The effectiveness of virtual environments (VEs) has often been linked to the sense of presence reported by users of those VEs. (Presence is defined as the subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when one is physically situated in another.) We believe that presence is a normal awareness phenomenon that requires directed attention and is based in the interaction between s...

Virtual characters have become crucial to many interactive 3D graphical virtual environment simulations in the context of virtual reality and computer games. One of the primary concerns of the designers of such environments is to model the interaction of the virtual characters with the users. The gaze of the virtual character forms a chief component of this interaction. When the gaze of the vir...

Research suggests that Virtual Reality has a key role in the development of new diagnostic tools in neuropsychology and shows great rehabilitative potentials for individuals with specific neurological, intellectual and cognitive disabilities. In the case of dyslexia, a neurodevelopmental reading disorder, the use of Virtual Reality technologies has only been recently documented in a handful of ...

In this paper we present an experiment, which was designed and conducted with the goal to study the effect of lighting on the sense of presence in Augmented Reality. We compared presence ratings between global illumination rendering and direct illumination and asked study participants to judge which of the shown objects are virtual and which ones are real. Thirty people participated in a within...

– Shared control represents a middle ground between supervisory control and traditional bilateral control in which the remote system can exert control over some aspects of the task while the human operator maintains access to low-level forces and motions. Our telema-nipulation system includes tactile, force and motion sensors that allow the slave to regulate grasp forces and impart rolling moti...

This report represents a committee summary of the current state of knowledge regarding aftereffects and sense of presence in virtual environments (VEs). The work presented in this article, and the proposed research agenda, are the result of a special session that was set up in the framework of the Seventh International Conference on Human Computer Interaction. Recommendations were made by the...

An accurate perception of the distance between an object and a nearby surface can increase a viewer’s sense of presence in an immersive environment, particularly when a user is performing actions that affect or are affected by this distance. Two experiments were conducted examining the effectiveness of stereopsis, shadows, and interreflections at conveying this distance information. Subjects pe...

This paper reviews current explanations of firesetting in adult mentally disordered offenders. In particular attention is given to contemporary research that has examined the developmental and background characteristics, personality and associated traits, motivation for firesetting, neurobiological explanations, psychiatric diagnoses and frequency of self injurious behaviour; including suicide....

Ambient Telepresence is a method to support informal awareness in distributed collaborative work, and to promote a sense of presence of people who are in fact not co-located. In this approach, everyday things that people use are augmented with awareness technology, creating a smart environment in which information on background activity can be collected and interpreted. This information is tran...

Early work in augmented reality grew out of virtual reality research domains. These initial augmented reality systems applied the same methods and technology to solve what at first appeared to be a similar problem: correctly render a scene of virtual objects as the user changes viewpoint in the world. This is indeed similar for augmented and virtual reality systems. In virtual reality systems o...