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The technological advances we are witnessing today have stimulated the creation of many 3D virtual environments for various purposes, from entertainment to industry to education. While the majority of these environments are perfectly suited for the healthy population, we should not forget about impaired people living among us. Regarding children’s education, one may wonder how impaired children handle them. Do they find them usable and attractive? How well do they handle basic activities in 3D environments, including orientation and interaction with objects? The experiment presented in this article provides answers to these questions within a specific setup. The experiment used a custom web application with several 3D virtual environments in a desktop virtual reality setting. The participants were 12 children, aged 8–14, with multiple impairments, predominantly hearing impairment, borderline and mild degree of mental retardation, and inferior communication skills. The answers can be regarded as positive and are based on results gathered in the form of completion times and the System Usability Scale questionnaire scores. The article also reports on a significant relation found between completion times and questionnaire scores. Future research directions, including those related to the Metaverse concept, are discussed, too.

This paper deals with an approach to upper limbs therapy that uses virtual reality technologies. The previous methods and subsequent improvements of these procedures by means of a skeletal model of the upper limb in a virtual environment are presented here. So, main focus of the paper is on the description of calculation related to the bone rotation system within appropriate skeletal model. The therapist can add either more virtual upper limb objects or more virtual training objects to the virtual environment and thus expand/change the scene or the therapy complexity. The functions used in the limb movement calculations are useful for creating additional animations with various objects. With this system, the patient can be stimulated under the supervision of a therapist to practice certain rehabilitation procedures. Due to the use of collaborative web-based virtual reality, the therapy can be also applied in a remote form. The way in which the underlying idea of rehabilitation process is implemented and it is also described. In the conclusion are the some notes about system testing and evaluation including description of a therapist interface.

This work introduces a uniform smartphone controller interface integrated into LIRKIS G-CVE web-based global collaborative virtual environments. In general, VR controllers provide various kinds of interaction techniques to manipulate virtual objects. Mostly, those aim focus on controlling the virtual context and the interaction with 3D GUI integrated in the virtual environment. With respect to web-based virtual reality, the progress in development of uniform interfaces is raising thanks to emerging web technologies and frameworks with cross-platform support. Although there are many manufacturers of VR controllers, their usage is often limited only for specified display device. Our intention is to cover multiple devices through only one simple controller interface, that is capable to provide a variety of interactions for web-based VR. In this study we proposed Enhanced Smart Client Interface designed for providing fully immersive interaction through smartphones. We performed several experiments focused on user experience and usability under two cloud platforms. Results obtained from experiments performed in our study confirm that utilization of our interface is mostly affected by the server response time. Based on the results this solution is suitable for further development and improvements.

Recent advances in the field of web technologies, including the increasing support of virtual reality hardware, have allowed for shared virtual environments, reachable by just entering a URL in a browser. One contemporary solution that provides such a shared virtual reality is LIRKIS Global Collaborative Virtual Environments (LIRKIS G-CVE). It is a web-based software system, built on top of the A-Frame and Networked-Aframe frameworks. This paper describes LIRKIS G-CVE and introduces its two original components. The first one is the Smart-Client Interface, which turns smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, into input devices. The advantage of this component over the standard way of user input is demonstrated by a series of experiments. The second component is the Enhanced Client Access layer, which provides access to positions and orientations of clients that share a virtual environment. The layer also stores a history of connected clients and provides limited control over the clients. The paper also outlines an ongoing experiment aimed at an evaluation of LIRKIS G-CVE in the area of virtual prototype testing.

Computer games and, of course, the development associated with them have been in the spotlight for many years; recently, also with technologies, such as virtual reality or extended reality. The main part of this chapter presents the classification of collaborative XR systems, the concept of the major application architectures and the consistency models of shared virtual game environments. The next subchapter briefly deals with the sharing of property ownership. The mentioned concepts and examples used in the chapter are implemented in many works and projects using a collaborative environment (also in gamified form) developed in the laboratory LIRKIS, the home laboratory of the authors. The knowledge presented in this chapter may provide tips and inspiration for some other game projects, and practical and useful notes on the advantages or disadvantages of some systems will be interesting and useful.

The paper deals with an issue of a design, development and implementation of a fully immersive virtual reality (VR) system and corresponding virtual worlds, specified in an object-oriented fashion. A virtual world object structure, reflecting a division of VR system into subsystems with respect to affected senses, is introduced. It also discusses virtual worlds building process, utilizing the software development technique of stepwise refinement, and possibilities of parallel processing in VR systems. The final part describes a VR system that has been implemented at the home institution of the authors according to some of the ideas presented here.

Part 11: Social Impact of EIS and Visualization; International audience; The aim of the paper is to present the advantages of the Use Cases transformation to the object layers and their visualization in 3D space to reduce complexity. Our work moves selected UML diagram from two-dimensional to multidimensional space for better visualization and readability of the structure or behaviour.Our general scope is to exploit layers for particular components or modules, time and author versions, particular object types (GUI, Business services, DB services, abstract domain classes, role and scenario classes), patterns and anti-patterns in the structure, aspects in the particular layers for solving crosscutting concerns and anti-patterns, alternative and parallel scenarios, pessimistic, optimistic and daily use scenarios.We successfully apply force directed algorithm to create more convenient automated class diagrams layout. In addition to this algorithm, we introduced semantics by adding weight factor in force calculation process.