virtual human (VH) interactions, in particular, the coherence of conversation with a VH. This experiment was performed in combination with another experiment evaluating two display technologies. As that aspect of the study is not relevant to this poster, it will be mentioned only in the Materials section. Participants who interacted with a low-coherence VH looked around the room markedly more than participants interacting with a high-coherence VH, demonstrating that the level of coherence of VHs can have a detectable effect on user behavior and that head and gaze behavior can be used to evaluate the quality of a VH interaction.

We report on the design and results of an experiment investigating Slater's Place Illusion (PI) and Plausibility Illusion (Psi) in a virtual visual cliff environment. Existing presence questionnaires could not reliably distinguish the effects of PI from those of Psi. They did, however, indicate that high levels of PI-eliciting characteristics and Psi-eliciting characteristics together result in higher presence, compared to any of the other three conditions. Also, participants' heart rates responded markedly differently in the two Psi conditions; no such difference was observed across the PI conditions.

Many geoscience disciplines utilize complex computational models for advancing understanding and sustainable management of Earth systems. Executing such models and their associated data preprocessing and postprocessing routines can be challenging for a number of reasons including (1) accessing and preprocessing the large volume and variety of data required by the model, (2) postprocessing large data collections generated by the model, and (3) orchestrating data processing tools, each with unique software dependencies, into workflows that can be easily reproduced and reused. To address these challenges, the work reported in this paper leverages the Workflow Structured Object functionality of the Integrated Rule‐Oriented Data System and demonstrates how it can be used to access distributed data, encapsulate hydrologic data processing as workflows, and federate with other community‐driven cyberinfrastructure systems. The approach is demonstrated for a study investigating the impact of drought on populations in the Carolinas region of the United States. The analysis leverages computational modeling along with data from the Terra Populus project and data management and publication services provided by the Sustainable Environment‐Actionable Data project. The work is part of a larger effort under the DataNet Federation Consortium project that aims to demonstrate data and computational interoperability across cyberinfrastructure developed independently by scientific communities.

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