Navigation in desktop virtual environments: an evaluation and recommendations for supporting usability

Virtual reality (VR) can provide useful tools for a variety of applications. However, for these tools to be effective, they must be easy to use. In virtual environments (VEs), usability is impaired by poorly designed navigation systems. Insufficient realism and missing physiological orientation and motion cues impair spatial learning in desktop VEs. Capabilities for navigation in a VE are far more varied than in reality; so much greater flexibility can be offered, but designing VEs with too many options can overwhelm users. To assist designers in building effective, usable navigation systems for VEs, navigation techniques must be evaluated to identify which features actually support users in accomplishing their tasks and which features create unnecessary problems.This study evaluates navigation in two different VEs to develop recommendations for the design of navigation systems in desktop VEs. The study consists of an objective assessment of navigation control dynamics, a guideline-based evaluation and a review of data collected during two experimental studies. The findings indicate that real-world constraints, specialised navigation techniques and feedback regarding location and direction of travel are needed to support navigation in desktop VEs.     

Online site visits using virtual collaborative spaces: A plan-reading activity on a digital building site

Site visits or field trips have been a tool utilized by construction educators to engage students in active learning, assist traditional lessons, and attain stronger and deeper student learning experiences. Nevertheless, site visits present major logistical and accessibility challenges for educational institutions and instructors, reducing the number of students that have access to the benefits of such a technique. The limitations for site visits have further broadened recently, as the reality of the COVID-19 public health concerns has forced educators to move to online course delivery quickly and the majority of site visits have been canceled. The research goal of this paper is to present construction students with opportunities to enable online location-independent site visits where contextualized learning is dangerous, unsafe, or impossible to achieve. In this project, a virtual online learning environment was created to offer the affordances that provide an in-depth learning experience through collaborative communication for a plan-reading activity in a virtual space that resembles a real-world site visit to a building facility. This virtual online learning environment helped students to experience the physical and social aspects of the site visit while getting a collaborative opportunity to practice their plan-reading skills. A comparative study with a business-as-usual condition (online delivery through Zoom®) was conducted and the students’ plan-reading performance and their feedback on the sense of presence, social presence, fatigue, and system usability was reported. The outcome of the study shows that such virtual collaborative site visits present unique opportunities to enable online delivery of spatiotemporal contexts of sites and offer an effective remote alternative when these learning opportunities are not available.     

Needs’ elaboration between users,designers and project leaders: Analysis of a design process of a virtual reality-based software

ContextThe participation of users in the design process is recognized as a positive and a necessary element as artifacts suit their needs. Two complementary approaches of users’ involvement co-exist: the user-centered design and the participatory design. These approaches involve learning process from users to designers and vice versa. However, there has no research in design of virtual reality (VR)-based software dealing with how the elaboration of needs is actually distributed in time and among users, designers and project leaders, as well as how it is actually supported by tools and methods.ObjectiveThis paper aims to observe, in a real design project of a virtual reality-based software, how the various stakeholders (users, designers, project leaders) actually participate by sharing and pulling pieces of information from the process of needs elaboration, and how these contributions evolve throughout the decisions made in the course of the project.MethodOur method, based on the observation of the practices in collective design, allows us to collect and analyze the relationship between each possible action (e.g., elicitation), each stakeholder who initiates these actions (e.g., users) and each phase of the design process (e.g., evaluation phase), and the dynamics of the construction of needs.ResultsOur results detail how the elicited needs are dealt with by designers, users and/or project leaders: (1) we show a strong contribution of users in the design, compared to others stakeholders, (2) among the needs elicited by users, most have been validated by the designers, (3) some elicited needs could have been firstly rejected and finally validated and implemented.ConclusionWe identify the reasons which justify and explain our results confronting them to the literature. We underline the conditions have been satisfied in our study in order to involve effectively users in the design of emerging technologies.     

Promoting collaborative skills in online university: comparing effects of games,mixed reality,social media,and other tools for ICT-supported pedagogical practices

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the development of collaborative skills through nine tools for information and communication technologies (ICT)-supported pedagogical practices, which are used in online universities. Using survey data for 930 online students at the Open University of Catalonia and partial least squares path modelling estimation techniques, three main findings emerged from the study. First, collaborative skills are directly explained by gamification and the use of mixed reality and social media in a socio-technical online learning context. Second, other tools for ICT-supported pedagogical practices (media content, wikis, open educational resources, personal webpages, personal cloud, and sharing files with fellow students and lecturers on the cloud) are not significant on collaborative skills development, when compared to use of games, mixed reality, and social media. Third, the analysis of indirect effects suggests that all four socio-technical factors (ICT, learning tasks, students, and organisation) existing in online university play a decisive, positive and significant role in collaborative skills development. Finally, these results are shown in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM studies. Thus, gamification, mixed reality, and sharing files are significant ICT-supported pedagogical practices in STEM studies. On the other hand, gamification is the only significant tool in non-STEM studies. Results are very useful for new approaches to design a framework for learning-team effectiveness in computer-supported collaborative learning.     

Evaluation of fostering students' creativity in preparing aided recalls for revision courses using electronic revision and recapitulation tools 2.0

In this study, the electronic revision and recapitulation tools 2.0 (EREP2.0) were used to foster creative moments while creating aided recalls (ARs) (pictures electronic notes etc.). Creative and critical thinking is associated with vital skills which enable students to deal with often complex knowledge domains through an informal way of learning. Enabling learners to develop their own representations of information can be a first step to deal with complexity and to foster creativity. In an exploratory study, n = 25 students used EREP2.0 to develop learning questions and ARs for an ongoing course on biological psychology. EREP 2.0 was evaluated with respect to user friendliness, the fostering of creativity and the expected support for cognitive skills according to Bloom's taxonomy. The influence of students' experienced creativity on experienced learning support was tested via Kruskal–Wallis test. Fifteen students reported moderate to high, 4 students low and 5 students no support in creativity. Students who experienced their work as creative felt better supported in comprehension, χ ²(3) = 9.04; p = 0.029, and synthesis, χ ²(3) = 9.46; p = 0.024. No statistically significant effects were found for other categories of Bloom's taxonomy. EREP 2.0 did support the experience of creativity and thus synthesis and comprehension skills.     

The learner characteristics,features of desktop 3D virtual reality environments,and college chemistry instruction: A structural equation modeling analysis

We examined a model of the impact of a 3D desktop virtual reality environment on the learner characteristics (i.e. perceptual and psychological variables) that can enhance chemistry-related learning achievements in an introductory college chemistry class. The relationships between the 3D virtual reality features and the chemistry learning test as it relates to the selected perceptual (spatial orientation and usability) and psychological (self-efficacy and presence) variables were analyzed using the structural equation modeling approach. The results supported all the hypothesized relationships except one. Usability strongly mediated the relationship between 3D virtual reality features, spatial orientation, self-efficacy, and presence. Spatial orientation and self-efficacy had statistically significant, positive impact on the chemistry learning test. The results indicate that 3D virtual reality-based instruction is effective for enhancing students’ chemistry achievement. Overall, this study contributed a research model that can help increase the effectiveness of desktop virtual reality environments for enhancing spatial ability and science achievement. Moreover, this study provides insight to science educators, instructional designers, and multimedia developers who are interested in designing science-based instruction using instructional design principles.     

基于课证融通的路由器与交换机课程虚拟实训体系构建

充分利用虚拟实训环境构建路由器与交换机课程＂V-3＂虚拟实训体系,将学习该课程必备的能力训练在虚拟环境中完成,让学生操作虚拟设备如同操作真实设备;并针对该体系提出了＂1432＂三段式层次实训教学模式。     

LESSONS FROM EMOTION PSYCHOLOGY FOR THE DESIGN OF LIFELIKE CHARACTERS

ABSTRACT

This special issue describes a number of applications that utilize lifelike characters that teach indirectly, by playing some role in a social interaction with a user. The design of such systems reflects a compromise between competing, sometimes unarticulated, demands: They must realistically exhibit the behaviors and characteristics of their role, they must facilitate the desired learning, and they must work within the limitations of current technology, and there is little theoretical or empirical guidance on the impact of these compromises on learning. Our perspective on this problem is shaped by our interest in the role of emotion and emotional behaviors in such forms of learning. In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the role of emotion in the design of virtual humans. The techniques and motivations underlying these various efforts can seem, from an outsider's perspective, as bewildering and multifaceted as the concept of emotion itself is generally accused of being. Drawing on insights from emotion psychology, this article attempts to clarify for the designers of educational agents the various theoretical perspectives on the concept of emotion with the aim of giving guidance to designers of educational agents.     

Scientific sketching for collaborative VR visualization design

We present four studies investigating tools and methodologies for artist-scientist-technologist collaboration in designing multivariate, virtual reality (VR) visualizations. Design study 1 identifies the promise of 3D drawing-style interfaces for VR design and also establishes limitations of these tools with respect to precision and support for animation. Design study 2 explores animating artist-created visualization designs with scientific 3D fluid flow data. While results captured an accurate sense of flow that was advantageous as compared to the results of study 1, the potential for visual exploration using the design tools tested was limited. Design study 3 reveals the importance of a new 3D interface that overcomes the precision limitation found in study 1 while remaining accessible to artist collaborators. Drawing upon previous results, design study 4 engages collaborative teams in a design process that begins with traditional paper sketching and moves to animated, interactive, VR prototypes "sketched" by designers in VR using interactive 3D tools. Conclusions from these four studies identify important characteristics of effective artist-accessible VR visualization design tools and lead to a proposed formalized methodology for successful collaborative design that we expect to be useful in guiding future collaborations. We call this proposed methodology Scientific Sketching.     

Move to get moved: a search for methods,tools and knowledge to design for expressive and rich movement-based interaction

The world is inherently meaningful for us, i.e. we perceive the world in terms of what we can do with it, and by physically interacting with it we access this meaning and express the meaning. We believe that this is the core reason and foundation for turning to movement-based interaction. ‘Interaction creates meaning’ does not only hold for users during interaction but also for designers when generating ideas and developing concepts. Therefore, we postulate that if one truly likes to design for movement-based interaction, one has to be or become an expert in movement, not just theoretically, by imagination or on paper, but by doing and experiencing while designing. In order to do so, we believe that designers need design tools, techniques, knowledge, awareness and skills that support their search for expressive, rich behaviour. Our search for this support resulted in several methods, tools and knowledge that help designers exploring, visualising and reflecting on interactions. Our developed methods and tools such as the Design Movement approach with its choreography of interaction, gestural design tools, interactive installations and interactive tangible sketching, have not only supported and inspired designers to design for movement-based interaction, but also resulted in surprising, fresh designs in comparison with the limited scope of rather uniform and traditional electronic consumer products. This paper discusses the possibilities and limitations of our approach.     

Empirical evidence,evaluation criteria and challenges for the effectiveness of virtual and mixed reality tools for training operators of car service maintenance

The debate on effectiveness of virtual and mixed reality (VR/MR) tools for training professionals and operators is long-running with prominent contributions arguing that there are several shortfalls of experimental approaches and assessment criteria reported within the literature. In the automotive context, although car-makers were pioneers in the use of VR/MR tools for supporting designers, researchers started only recently to explore the effectiveness of VR/MR systems as mean for driving external operators of service centres to acquire the procedural skills necessary for car maintenance processes. In fact, from 463 journal articles on VR/MR tools for training published in the last thirty years, we identified only eight articles in which researchers experimentally tested the effectiveness of VR/MR tools for training service operators’ skills. To survey the current findings and the deficiencies of these eight studies, we use two main drivers: (i) a well-known framework of organizational training programmes, and (ii) a list of eleven evaluation criteria widely applied by researchers of different fields for assessing the effectiveness of training carried out with VR/MR systems. The analysis that we present allows us to: (i) identify a trend among automotive researchers of focusing their analysis only on car service operators’ performance in terms of time and errors, by leaving unexplored important pre- and post-training aspects that could affect the effectiveness of VR/MR tools to deliver training contents – e.g., people skills, previous experience, cibersickness, presence and engagement, usability and satisfaction and (ii) outline the future challenges for designing and assessing VR/MR tools for training car service operators.     

FlatWorld: combining Hollywood set-design techniques with VR

Despite notable advances over the past decade, current virtual reality systems have numerous drawbacks. The FlatWorld project at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies seeks to overcome these limitations by exploring a new approach to virtual environments (VEs) inspired by Hollywood set-design techniques. Since the dawn of the film industry, movie sets have been constructed using modular panels called flats. Set designers use flats to create physical structures to represent various places and activities. The paper considers how FlatWorld is developing a reconfigurable system of digital flats. Using large-screen displays and real-time computer graphics technology, a single digital flat can appear as an interior room wall or an exterior building face.     

A system for desktop conceptual 3D design

In the traditional design process for a 3D environment, people usually depict a rough prototype to verify their ideas, and iteratively modify its configuration until they are satisfied with the general layout. In this activity, one of the main operations is the rearrangement of single and composite parts of a scene. With current desktop virtual reality (VR) systems, the selection and manipulation of arbitrary objects in 3D is still difficult. In this work, we present new and efficient techniques that allow even novice users to perform meaningful rearrangement tasks with traditional input devices. The results of our work show that the presented techniques can be mastered quickly and enable users to perform complex tasks on composite objects. Moreover, the system is easy to learn, supports creativity, and is fun to use.     

Efficient virtual reality design of quiet underwater shells

Abstract Efficient computational tools are developed to model, visualize, and feel the structural-acoustics of shells in a virtual reality environment. These tools aim at building the structural-acoustic models of shells from an array of basic building blocks including: beams, shells, and stiffeners. The concepts of finite element analysis, sub-structuring, model reduction, meta-modeling, and parallel computations form the main steps to be followed for building simplified computational models of complex shell systems. The resulting models are particularly suitable for the efficient application of multi-criteria optimization techniques in order to select the optimal design parameters of these complex shell systems. The developed integrated analysis tools enable the engineers to design complex systems in a cost effective and a timely manner. Furthermore, engineers will be immersed in an audio-visually coupled tele-operated environment whereby direct interaction and control of the design process can be achieved. In this manner, the behavior of synthetic models of shells can be monitored by literally walking through the shell and adjusting its design parameters as needed to ensure optimal performance while satisfying design and operational requirements. For example, engineers can move electronic wands to vary the number, size, type, and location of stiffeners in the shell, monitor the resulting structural-acoustic visually or by haptic feedback and simultaneously listen to the radiated sound pressure field. Such manipulations of the virtual shells in the scene are carried out while the engineer is navigating through and around the shell to ensure that the vibration and sound levels, at any critical locations, are within the acceptable limits. The developed integrated approach also serves as a means for virtual training of students and engineers on designing and operating complex smart structures on the site as well as through collaborative efforts with other virtual reality sites. Such unique capability will enable engineers to design prototypes of expensive vehicles without building them. Examples of these vehicles include aircraft, submersibles, torpedoes, and others that can share this virtual experience and can be profoundly impacted upon by the proposed approach. The presented optimal design approach is implemented in the Virtual Reality CAVE Laboratory at the University of Maryland that is controlled by an eight parallel processor Silicon Graphics Infinite Reality (ONYX2) computer.     

Industry use of virtual reality in product design and manufacturing: a survey

In 1999, Fred Brooks, virtual reality pioneer and Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published a seminal paper describing the current state of virtual reality (VR) technologies and applications (Brooks in IEEE Comput Graph Appl 19(6):16, 1999). Through his extensive survey of industry, Brooks concluded that virtual reality had finally arrived and “barely works”. His report included a variety of industries which leveraged these technologies to support industry-level innovation. Virtual reality was being employed to empower decision making in design, evaluation, and training processes across multiple disciplines. Over the past two decades, both industrial and academic communities have contributed to a large knowledge base on numerous virtual reality topics. Technical advances have enabled designers and engineers to explore and interact with data in increasingly natural ways. Sixteen years have passed since Brooks original survey. Where are we now? The research presented here seeks to describe the current state of the art of virtual reality as it is used as a decision-making tool in product design, particularly in engineering-focused businesses. To this end, a survey of industry was conducted over several months spanning fall 2014 and spring 2015. Data on virtual reality applications across a variety of industries was gathered through a series of on-site visits. In total, on-site visits with 18 companies using virtual reality were conducted as well as remote conference calls with two others. The authors interviewed 62 people across numerous companies from varying disciplines and perspectives. Success stories and existing challenges were highlighted. While virtual reality hardware has made considerable strides, unique attention was given to applications and the associated decisions that they support. Results suggest that virtual reality has arrived: it works! It is mature, stable, and, most importantly, usable. VR is actively being used in a number of industries to support decision making and enable innovation. Insights from this survey can be leveraged to help guide future research directions in virtual reality technology and applications.     

Single-narrative,multiple point-of-view dramatic experiences in augmented reality

Researchers and practitioners working on story-based experiences in virtual environments often make two assumptions. One assumption is that, to be compelling, such experiences must enable the user to make significant choices that alter the outcome of the story. Another is that virtual environments constitute a revolutionary new medium, and therefore that the techniques of earlier media, such as film and stage production, are no longer relevant. In designing story-based experiences in augmented reality, we have come to question these two assumptions. Three Angry Men, based on the teleplay and movie Twelve Angry Men, is an example of an augmented reality, dramatic experience with a fixed plot but multiple points of view.     

Methods engineering: Using rapid prototype and virtual reality techniques

Methods engineering (ME) is the most traditional area of industrial engineering. In spite of its importance, the tools and techniques in use have hardly changed in the last 30 years. Lately, tools based on rapid prototyping (RP) and virtual reality (VR) techniques have been developed. This article presents the concept of incorporating these technologies with the ME process. A framework for an RP and VR-based ME system is introduced. Two preliminary attempts to implement RP technology in ME are reported. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Material light: exploring expressive materials

The control of material appearance has become richer than before, giving designers new expressive freedom. Designers need tools and techniques to handle this freedom when designing products. We present a simple but powerful technique to explore material expression in the conceptual phase of the design process. Colours and patterns are projected on foam and paper models to enable designers to quickly visualise and judge materials in context of the products shape. This paper is part of the 3AD design colloquium creative connections.     

Machine learning: A tool to support usability?

One problem facing designers of interactive systems is catering to the wide range of users who will use a particular application. Understanding the user is critical to designing a usable interface. There are a number of ways of addressing this problem, including improved design methodologies using ''intuitive'' interface styles, adaptive interfaces, and better training and user support materials. In this article, we argue that each of these solutions involves pattern recognition in one form or another and that machine learning can therefore aid designers of interactive systems in these areas. We report on experiments that demonstrate the potential of machine learning to user modeling that has application to two of these areas in particular: adaptive systems and design methodologies.