Search

In this article, we introduce a concept called "virtual co-embodiment", which enables a user to share their virtual avatar with another entity (e.g., another user, robot, or autonomous agent). We describe a proof-of-concept in which two users can be immersed from a first-person perspective in a virtual environment and can have complementary levels of control (total, partial, or none) over a shared avatar. In addition, we conducted an experiment to investigate the influence of users' level of control over the shared avatar and prior knowledge of their actions on the users' sense of agency and motor actions. The results showed that participants are good at estimating their real level of control but significantly overestimate their sense of agency when they can anticipate the motion of the avatar. Moreover, participants performed similar body motions regardless of their real control over the avatar. The results also revealed that the internal dimension of the locus of control, which is a personality trait, is negatively correlated with the user's perceived level of control. The combined results unfold a new range of applications in the fields of virtual-reality-based training and collaborative teleoperation, where users would be able to share their virtual body.

Hand interaction techniques in virtual reality often exploit visual dominance over proprioception to remap physical hand movements onto different virtual movements. However, when the offset between virtual and physical hands increases, the remapped virtual hand movements are hardly self-attributed, and the users become aware of the remapping. Interestingly, the sense of self-attribution of a body is called the sense of body ownership (SoBO) in the field of psychology, and the realistic the avatar, the stronger is the SoBO. Hence, we hypothesized that realistic avatars (i.e., human hands) can foster self-attribution of the remapped movements better than abstract avatars (i.e., spherical pointers), thus making the remapping less noticeable. In this article, we present an experiment in which participants repeatedly executed reaching movements with their right hand while different amounts of horizontal shifts were applied. We measured the remapping detection thresholds for each combination of shift directions (left or right) and avatar appearances (realistic or abstract). The results show that realistic avatars increased the detection threshold (i.e., lowered sensitivity) by 31.3 percent than the abstract avatars when the leftward shift was applied (i.e., when the hand moved in the direction away from the body-midline). In addition, the proprioceptive drift (i.e., the displacement of self-localization toward an avatar) was larger with realistic avatars for leftward shifts, indicating that visual information was given greater preference during visuo-proprioceptive integration in realistic avatars. Our findings quantifiably show that realistic avatars can make remapping less noticeable for larger mismatches between virtual and physical movements and can potentially improve a wide variety of hand-remapping techniques without changing the mapping itself.

This paper presents a novel interactive system that provides users with virtual reality (VR) experiences, wherein users feel as if they are ascending/descending stairs through passive haptic feedback. The passive haptic stimuli are provided by small bumps under the feet of users; these stimuli are provided to represent the edges of the stairs in the virtual environment. The visual stimuli of the stairs and shoes, provided by head-mounted displays, evoke a visuo-haptic interaction that modifies a user's perception of the floor shape. Our system enables users to experience all types of stairs, such as half-turn and spiral stairs, in a VR setting. We conducted a preliminary user study and two experiments to evaluate the proposed technique. The preliminary user study investigated the effectiveness of the basic idea associated with the proposed technique for the case of a user ascending stairs. The results demonstrated that the passive haptic feedback produced by the small bumps enhanced the user's feeling of presence and sense of ascending. We subsequently performed an experiment to investigate an improved viewpoint manipulation method and the interaction of the manipulation and haptics for both the ascending and descending cases. The experimental results demonstrated that the participants had a feeling of presence and felt a steep stair gradient under the condition of haptic feedback and viewpoint manipulation based on the characteristics of actual stair walking data. However, these results also indicated that the proposed system may not be as effective in providing a sense of descending stairs without an optimization of the haptic stimuli. We then redesigned the shape of the small bumps, and evaluated the design in a second experiment. The results indicated that the best shape to present haptic stimuli is a right triangle cross section in both the ascending and descending cases. Although it is necessary to install small protrusions in the determined direction, by using this optimized shape the users feeling of presence of the stairs and the sensation of walking up and down was enhanced.

Manufacturing functions are often performed by groups of engineers who cooperate and gather at work sites. However, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the movement and activities of groups of people have been restricted, especially in indoor spaces. This reduction in travel by engineers also implies a reduction in associated costs. Telepresence technology, which is studied in the field of virtual reality, can be used as a way to reduce travel. Telepresence allows users to engage with a site from a remote location as if they were present. Thus, engineers would be able to participate in a working group without the necessity of physically traveling to the site to cooperate with local manufacturing people. A variety of telepresence systems have been proposed; however, relatively few methods have been widely implemented compared with video chat applications that have recently become an established infrastructure in many companies. This is most likely because most proposed systems use robots, head-mounted displays, or dedicated multi-functional applications that require engineers to learn how to use them. One way to use a video chat application to understand a remote space is to have a remote participant move a camera used in a video chat application. In contrast, many VR social networking services use a viewing method with which users can change their viewing direction on the computer screen. In this study, we demonstrate that a system that allows users to rotate their viewing perspective on a laptop computer screen can provide an easier understanding of a virtual space than a system that requires a remote person to move a webcam. Based on these results, we propose a system that allows users to view a remote location on a laptop computer screen via a video chat application and an off-the-shelf spherical camera, and evaluate its usefulness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss possible applications of virtual reality technologies, such as immersive projection technology (IPT), in the field of genome science, and propose cluster-oriented visualization that attaches importance to data separation of large gene data sets with multiple variables. Based on these strategies, we developed the cluster overlap distribution map (CDCM), which is a visualization methodology using IPT for pairwise comparison between cluster sets generated from different gene expression data sets. This methodology effectively provides the user with indications of gene clusters that are worth a close examination. In addition, by using the plate window manager system, which enables the user to manipulate existing 2D GUI applications in the virtual 3D space, we developed the virtual environment for the comprehensive analysis from providing the indications to further examination by referring to the database on Web sites. Our system was applied in the comparison between the gene expression data sets of hepatocellular carcinomas and hepatoblastomas, and the effectiveness of the system was confirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sensations of touch and force have come to be recognized as essential factors in virtual reality, and many efforts have been made to develop display devices that reproduce these sensations. Such devices are divided into two categories: wearing and nonwearing. In this paper, a method is proposed for representing virtual objects of arbitrary shapes using a nonwearing device. Based on this method, a device was fabricated to describe our approach. Our prototype device was designed to approximately represent part of the surface of a virtual object as a tangential surface (i.e., partial surface) to the user's fingertip. The device was implemented as a mechanism with five degrees of freedom that are commonly used to measure the fingertip position and to present the partial surface to the fingertip. The mechanism was controlled through two calculation loops: a model loop that gives a tangential surface from the fingertip position and the shape of objects, and a servo loop that manages the mechanism to represent the given tangential surface by the partial surface. Also, a stereoscopic, head-tracking visual system was implemented to realize the combined presentation of visual information and the partial surface. As an example of the applications of the environment, a task of writing characters was simulated. From the observation of the performance of the task, the presentation of the partial surface was proved to have an effect on decreasing blur and dragging in written characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of the CABIN immersive multiscreen display. CABIN consists of five screens that surround users, and one of the five, the floor screen, is made of tempered glass able to support the users' weight. In CABIN, computer graphics images and video images can be projected. By using a five-screen configuration, the user is able to look at three-dimensional objects from various directions, as well as look around a wide area of the virtual world. A quantitative evaluation showed that multiple screens are indispensable to support a large area of viewpoint change for the purpose of displaying three-dimensional objects. In addition, distortion of the generated virtual space was evaluated. From the experimental results, the user is able to perceive space accurately with little distortion when standing near the center of the display space. © 1999 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 30(1): 13–22, 1999 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the developments in virtual reality and augmented reality and describes solutions and ideas for research. Projection-based virtual environments for sharing audio-visual experience; Multimodal interactions in three-dimensions with integration of voice, gesture and other perceptual modalities.

Introduces a series of articles on mixed reality and virtual reality, published in the April 2002 issue of 'Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments.'

The articles in this special section contain selected papers from the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (VR). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]