OBJECTIVE To confirm, using an observational cohort design, the relation between severely stressful life experiences and relapse of breast cancer found in a previous case-control study. DESIGN Prospective follow up for five years of a cohort of women newly diagnosed as having breast cancer, collecting data on stressful life experiences, depression, and biological prognostic factors. SETTING...

The aim of this study was to test the efficacy of a mood-induction procedure in a Virtual Reality (VR-MIP) environment for inducing relaxation and generating sense of presence, and to test whether the stimulation of the senses of touch and smell improves the efficacy of this VR-MIP. A controlled study was carried out with four experimental conditions. All of them included the VRMIP to induce re...

Feeling deeply connected to yourself and your body creates a richer experience of presence in a virtual world, even when your body is sitting in a chair wearing VR googles. We call this embodied presence. Connection to the self and body (paying attention to present-moment sensations and feelings) enhances the sense of self and the sense of presence, regardless of whether you are in the natural ...

Virtual reality systems have reached a certain level of maturity in terms of visual and aural quality, but the sense of presence also requires believably behaving environment. A new field of adding intelligence into virtual environments is emerging. We describe shortly the field of virtual reality, and how AI can be applied there. We outline the possibilities of using AI to enhance existing app...

The present paper is a review of the role of individual factors in Spatial Presence. If Spatial Presence is a subjective mental phenomenon psychological factors must have an important role on it. Our review shows that, even though many authors claim about the need for a better understanding about this relation, empirical evidence is still very limited. Personality-related factors as absorption,...

Psychological approaches to the study of presence are limited, and those with experimental support even more limited. This work is an attempt to highlight the human factors involved which may lead to a better understanding of individual differences in relation to the experience of presence. We investigated the relationship between four cognitive factors namely absorption, creative imagination, ...

We need to know the real intentions of participants that are not expressed by verbal languages This means that not only verbal information but also non-verbal information (i e , gestures, facial expression, eyes of participant, etc.) is a very important factor We proposed and implemented MAJIC, a multi-party videoconferencing system that enables eye contact among people in remote places, with l...

Presence and copresence have been key goals of researchers and developers of shared virtual environments. Much research has assumed that the two reinforce each other; that is, an enhanced sense of presence enhances copresence and vice versa. In this essay we question this assumption, and provide some examples in which users experience high presence and low copresence and the opposite. Although ...

Human movement in virtual environments (VEs) is a largely unstudied area, and there are no well-established methods of measuring it in VEs. Consequently, it is unclear how movement affects the experiential side of VEs. We introduce a novel method of measuring and modelling human movement. A specific information entropy-based modelling method enabled us to identify different movement patterns an...