It can be argued that an ideal teleconferencing system would offer a sense of presence comparable to that afforded by real face-to-face meetings. In contrast, traditional desktop videoconferencing loses essential socially important phenomena such as true perspective views, live facial expressions and tacit body language. This paper reports a prototype concept demonstrator under development at B...

This article presents the characteristics of using a tangible tabletop environment produced by augmented reality (AR), aimed at improving the environment in which learners observe three-dimensional molecular structures. The authors perform two evaluation experiments. A performance test for a user interface demonstrates that learners with a tangible AR environment were able to complete the task ...

Serious games seem to be more effective if the participant feels more involved in the game. The participant should experience a high sense of presence which can be obtained by matching the level of excitement to the level of arousal a participant experiences. The level of arousal should be measured at runtime to make the game adaptive to the participant’s physiological state. In this paper an e...

With the development of new instruments as telecommunication, teleoperation, computer representation tools, human beings are commonly in situation to perceive and act on spaces that are more and more distant or different from our physical world. These new tools raise nowadays the question of Presence of these distant spaces with a growing intensity. This question crosses disciplines as differen...

• In the current study we have applied the concept of presence to 3DTV research. More specifically, we took this concept to reflect the increased perceptual linkage between the observer and the mediated environment, supporting an illusion of non-mediation. We applied the continuous assessment methodology to reveal time-variant properties of presence, which were hitherto largely ignored, and to ...

This paper studies the applicability of Synthetic Environments (SE) for dynamic prototyping in the early phase of product design. For this purpose, a simple SE, built with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology, was employed to support the design of the lid of an X-Ray machine. Psychological experiments, statistical analysis of questionnaires, and user interviews indicated that for the desi...

BACKGROUND Stress questionnaires are included in many epidemiological cohort studies but the psychometric characteristics of these questionnaires are largely unknown. The aim of this study was to describe these characteristics for two short questionnaires measuring the lifetime and past year occurrence of stress: the List of Threatening Events (LTE) as a measure of acute stress and the Long-ter...

With rapidly changing advances in technology, VEs have gained much attention from both scholarly and practitioner communities. In spite of intense and widespread efforts, most VE-related research has focused on the technical aspects of applications. By contrast, the necessary theoretical framework needed to assess the quality of interfaces and designs has not yet been fully developed. This rese...

Force feedback coupled with a real-time physically realistic graphic display provides a human operator with an artificial sense of presence in a virtual environment. Furthermore, it allows a human operator to interact with the virtual environment through ”touch”. In this paper, we describe a haptic simulation system that allows a human operator to perform real-time interaction with soft 3D obje...

This paper is concerned with approaches to semi-autonomous avatars in virtual game worlds, and degrees of autonomy in relation to player-control. Approaches to semi-autonomous avatars can be divided into three groups based on the design goals of using them: relief, expression and impression. Players can be relieved of cognitive and operational load by for example automating the animations of bo...